Black and White, Learning by Doing

A brief, terrifying story for you all.

In our mousecapades, Bastas accidentally killed a few by fox-pouncing on them. I say accidentally because afterwards, just like a toddler who doesn't understand cause and effect, he mopes around the house for hours when his toy stops moving.

Monday morning, as we prepared to take the girls in for their spay, we startled a mouse that Bast delightedly stomped out in the livingroom, in full view of the Twins and my traumatized mother, who had graciously come over to help me wrangle the girls for their surgery. My mom, unused to the casual sociopathy of my animals, described Bast river dancing on the mouse as, "Like one of those little stress balls. I could see its eyes bulge out every time he pounced."

I took this last year and never saw the signs of incipient, stomping psycho.

He's sort of a psychopath.

Unfortunately for me, the Twins are exceptionally clever at watch-and-learn. Zelda, after watching how I opened the microwave and produced food, learned how to use her abnormally huge schnoz to press the buttons and open the door on her own. The morning she figured that little parlor trick out, I bet I had to get up and shut that god forsaken microwave a dozen times before I ran out of patience and banished her outside to find a new game. Go chew up the hose or something, just do it quietly.

After seeing Bast sail through the air and snuff the life out of a living creature, the Twins became eager to practice their own mouse-mashing techniques, and in the absence of any mice (so far), demonstrate their pouncing prowess on other household items, such as: piles of clothes, grocery bags, newspaper circulars, my midsection, unsuspecting toys, leaves in the wind.

The other day, Midna sashayed in the living room after punching the back door open and popped onto the couch to favor me with a kiss. Her friendly duties thus attended, she dug furiously into the couch cushions, using her enormous, paddle-like feet to uproot a section of pillow and throw it on the floor. She hopped off the couch, reared up like a pony, and vigorously stomped the cushion into flat submission before flicking her tail and trotting off out the door without a backwards glance.

I sat and eyeballed the flattened, lumpy corpse of the cushion, and couldn't help but wonder if that will be my internal organs some day when they get bored of stomping pillows.