The Circle of the Paw

Chapter 4

     Fall turned to winter, winter to spring, and spring to summer. In what seemed like the wag of a tail, nine moon cycles had passed and Noah had grown from a cooing newborn into a vocal infant. Even Akhi had grown closer with the newest member of the family.

It had started in spring, when Jacob and Abigail started feeding small pieces of chicken to their son at dinnertime. Noah's clumsy fingers missed his mouth more than they found it, causing scraps of meat to fall from his high chair to the floor. Akhi, sensing an opportunity, learned to wait patiently under the chair for his second dinner. When the boy became aware of the cat below him, he started dropping chicken pieces purposefully and giggling at the results.

When his parents would bring Noah out of his high chair, he and Akhi played a game where they would lay on the ground and attempt to gently head-butt each other. Misha knew this to be the universal feline symbol for trust. Noah even began calling for Akhi after his naps, calling out "Aca. Aca. Aca," which Jacob and Abigail thought to mean 'cat', but Misha assumed to be the boy's pronunciation of "Cagney".

However, not all was well in the Benveniste household. Things were still strained between pets and parents. Jacob and Abigail were spending whatever free time they had available on their infant in the afternoons and would distract themselves with their phones at night. The old rituals of dusk playtime and falling asleep on their owners' laps seemed like distant memories. They had been replaced by repeated nightly wake-ups, arguments about formula types, and the occasional half-awake watching of an old TV show.

It was just such an evening when Misha found herself on the yellow living room carpet, trying to cover her ears with her forepaws. The near-constant howling from the baby monitor rang in Misha's ears like a whistle. The warm summer sun had barely set as Jacob tried unsuccessfully to put a wailing Noah to sleep in his crib upstairs. More teeth had started to break through the boy's gums, causing immense pain and poor sleep for everyone in the house.

The boy's cries reached an even louder pitch on the monitor. Misha stood up and jumped on the couch next to Abigail. She laid on her human's lap and attempted to nuzzle her head under one of Abigail's hands, hoping for an ear rub. Unfortunately, the long-fingered hand stayed still while the other was firmly clenched around a phone. Misha whimpered, but received no sympathy. She looked up and recognized the blue glow hypnotizing her human's face.

Finding little comfort in Abigail's lap, Misha hopped off the couch and headed toward the kitchen. Her tail wagged when she found Akhi sitting by their food dishes on the cold kitchen floor.

"Can you help me out here?" the cat asked while shaking one of his front paws. A beige piece of double sided tape was stuck to his front claw and flapped around like a leaf with every shake.

Misha's tail stopped wagging.

"Again with the tape?" Misha let her disappointment be known with her tone of voice. Akhi had been taking the lack of attention from Jacob and Abigail especially hard and had been scratching furniture around the house. He would extend his body up along the fabric of couches, chairs, and wicker laundry baskets, repeatedly using his claws to loudly pull out threads. But inevitably, his humans would just slap some double-sided sticky tape on Akhi's most recent scratching post, hoping to break their cat's habit.