🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
Two workmen arrive at my apartment. They go to the screen door leading out to the balcony. It’s broken and blows open in the wind, leaving a space that a kitten could slip out of. Over the past few months, Zosi has grown and has free reign in the apartment. The purring—the nuzzling, the sweetness—didn’t last.
The workmen slide the screen door open, then closed, open, then closed. They flip the latch that doesn’t catch, flicking it up and down, up and down.
“The latch is broken,” one of them says.
I nod and explain that I have a new kitten and don’t want to risk her getting out.
They glance around the apartment and, not finding said kitten, look at me. Zosi is in the bathroom.
“We’ll have to go back to the truck for a new latch,” one says to the other.
But the other isn’t listening. He’s staring at my bare arms. I fold them across my chest and use my hands to try to cover the marks that make it look like I’ve been cutting myself.
The workmen agree they’ll both go to the truck to get the latch.
While they’re gone, I put on a cardigan sweater to cover the bite marks and teeth scratches. Zosi has taken not just to biting me but attacking me. Full out.
I can’t understand what I’ve done to make her so violent. I’ve read everything I can online about curbing aggression in kittens. I’ve taken her to the vet, who said that, yes, some kittens have “play aggression” (this is not play aggression) when they aren’t properly socialized, are played with roughly by humans, or aren’t given appropriate toys when they’re young. They can develop “intense biting and scratching habits.”
Zosi eats gourmet food and has her choice of cat beds and toys. Four times a day, we engage in “structured play” using a wand toy.
In email after email, the breeder assures me there’s nothing wrong with Zosi. The breeder insists she was socialized. She was eight weeks old.
The workmen return and replace the latch. When they’re gone, I let Zosi out of the bathroom. She sniffs around and goes to her stuffed fox toy, which lies on the floor. It’s twice her length. She attacks it too; like me, it didn’t do anything to her to deserve it.
She pounces on it. With a viciousness unfathomable in a kitten that cute and small, she sinks her teeth into the fox’s neck. After tousling with it for a bit, she looks at me, her eyes wild.
*
“She’s just a cat,” my mother says on the phone.
I know she’s just a cat.
My mother says, “Enough times in the bathroom, and she’ll learn.”
Zosi spends a lot of time in the bathroom. I’ve put her in there because I don’t know what else to do. My apartment is one big open space. The only door is on the bathroom, so the bathroom—which I justify as being her safe space—is where she practically lives. Otherwise, when I sit at my computer to work, she attacks my arms, her sharp little kitten teeth drawing blood. I’ve bought baby gates, but she hurdles them in a single bound.
I thought I’d healed from twenty-five years of serious mental illness, but Zosi is too much. It seems she’s sent me backward or forward into something worse. The crushing weight on my chest and harrowing pit in my stomach are constant. I can’t eat. I don’t sleep. The swirling blackness comes and goes. I just try to ignore them.
What I don’t know is that they’re emotions and can’t be ignored.
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