KATORI PIGGY...KITTY?

I have learned to love insects...most of them. But no matter what I do, I cannot love the ones who take my blood then leave heated balloon-like things under my skin (that's what it feels like, anyway). I know I cannot hold it against the mosquito for wanting to sustain life--but they cannot hold it against me either for feeling negatively about the discomfort they cause!

Marquita, who came to my room, never bit me. But I can't say the same for the mosquitoes breeding at the Irrigation Ditch, or all the others outside, for that matter.

The Japanese have ceramic piggy figurines to hold mosquito repellant incense in the summer. A photo on YouTube showed a cat had apparently been playing with one of these and got herself in a little more trouble than she'd bargained for...I sketched the picture, changing a few things here and there, and wrote the following story from imagination.

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KATORI PIGGY...KITTY?

"Just look; mustn't touch," mommy kitty told the little one, and hoisted her on top of the low table, where the katori piggy was. Apparently, she hadn't heard the adage, "Curiosity Killed the cat" because the kitten not only peeked inside, but saw it was like a little room so stepped inside. He knocked the incense coil off its aluminum stand, and it went out instantly. Oh-oh.

But when Kitty decided he'd better get out, he realized the place he'd walked into was too small to turn around! There was an opening ahead; Kitty could get out that way. But he wanted to get out the way he had come in. There could be scary monsters on the other end, after all. But try as he might, there was no way to turn around in this thing.

"Mommmmmmm!" It's humans that say, "When all else fails, read the instructions." With kittens, it's "Call Mama!" Actually, he didn't have to cry very loud; Mama was watching the whole thing. "Just go out the front end, Sweetie, she said. "You're small enough." "But Mom..." After who knows how many minutes of arguing, that's exactly what the mother cat had to do: head butt her kitty out through the front opening. But he was so scared of what he might find out there, he resisted with all his might. He couldn't believe his own mother was doing this to him!

But he finally ended up popping through the front hole, and his mother's head came popping out too! Of course, a grown cat's body was way too big to come through that opening. As a matter of fact, even their heads usually don't fit. When she tried to pull herself back in, she found she couldn't. She was stuck! Oh, no!

So, wearing this pig armor, Ma Cat went hobbling over into the next room, where the human owners were. They looked at her for an instant and wondered what they were seeing, then they howled with laughter. "Wait. before you help her off with that thing, let me get a picture, " one of them said, and he left the room to get his camera. The cat didn't think it was so funny. But at least they were going to get it off. Through the photographing, the de-armoring, the kitten stayed quiet and hidden in the next room.

The little kitten love riddles and often tries to make up his own. That night, he turned to his mom and asked, "When does a cat have 6 legs?" She had heard about humans having 4 legs, 2 legs, and 3 legs, (crawling in infancy, standing as a man, using a cane in old age)...but cats having 6 legs?

"I give up. When?"

"When her 4-legged piggy outfit doesn't cover her 2 back legs. And she ended up wearing that outfit because she got her kitten out of it. Thanks, Mom."

She couldn't give him a bear hug, so she gave him a cat snuggle instead.

END