Little Miss Carnivore

My kind of toxic love is being woken at 4 am by two tiny paws cold on my cheek. She sneaks into my blanket and starts licking my ear with her smol tongue.

Her tongue is so tiny and full of mini sharp spikes, like velcro, it feels like sandpaper. This is how she licks herself clean and shiny. And this is how she expresses her care and affection.

Underneath the blanket, she continues to lick the back of my hands and forearms, over the red claw marks and fang bites she has made.

When I don’t get up before sunrise, little miss carnivore starts nibbling on my toes, sending me into a fit of laughter in the dead quiet of the morning.

When she finds me stirred and awake, she runs all over me under the blanket, dashing everywhere in a mad frenzy. I chase her with my hands, oh these heavily scratched hands, and we play cat and mouse — to trip, tickle, frolic, and tackle.

With her lead I learn to modulate my throat and vibrate like a cat. We purr onto each other to express pleasure and contentment.

She is only two months old. When she arrived, she went through 22 hours of land travel before she was delivered at the newly built theme park where my family and I were spending the day.

Out in the loftiest city in the country, we were surrounded by tourists and clouds, blue skies, and pine trees.

And there she was, as tiny as my palm, in a cardboard box made for a rice cooker. The poor thing, it took her two days to sleep and recover from all that tedious land travel.

It’s only been one month and she’s tripled in size. From a tiny baby she is now a toddler — hyperactive, hyperaware about her surroundings, and curious about all things that move and rattle.

Cutting her claws is probably the hardest part of caring for this feline. I’d have to tire her through long walks among pine forests and scare her among big hairy dogs that may attack and eat her.

When she’s exhausted from all that, she takes a nap and I can clip her claws. Her claws grow fairly quickly — how do they stay sharp despite me clipping them?

It’s the baths that make her a ferocious kitty, despite being washed in warm water. The water may be warm but it’s the afterbath that leaves her shivering down to her bones, what with the cold air here in the mountains.

Try as I may to keep her clean, I am left with red scratches and tiny vampire bites on my forearms. Sometimes I bite her back just to tame her.

During the day, kids as little as four years old would bang at my door early in the morning to play with my kitten. An average of about five kids come visit daily to play with her.

They have grown to love her and her ways this past month that they have started to bring her toys to play with — balls and strings, trinkets, dismembered parts of stuffed toys, rocks and marbles.

Even when I take her with me to most places I go, I am careful with things that might hurt her. She’s still a baby after all, and she still wobbles into strange places, unsure of the big world of humans around her.

For now she’s safe and warm in swathes of blankets, sleeping like a baby. Oh, my little carnivore. She is my sweet precious one.

I will outgrow these marks and bites one day, but for now these scars have become a part of me.

// 01 Oct 2024