No pussy for pussy puss
Author: Chad C. Mulligan
Email: jm@public.antipope.org
Date: 1997/07/02
Forums: alt.tasteless
My cat, Mandelbrot, has no testicles.
Well, that's possibly not exactly true. I took him to be neutered a
couple of weeks ago and I assume they removed his balls then; however,
his continued friendship with me, the principal architect of his
emasculation, leaves me with the niggling suspicion that maybe they just
cut-sliced-and-tied rather than cut-slice-and-scooped.
Mandelbrot is a very large five-year-old black tomcat and I finally had
to get him done to stop him fighting. He's a friendly beast and likes
nothing better than to sleep on my head. He ignores the other cats and is
cordially polite to the two dogs. However, Other Cats Must Die. Where I
used to live there was a large expanse of grass and trees that led up to
the council owned allotments that began where my back garden ended.
During the summers, Mandelbrot would disappear for a week or two at a
time presumably spending his time hunting, fucking, fighting, fucking,
fucking and fucking. He'd come back eventually, but every time there
would be a little less of him than before; bits of ear missing, lumps
bitten, gouged, and torn from his body. You know the kind of stuff I
mean, I'm sure.
Now he's been done so he no longer fights, and spends his time hanging
around the house looking for something to cuddle. Actually, this isn't
true either. On Sunday morning he spotted another tomcat on the garden
fence and made a point to sneaking up onto the shed and pouncing on the
unsuspecting visitor. Mandelbrot dragged his surprised prey off the fence
and they both fell kicking, spitting and screeching into the narrow gap
between fence and shed, where Mandelbrot kicked seven different kinds of
shit out of his opponent. The commotion was such that Frodo, my senile
corgi cross, yapped once in alarm before running back into the house and
hiding under a blanket.
Where was I? Last summer Mandelbrot came back from one of his jaunts with
both his cheeks swollen; he looked like he'd been attacked with a cleaver
and finished off with a wire brush. The vet said the cheeks were due to
scar tissue and hormones and the appalling state of his head would fix
itself after a course of antibiotics.
Time passed and eventually we moved house last March. Mandelbrot went
into the cattery whilst we were between houses and I hoped that the three
months' captivity would give him time to heal once and for all. It
didn't. I got him back and he looked as raggedy as ever and within two
days of being home he'd gone out and had his head ripped open again. It
didn't seem to bother him but the wound went right through the scalp to
the bone. Whenever he shook his head it made a floppy-rubber sound like a
Wellington boot thrown across a lawn.
I whisked him off to the vets' and they said that after his balls came
out he'd stop fighting and his cheeks would subside; the wound on his
head was unpleasant but not infected and the swelling was not an abscess.
Like fuck it wasn't.
Two days later, I noticed a Smell. I examined his head and found that if
I gave the engorged right cheek a squeeze, a torrent of stinking pus
would gush from the hole in his head. Now, I'm no medic, but I figured
that this wasn't normal. Twenty minutes later he was back at the vets'
where she did a biopsy and diagnosed a fucking enormous abscess. She set
to work with knives and hammer drills and dug out the necrotic tissue and
pumped him full of antibiotics.
When I went to collect him, the nurse seemed nervous. "He looks a bit,
um, unsightly," said she "but he's fine. The cheek is open now and you'll
have to make sure he keeps it clean and make sure he takes his tablets
twice a day. Um, if it closes up, you'll have to open it again".
Thus forewarned and bolstered, I picked up his cage and took a look.
Mandelbrot stared out at me with the forlorn look of a castrated tomcat
who has a three-quarter inch diameter hole, one quarter inch deep in his
cheek. The insides of the hole were black, stinking and weeping. Yum.
By the next day the hole had closed up again. I can't adequately describe
this, so you'll just have to imagine for yourselves what it looked like:
a three-quarter inch black, crusty scab on a generally crusty cat that's
starting to weep pus and stinks like a drain. Mandelbrot was completely
unbothered by all this, and probably wondered why The God Who Opens Tins
kept squeezing his head onto huge swathes of kitchen towel and washing
his cheeks in salt water.
However, the scab remained firmly in place and it became clear that
Something Must Be Done.
Perhaps at this point I should mention that my wife, squeamish at the
best of times, wasn't exactly joyous at having a stinking puss-dribbling
cat around the house, particularly as we have a two-week old larval human
hanging around, too; when I told her that "I, um, have to, like, pick
Mandelbrot's scab off, honey" she invented a few choice expressions that
even I with my seasoned and robust vocabulary had to look up in the
dictionary.
So, I waited until they were both in bed before I undertook To Do That
Which Must Be Done.
I picked Mandelbrot up and set him on my lap. I stroked his head and
murmured encouragingly into one ragged ear, taking care not to get my
nose and mouth too close to the festering scab. In one hand I had some
paper kitchen towel and as I stroked his head I gently worked my fingers
under one edge of the scab as they crossed it; with each pass I tugged a
little harder, and the scab began to lift on one side. The stench was
unbelievable; equally unbelievable was Mandelbrot's apparent and utter
lack of concern at what I was doing; indeed he even started pressing his
head against my hand as I stroked him, thus making the scab-picking
operation even easier.
Bit by bit the crusty black mass peeled away from his head, bits of dead
and dying tissue adhering to its sticky underside. The scab was thick and
as tough as old leather and had a strange white and glistening bulge
running up the middle of it, like a pus-filled sausage skin. Pus and
blood oozed from the widening gap and I mopped it up with the kitchen
towel.
The scab came off smoothly and easily until there was but a thread, the
merest scrap of some unspeakably disgusting tissue holding it on, and
then it would go no further. Stroke and pick as I might, it wouldn't
budge, and it dawned on me that what I was going to have to do next was
going to be unpleasant for me, but not nearly so unpleasant as it was
going to be for Mandelbrot.
Steeling myself, I took a firm hold of the hanging scab between my thumb
and forefinger and then, counting to three, yanked the fucker hard. It
came free with a "schllooooop" and a final gush of pus. Mandelbrot, to my
everlasting relief, merely turned his head and gave me a bored "Why have
you stopped stroking me?" look.
That was about five days ago.
The tissue revealed by the scab was pink and mercifully smell free, and
now the wound is drying up cleanly and painlessly.
The only problem is the midwife who comes to visit my wife and baby
daughter; it seems that she finds the sight of a cat wandering around
with a huge pink open wound on the side of its head just a little
unpleasant.
Ah well, you can't have everything, can you?
Jon
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