The Bahgeera Chronicles

Those who know me quite well can attest to the fact that I am utterly, inconsolably, ridiculously, and religiously afraid of cockroaches. I cannot stand the thought of them, and have had a battle with the evil creatures ever since I have come to live in my current apartment. So, you can all imagine my joy as I share the following narrative.

Tonight, Bahgeera single handedly (er, pawedly) hunted and captured a vicious, horrible, extremely large and Kafkaesque cockroach.

I was lying on the couch, finishing my tasty dinner of enchiladas, (I can make a mean enchilada,) and giggling quietly to the wit of John Stewart and his band of merry writers that make up the humoriffic Daily Show, when I heard a commotion in the kitchen. Bagheera had previously spent time this evening knocking over his water dish by landing in it, (picture an over turned kitchen stool for visual aid in how this might have happened,) and by trying to jump and reach the hinge of the kitchen door. (Tried so hard, and cried about it when he couldn’t reach. I finally picked him up and held him in reaching distance to the hinge so he could bat at it with his paws for a few minutes and purr appreciatively.)

After hearing the commotion, I called out to him, expecting to hear the sound of four little paws scrambling down from off the forbidden kitchen counter and to see his little face come trit-trotting my way. He did not come. I called him again, in a nicer tone, so that he wouldn’t think I was too mean, lest he decide not to grace me with his presence. He still didn’t come, and I went back into my TV stupor without thinking too much on it. When I heard nothing from him for a good ten minutes, I called his name again.

He still ignored my call. Even for a bad demon kitty, this was unusual. He usually comes when I call to him, unless he is doing something really bad, or knocked unconscious. Fearing that it was one of the two, I left the glow of the idiot box to go check on my kitty. I found him crouched on the floor of the kitchen in front of a paper bag.

“Oh.” I scold him, reaching down to give him a squeeze, “a paper bag is more important than coming when your mother calls?” I pick up the bag, intending to play the delightfully sophisticated game “torture the kitty,” and what should creep out from under the paper bag? You guessed it - the hideous cockroach from three paragraphs ago. I react in a dignified and worldly manner, by screaming like a banshee (that would be the “worldly” part,) and leaping across the room in a soaring arch which was quite dignified, I assure you. Bagheera, pleased to have his new plaything uncovered from the complexity of the paper bag, proceeded to pounce, chew and claw the hideous roach in a very un-vegetarian manner. Drawing my courage, I convinced Bagheera to let me flush the hideous roach down the toilet (a more humane death than death by kitten.)

Bagheera was then lauded with praise and special kitten treats, and many, many insistences that he was such a good, good boy, and that for every evil roach he captured I would in turn forget every evil deed Bagheera himself committed. So, tonight, he is my little protector and I am quite pleased with him. That is, until I went to take a shower and he crawled into my closet (again) and pulled more of my clothes off the hangers, and the towels off the shelves, and used his claws on all the delicate clothes I keep in the closet to be safe from said claws……sigh.