“Yeah, didn’t your parents teach you about dental hygiene?” Brutus echoed. “Take better care of your snappers, Max, and we wouldn’t have to eat this… junk.”
“Hey, I heard that, mister,” said Gran. “This isn’t junk. It’s chicken liver, chicken stomach, chicken hearts, chicken necks and… some other stuff. Cooked and put through the blender.”
“Did you really make this yourself?” asked Dooley. “You put in so much work, Gran.”
“Oh, well… “ said Gran with a throwaway gesture of the hand. “It’s a labor of love.”
“But you didn’t make this yourself, did you?” said Harriet, narrowing her eyes at the old lady.
Gran shrugged.“Who cares who made it? It’s good for you—and probably a damn sight better than that kibble. Who knows what they put into that stuff? Rat guts, probably, or pulverized beetles. Now eat up, before I chuck it all down the garbage disposal.”
Reluctantly, we all started eating from the cold pureed meat, straight from the fridge. It went down like cardboard. At least it was something, though, and after the ordeal I’d had the previous day I have to confess that I would have eaten pretty much anything.
Not Harriet, though, who, after one swallow, declared,“I’m not eating this crap. I’m sorry, but I’m not. I want my usual gourmet food, or else.”
“Or else what?” asked Gran, giving Harriet a distinctly nasty look—not the look a loving human is supposed to give a favorite and beloved pet, I might add.
“Or else I’m going on a hunger strike,” said Harriet, tilting up her chin.
“Suit yourself,” said Gran, and started collecting the bowls, then chucking their contents into the sink, turned on the garbage disposal, and let it chew up all of our food!
“Hey, you can’t do that!” Harriet cried, aghast at the chain of events her words had set in motion.
“Watch me,” said Gran, and we did. I hate food going to waste, even food that tastes as if someone has mixed in a splash of Drano, but this was taking waste to another level.
“Gran!” Harriet cried. “We have to eat!”
“I thought you said you were on a hunger strike?”
“You have to feed us!”
“Says who?”
“It’s in the Universal Declaration of Feline Rights!”
“There is no Declaration of Feline Rights,” said Gran. “And when I look at you bunch of ingrates I think a nice long fast will do you a world of good. Now if there’s nothing else, I’m off. Ta-dah.” And she hooked her arm into her purse strap and was off!
We stared after her, our jaws on the floor, except for mine, because opening my mouth that far still hurt a little.
“She can’t do this, right?” asked Harriet when we’d ascertained that Gran really had left the building.
“I think she just did,” I said, staring at the empty spot where my bowl used to be.
“We have to fight her on this,” said Harriet. “If I have to go all the way to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, I’m going to fight for my feline rights!”
“Good luck with that,” said Brutus, also looking distinctly dismayed at this sudden dearth of foodstuffs at our disposal.
“Just watch me. I’m going to fight until my dying breath!”
“Which may come a lot sooner than you think.”
Harriet pointed to the sink.“That’s waste. A waste of good food. What is Greta Thunberg going to say about this? Mh? She’s going to get mad. Mad at Gran. That’s what.”
“Uh-huh,” said Brutus sadly.
“Is Gran really going to starve us to death?” asked Dooley.
“I’m not sure, Dooley,” I said. “But it sure looks that way.”
And there was not a thing we or the Secretary-General of the United Nations or Greta Thunberg, whoever she was, could do about it.
Chapter 11
“I don’t like this, Max,” said Dooley, using one of his favorite phrases.
“Yeah, I don’t like it either,” I said.
“She can’t do this!” Harriet cried, starting to sound like a broken record.
“Maybe we should go and see what food Odelia has put out for us,” said Brutus, who turned out to be the only practical thinker in our small company today.
“You’re absolutely right, Brutus,” said Harriet, perking up. “Odelia won’t go to these extremes. She would never force us to eat this junk, and then throw it down the drain if we decide it is simply not fit for feline consumption.”
She was right. Odelia would never put us through the wringer like that. So we walked out of Marge’s kitchen, through the hole in the hedge that divides both backyards, and into the house through the pet flap and straight into the kitchen.
It hit us like a cold shower. The four bowls that greeted us were filled to the brim with… the same grayish-greenish sludge we’d already encountered over at Marge’s.
“Yuck,” said Harriet, wrinkling up her nose. “That’s it. My hunger strike is on. When they see my wasted, weakened body, they’ll be sorry. I mean, they could have given us some gourmet soft food, but instead they chose to feed us this tasteless, odorless guck.”
We all looked up when sounds of a cat eating with relish reached our antenna-like ears. It was Dooley, who’d hunkered down while Harriet was officially announcing her hunger strike, and was eating his fill from the bowl that carried his name.
“What?” he said when he caught our looks of horror and shock. “I’m hungry.”
“But Dooley!” cried Harriet. “We have to stick together. We have to show them that we mean it.”
He gave her a sheepish look.“It might not taste like much, or smell like much, or look like much, but it’s full of the necessary proteins and vitamins and essential minerals that a growing body needs, so I’m eating it.”
A snicker sounded from Brutus, and immediately Harriet turned to him with outrage written all over her features. The snicker was squelched, and Brutus rearranged his features into the appropriate expression of solicitude and quiet resolve to go without food for as long as he could manage, or as long as Harriet told him to.
I, for one, was with Dooley on this. And I had an excuse: I was an outpatient, still recovering from a surgical procedure, so I needed all the proteins, vitamins and essential minerals I could get. But I was also conscious of one salient fact: this was all my fault. If only I’d taken better care of my snappers, this would never have happened. And as the cat carrying sole responsibility, I couldn’t very well go against Harriet’s orders, so I abstained from tucking in, too, hard as it was when I saw Dooley eat with such relish.
“You, Dooley, are a traitor,” said Harriet. “You are a strikebreaker and a rat.”
“I’m just eating,” Dooley pointed out. “How can I be a traitor for eating?”
“Aaargh!” Harriet screamed in response, and stalked off and out of the house.
Brutus gave me an apologetic look.“It’s because she hasn’t eaten. She always gets cranky when she hasn’t taken nourishment.”
“You mean she’ll only get crankier the longer this hunger strike lasts?” asked Dooley.
“Afraid so,” said Brutus, not looking too happy at the prospect of a berserk Harriet.
Then, after exchanging a quick look of understanding, both Brutus and I moved over to our respective bowls, and dug in. Harriet might be willing to forego a square meal or two but I wasn’t, even if that made me a traitor, a strikebreaker and a rat.
“You know what we should do?” said Brutus in between two mouthfuls.
“No, what?” I said.
“We should go and visit one of those celebrity cats we met over the course of our investigations. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to fix us up with some prime grub.”
“Yeah, what happened to Pussy?” I asked Dooley.
He gave me a mournful look.“Pussy moved to Paris with Gabriel.”
Pussy was the cat of famous fashion designer Leonidas Flake. After he died, Pussy was adopted by Leo’s boyfriend Gabriel, who loved her as much or even more than Leo.