Mutant Cat

My Shih Tzu just got a haircut and the groomer left him a beard so that he looks like Scott Ian from Anthrax. This is the first dog I’ve ever owned that has been so high maintenance…aesthetically speaking. On the farm, we either took a shear to them and called it good or only had animals with short hair.
My mom recently reminded me about this cat we used to have. My grandma’s friend was casting aside this cat and it was described to us as “friendly” and “Garfield-like” which in reality meant meaner than hell and fat and lazy. We were never ones to turn down a pet in need so we took Mickey in and promptly regretted it. This cat would sit on my brother’s bookcase and bat its mutant hands at us and hiss while we taunted it with robot toys. He had an extra toe on each paw which made him extremely clumsy and he’d fall off the bookcase every now and then which always amused us. Cats are supposed to be graceful and limber! He used to hide in my brother’s closet growling at us and to get him out my mother would truss me up in a welding helmet and welding gloves and feed me into the back of the closet like a toilet snake to liberate demon cat. Sometimes we could coax him out using cat nip, but he caught on to our ruse pretty quickly. Mickey eventually went to live outside with the other farm cats and we grew to respect his tenacious charm. The neighbors decided to blow a hole through Mickey and the bullet entered right under his spine and exited out the other side. When they say cats have nine lives, Mickey used up at least 4 that day because without any veterinary care whatsoever, he survived and prospered. In Mickey’s old age he gave up cleaning himself and became a matted hideous mess and visitors would stare and ask “what’s that?” and children would run away in horror. He set up shop on the back porch where my mom would toss whatever generic cat food she had on hand. Eventually Mickey lost the tops of his ears due to frostbite, but when you came near his territory he would manage his signature greeting, “MROW” and seemed content enough. We never did know what happened to Mickey and we never found his body so for all we know that resilient cat is still alive out there somewhere. Or he's an undead zombie cat. Sometimes I swear I hear a disembodied "MROW".
I realized I learned many things from Mickey. You can grow to love and admire even the meanest creatures on earth because even they have a unique quality that makes them valuable to your life. I’ve learned that the meanest of us outlive the rest of you pleasant and polite folks and that’s just good old spite. He taught me not to judge because even the vilest looking and smelling beings can be awfully clever. And lastly, he taught me never to trust an old woman giving away a “friendly” cat.