No pussy for pussy puss

Author: Chad C. Mulligan
Email: jm@public.antipope.org
Date: 1997/07/02
Forums: alt.tasteless 

My cat, Mandelbrot, has no testicles.

Well, that's possibly not exactly true. I took him to be neutered a   
couple of weeks ago and I assume they removed his balls then; however,   
his continued friendship with me, the principal architect of his   
emasculation, leaves me with the niggling suspicion that maybe they just   
cut-sliced-and-tied rather than cut-slice-and-scooped.

Mandelbrot is a very large five-year-old black tomcat and I finally had   
to get him done to stop him fighting. He's a friendly beast and likes   
nothing better than to sleep on my head. He ignores the other cats and is   
cordially polite to the two dogs. However, Other Cats Must Die. Where I   
used to live there was a large expanse of grass and trees that led up to   
the council owned allotments that began where my back garden ended.   
During the summers, Mandelbrot would disappear for a week or two at a   
time presumably spending his time hunting, fucking, fighting, fucking,   
fucking and fucking. He'd come back eventually, but every time there   
would be a little less of him than before; bits of ear missing, lumps   
bitten, gouged, and torn from his body. You know the kind of stuff I   
mean, I'm sure.

Now he's been done so he no longer fights, and spends his time hanging   
around the house looking for something to cuddle. Actually, this isn't   
true either. On Sunday morning he spotted another tomcat on the garden   
fence and made a point to sneaking up onto the shed and pouncing on the   
unsuspecting visitor. Mandelbrot dragged his surprised prey off the fence   
and they both fell kicking, spitting and screeching into the narrow gap   
between fence and shed, where Mandelbrot kicked seven different kinds of   
shit out of his opponent. The commotion was such that Frodo, my senile   
corgi cross, yapped once in alarm before running back into the house and   
hiding under a blanket.

Where was I? Last summer Mandelbrot came back from one of his jaunts with   
both his cheeks swollen; he looked like he'd been attacked with a cleaver   
and finished off with a wire brush. The vet said the cheeks were due to   
scar tissue and hormones and the appalling state of his head would fix   
itself after a course of antibiotics.

Time passed and eventually we moved house last March. Mandelbrot went   
into the cattery whilst we were between houses and I hoped that the three   
months' captivity would give him time to heal once and for all. It   
didn't. I got him back and he looked as raggedy as ever and within two   
days of being home he'd gone out and had his head ripped open again. It   
didn't seem to bother him but the wound went right through the scalp to   
the bone. Whenever he shook his head it made a floppy-rubber sound like a   
Wellington boot thrown across a lawn.

I whisked him off to the vets' and they said that after his balls came   
out he'd stop fighting and his cheeks would subside; the wound on his   
head was unpleasant but not infected and the swelling was not an abscess.

Like fuck it wasn't.

Two days later, I noticed a Smell. I examined his head and found that if   
I gave the engorged right cheek a squeeze, a torrent of stinking pus   
would gush from the hole in his head. Now, I'm no medic, but I figured   
that this wasn't normal. Twenty minutes later he was back at the vets'   
where she did a biopsy and diagnosed a fucking enormous abscess. She set   
to work with knives and hammer drills and dug out the necrotic tissue and   
pumped him full of antibiotics.

When I went to collect him, the nurse seemed nervous. "He looks a bit,   
um, unsightly," said she "but he's fine. The cheek is open now and you'll   
have to make sure he keeps it clean and make sure he takes his tablets   
twice a day. Um, if it closes up, you'll have to open it again".

Thus forewarned and bolstered, I picked up his cage and took a look.

Mandelbrot stared out at me with the forlorn look of a castrated tomcat   
who has a three-quarter inch diameter hole, one quarter inch deep in his   
cheek. The insides of the hole were black, stinking and weeping. Yum.

By the next day the hole had closed up again. I can't adequately describe   
this, so you'll just have to imagine for yourselves what it looked like:   
a three-quarter inch black, crusty scab on a generally crusty cat that's   
starting to weep pus and stinks like a drain. Mandelbrot was completely   
unbothered by all this, and probably wondered why The God Who Opens Tins   
kept squeezing his head onto huge swathes of kitchen towel and washing   
his cheeks in salt water.

However, the scab remained firmly in place and it became clear that   
Something Must Be Done.

Perhaps at this point I should mention that my wife, squeamish at the   
best of times, wasn't exactly joyous at having a stinking puss-dribbling   
cat around the house, particularly as we have a two-week old larval human   
hanging around, too; when I told her that "I, um, have to, like, pick   
Mandelbrot's scab off, honey" she invented a few choice expressions that   
even I with my seasoned and robust vocabulary had to look up in the   
dictionary.

So, I waited until they were both in bed before I undertook To Do That   
Which Must Be Done.

I picked Mandelbrot up and set him on my lap. I stroked his head and   
murmured encouragingly into one ragged ear, taking care not to get my   
nose and mouth too close to the festering scab. In one hand I had some   
paper kitchen towel and as I stroked his head I gently worked my fingers   
under one edge of the scab as they crossed it; with each pass I tugged a   
little harder, and the scab began to lift on one side. The stench was   
unbelievable; equally unbelievable was Mandelbrot's apparent and utter   
lack of concern at what I was doing; indeed he even started pressing his   
head against my hand as I stroked him, thus making the scab-picking   
operation even easier.

Bit by bit the crusty black mass peeled away from his head, bits of dead   
and dying tissue adhering to its sticky underside. The scab was thick and   
as tough as old leather and had a strange white and glistening bulge   
running up the middle of it, like a pus-filled sausage skin. Pus and   
blood oozed from the widening gap and I mopped it up with the kitchen   
towel.

The scab came off smoothly and easily until there was but a thread, the   
merest scrap of some unspeakably disgusting  tissue holding it on, and   
then it would go no further. Stroke and pick as I might, it wouldn't   
budge, and it dawned on me that what I was going to have to do next was   
going to be unpleasant for me, but not nearly so unpleasant as it was   
going to be for Mandelbrot.

Steeling myself, I took a firm hold of the hanging scab between my thumb   
and forefinger and then, counting to three, yanked the fucker hard. It   
came free with a "schllooooop" and a final gush of pus. Mandelbrot, to my   
everlasting relief, merely turned his head and gave me a bored "Why have   
you stopped stroking me?" look.

That was about five days ago.

The tissue revealed by the scab was pink and mercifully smell free, and   
now the wound is drying up cleanly and painlessly.

The only problem is the midwife who comes to visit my wife and baby   
daughter; it seems that she finds the sight of a cat wandering around   
with a huge pink open wound on the side of its head just a little   
unpleasant.

Ah well, you can't have everything, can you?

Jon