In my teenage years, I lived in a world of curated cool. I had my mattress on the floor, a stack of indie CDs within reach, and an air of effortless sophistication that I believed was matched only by my cat, Miso.
Miso was a Burmese-Siamese mix, a sleek creature of cream and chocolate who moved with the grace of a silk ribbon. She was elegant, poised, and utterly regal—except for her one nightly ritual. Every evening, as I settled into my floor-bound sanctuary, Miso would climb into her cat bed right next to my pillow. There, she would dive into her favorite knit blanket, “making bread” with rhythmic paws and nursing on the wool like a kitten who had forgotten she was a queen.
It became our routine. I’d drift off to the sound of her soft purring and the muffled squish-squish of her kneading the blanket. In the dark, I’d habitually reach over the edge of my mattress to give her a gentle scratch on the top of her head. It was our nightly sign-off—a sweet, tactile connection before sleep took over.
One night, the room was thick with shadows as I performed the usual reach. My fingers found her, but as I began to scratch, my brain sent back an error message.
The texture was wrong. It wasn’t the silky, flat fur of her forehead. It wasn’t the familiar dip between her ears. It felt… fleshy. Strange. Distinctly un-head-like.
A wave of confusion washed over me, followed quickly by a prickle of unease. I rolled across the mattress, fumbling for the switch of the bedside lamp on the far wall. The bulb flickered to life, bathing the room in a harsh, yellow glow.
I squinted against the light and looked down at Miso’s bed.
She was still nursing on the blanket, her eyes half-closed in a trance of pure bliss. But she wasn’t facing me. In her aggressive dedication to “making bread,” she had performed a full 180-degree rotation.
I wasn’t scratching her head.
I had spent the last thirty seconds vigorously massaging her asshole.
Worse than the realization of what I was touching was Miso’s reaction—or lack thereof. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t move. She didn’t give an actual damn. She just kept kneading that blanket, staring into the middle distance with a look of vacant contentment, apparently decided that if the human wanted to provide a high-end spa treatment to her hindquarters, who was she to complain?
At seventeen, I was horrified. I spent the next ten minutes scrubbing my hands with enough soap to strip my own skin, convinced my “cool” factor had been permanently revoked by a four-legged comedian.
Ten years have passed since then. Miso has long since moved on to the great knit blanket in the sky, and looking back, the horror has faded into pure, unadulterated comedy. She was the most elegant cat I ever knew, but she certainly knew how to keep me humble. God rest her precious, weird little soul.
