Giving Them the Cold Shoulder

“What do you want, Annabelle? I’m trying to write,” he told his cat after she jumped on the desk between him and his laptop. He brushed her into his lap and petted her absently with his left hand, while he continued pecking out words with his right.

She lapsed into a hyperventilation of purring and he had to hold her down with his left hand to prevent her from standing up against his chest and nuzzling him so that he could maintain an uninterrupted view of the screen. His other cat, a calico throw pillow, rested on top of the darkest fabric she could find in the room to make her hairs easy to spot.

“What do you want, Annabelle? I’m trying to watch this movie,” he said later when he was done reading and needed to blank his mind. Annabelle gamboled at his feet, meowing and rubbing her face with force against his ankle. She hopped on the chair next to him and then rubbed her face against the laptop’s screen. As soon as her nose touched it, the movie stopped. When she touched it again, the window shut. He brushed her unceremoniously to the floor and rebuffed her advances until after the movie when she rebuffed his.

“What do you want, Annabelle?” he asked her the next day when he was texting his friends and catching up on his social media. The laptop had given a warning chirp and then went black. He saw that the power cord had been pulled out and its insulation had tell-tale tooth marks. “Come on, girl. I’m trying to stay connected with my friends and loved ones.”  He got up to plug it back in, dumping her from his lap to the floor. There she lay, eyes akimbo, boring holes through him with rays of disdain as he read and posted, chortled and raged.

“What do you want, Annabelle?” he asked her the next day when she walked across his keyboard, miraculously standing with one front paw on the delete key and one paw on the backspace key. He watched his text unravel before his eyes, then swiped her viciously to the floor.

“Can’t you spend just five minutes when you’re not messing with the computer?” he snapped. 

This was too much for Annabelle, who had been trying to get him to stop messing with the computer for days. She bit him with prejudice while his other cat licked her paw with disinterest.