The Wet Spot

On Tuesday night, I had to leave the house for a group study session with some fellow students in the McCombs MBA program. JM was still at work, and thus Joey was designated to be left home alone in my abode for the first time in his life. To say I was a bit nervous about having a strange animal wander through my tidy quarters unsupervised would be akin to saying that Sidney Prescott was nervous every time the phone rang in her Woodsboro, CA home (That's an obscure "Scream" reference for those of you who haven't seen it or don't waste your precious hippocampus with obscure movie trivia.)

I left the house for a few hours and upon my return did not see JM’s car in the garage. Thus, I knew that Joey had been left alone for the entire duration of my absence. As I parked my car and gathered my belongings, I began to envision the whirlwind of destruction awaiting me, sort of like a post-apocalyptic Mad Max landscape with Joey dressed in a leather jacket wielding a pistol.

I proceeded to slowly open the door between the garage and the house. As its squeaky hinges creaked, I softly whispered, “Joey? Where are you? Is everything ok?”

Within an instant, I heard a delicate meowing emanating from upstairs. I dropped my belongings in the hallway and marched forward to investigate. What I saw was a forlorn feline sitting in the darkness of the night and looking at me with eyes of abandon.

Relieved by the seeming lack of damage, I strutted back downstairs to unpack my laptop and to put it back in its rightful place on the countertop dividing the breakfast area and the living room. As I approached the designated computer spot, laptop en tow, the cold, hard tile beneath my feet quickly turned into the wet, cold, hard tile, with a mysterious liquid spreading between my toes.

The first thought to course through my mind, before my eyes even had a chance to gaze at the ground, was “did this fucking cat just pee on my floor????”

Just then, my neck snapped downwards in one foul swoop, and I found before me an enormous puddle of liquid all over the ground. I glanced to my left and saw that Joey’s food bowl had been knocked over and its contents were scattered all over the white tile floor, as if a young child had just received a brand new puzzle and tossed all of the jagged pieces on a small coffee table. Curiously enough, however, Joey’s water bowl remained upright, albeit with a tiny amount of liquid housed within.

Like a good crime scene investigator, I tried to comprehend the sight before me. I took a few steps back and just gazed at the entire area, soaking in every detail. After a few seconds (and an embarrassingly quick sniff of the spilled liquid on the ground), I came to the conclusion that somehow Joey tipped over his water bowl, leading to a flash flood within a five-foot radius. However, I was confused as to why the water bowl was still upright but the food bowl was knocked over.

It was almost as if Joey had inadvertently knocked the water bowl over earlier that evening and thought to himself, “Meow meow. The tall brown anal guy will kill me if he knows I spilled water everywhere. I know. I’ll make it look like the water bowl has a crack or hole in it and he won’t blame me. In fact, I’ll knock my food container over so he will think I slipped in the puddle and slid into it, thereby sprinkling kitty chow everywhere! He’ll feel sorry for me thinking I injured myself due to HIS negligence! Meow.”

Having realized Joey's modus operandi, I then dutifully picked up the water bowl to inspect it for structural integrity flaws, but found nothing.

I then yelled at Joey upstairs, “I’m on to your little game, you rascal! You thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?” sounding like an old-timey detective from a random 1940s mystery flick.

He just sat in silence at the top of the stairs, enveloped by the dimness of the witching hour. I knew that his lack of purring or meowing was a sure sign of guilt.

Joey had just been caught, wet-handed.