The morning started with my kittens Clifford and Wally getting locked away. I had a batch of cookies to make and there was no part of that, from getting the butter out to cooling the finished product on a rack, that they wouldn’t get super duper involved in. So: C&W got three rooms to themselves that included their food dish and potty, and I got to make cookies.

Something about being on the wrong side of a door with me on the other side seems to rev them up though.

When I heard the crash—truly an impressive thing, titanic, reverberating—I did a mental inventory of things in those rooms that could have caused it, and came up with nothing. Even the time they managed to knock an entire chair over it didn’t make that much noise. I didn’t know what it was, but I the hell knew who it was. That crash had Wally’s paw prints all over it. Clifford would just be standing by thinking Go-lly, Wally, that was neat-o. But gravity had already done all it could to whatever made the noise, and I figured I could check it out later.

So now it’s later and right away I see that the heavy ceramic sculpture on the shelf above the bathtub is now in the bathtub, in pieces. This is an artwork that Dave took a shine to years ago. I never liked it but I encouraged him to buy it because he so rarely bought anything for himself. It’s about fifteen inches high, a feminine form wearing a garish gown; she has rabbit ears, and she’s holding a baby bird. Sounds like something I’d like, right? It was gross. I’ve been getting rid of things I don’t care for but Rabbithead hadn’t yet made the cut. Only recently it occurred to me that I could live with it outside. She’d look just right in my garden.

Well, she’s not only in my bathtub instead, but she has been neatly decapitated.

Worse, there is a little blood on the sink. I didn’t even bother to look for Clifford. There, of course, is Wally, with a bloody paw. She’s getting around okay, but it doesn’t look great. I box her up and take her in to the emergency vet. I’d read a hundred pages in the novel I brought before they came for my little buttonhead-in-a-box. Ultimately they said it looked like Wally had torn out her entire claw, and they wanted to take x-rays to see if any bone was missing too, because if the bone was intact the claw might grow back, and it would be painful for it to push through sutured skin.

It’s full on dark when I finally drive home with a loopy coneheaded cat, an opioid of some kind, and a revised diagnosis. Claw is still intact. There’s a cut and swelling and fur that obscured it. They glued the cut shut and advised me to keep the cone on for up to two weeks and swap out her clay litter for paper litter, whatever that is. Clifford is waiting at the front window when we arrive, anxiety in a fuzzy black suit. He’d just had the experience of being separated from his beloved sister for a couple hours earlier that same week, and it kind of broke him, temporarily, and now he’s been separated from both of us for six hours. It’s the worst day in his life. I come in and open the crate and Wally strolls out drunk and coned-up and Clifford dives under the sofa in a state of abject horror. He has totally lost his shit.

He’d had a normal morning during which Wally knocked over something loud (not unprecedented) and then was whisked away and replaced with an alien Wally, and he does not know if it was something he did.

“At least maybe Wally learned something about knocking things over this time,” someone suggested. Wally did not learn anything. Wally, who is doing a study of gravity, had merely knocked over something that totally needed to be knocked over, and that was followed by this whole sequence of unrelated, unnecessary, and expensive events, and she doesn’t give one shit about the expensive, and there’s still a lot of stuff around here to knock over. Also, she’s now banging into the walls and knocking over things with her new face extensions.

Clifford needed a whole lot of affection. He started to come around by the next morning but he was way worse off than Wally. Wally will be fine—matter of policy.

The pet store didn’t have paper litter but sold me soft grass seed litter. Three days of peeing in that and we’ll have us a lawn.

The rabbit lady can still go in the garden. With her rabbit head by her side. In a way, that’s the best part of all this.