Kibble under siege

Tragedy has visited the heretofore unmarred lives of Clifford and Wally, my sibling kittens. Their kibble has been overcome by ants.

There are 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants alive today. It’s excessive. But I have the ant thing down now. I sponge up the marching ant platoons with Windex and paper towels and put down Raid Ant Gel around their entry points. The problem is gone in 24 hours. To this day if I clean a window I think it smells like ants.

I got out my gel, squeezed the last little blibbet out of it, and went to Walgreens for more. Guess the hell what? They don’t make it anymore. The thing that works. Even Amazon can’t find it for you. Why? Why? Raid Ant Gel joins the ranks of Parke-Davis Throat Discs, the only thing that will silence a horrible cough, the thing that was discontinued just because it contained chloroform. I bought bait traps.

Ants don’t smell like Windex. They smell like formic acid. That’s Latin for ant fug. But even though I have cleaned everything up and polished the floor and put down fresh kibble in a new clean bowl, the ghost of formic acid hovers in the vicinity. Wally is skeeved out. Wally won’t eat.

Clifford is more or less unfazed. I’m sure he can detect the odor, but he likes food. He’s all “Crunch. Eww! Crunch. Eww! Crunch.” Wally is wasting away.

“Look, Wally,” I wheedled. “It’s okay! Clifford is eating! Shouldn’t that count for something?” Wally gave me a patient, sad look, as though she was disappointed in my report card. No, mom. I love Clifford, but he runs head-first into closed doors. He just fell off the counter batting at a sunbeam. He’s going to need specialized care.

“Try feeding her by hand,” a friend suggested. Wally stared at me and walked away. “I’m not a chickadee,” she said. Hey, little missy. I am AWARE you are not a chickadee. But there’s no need for the attitude. And don’t you be sneering at chickadees. I hand-fed a very fine chickadee for years, and it elevated me in the karma sweepstakes.

Well, she’ll eat eventually, I thought, casually fingering pages on the internet. The internet is unanimous on the issue. If a cat doesn’t eat for two days, her liver might blow up. Really? Don’t lions eat a wildebeest and then sleep it off for a couple weeks? How evolutionarily unsound is this kitten?

She didn’t eat. She mostly slept. She did demonstrate her former verve for a moment. That moment was when she discovered the door to the upstairs could be jiggled open. The kittens had not yet been allowed upstairs. But up she went. Clifford remained downstairs, rolling around mournfully by the portal he watched Wally disappear into like Harry Potter boarding the Hogwarts Express. He was completely befuddled and alone. Clifford couldn’t figure out the door at all, and it was already open. He pawed at the wall and floor.

Wally returned eventually, but I could tell she was fading. She’d knocked down only one picture upstairs.

Well, I was worried. I checked the kibble she was ignoring and it had ants again although I had not noticed their re-arrival. That night I cleaned up the bowls and left them on the counter, unfilled; I usually top them up and they polish them off overnight. This morning I woke to two unusually clingy and desperate kittens. I put down fresh kibble and Wally scarfed it right up. She’s back. She’s rocketing around the house like a coked-up pinball.

Wally is safe. Ain’t nothing else in this house safe.