The night of the 💩 missile

It’s Saturday, which means I don’t talk about anything serious. Instead, let’s talk about a cat pooping in the middle of the night.

We used to have a cat who periodically exhibited gastrointestinal distress. If you've been following along with my stupid cat stories over the years, this cat was Fat Jonah. Great lap cat, appreciably dumb and charmingly goofy, but when he had digestive issues, he had DIGESTIVE ISSUES.

Several years ago, in the middle of winter, my wife and I were asleep, just like any other night. It was about 2 AM. Fat Jonah had been exhibiting some stomach-issue signs for about 10 days - farting constantly, licking his butthole like it was a government mandate - and we knew, deep down, that a vet visit was in the cards, but we had been putting it off. We did not know we'd be spending the next two hours cleaning up our procrastination.

And let me tell you, procrastination is disgusting.

So, 2 AM. Asleep. I'm awakened by a smell. A truly horrible smell.

I wake my wife. "Do you smell that?"

"Oh God. Yes. What is that?"

"I have no idea." I briefly wonder if we have a dead person in the walls. I’ve seen enough horror movies to know this couldn’t be ruled out.

We lay there in bed, both silently hoping the smell is a remnant of a dream, or something else that will magically vanish into thin air so we can go back to drooling on our pillows like normal adults.

Nope. We hear Fat Jonah violently running around the house - start, stop, start, stop. We can tell it's him because he makes little squeak-meows when he's agitated, and there were squeak-meows coming from everywhere.

The smell gets even stronger. I say to my wife, "Um, so I think the deal is he's running around shitting all over the place."

The nocturnal shitter in repose.

"No!" she says.

"Yep!" I counter cleverly.

Out in the living room, Fat-and-now-Panicked Jonah is bolting everywhere, but the situation is on a steep decline: in between the agitated squeak-meows, we hear a series of blunt, wet rips: Fat Jonah is (a) unable to find a litterbox, and (b) forcefully expelling a stream of shit anywhere and everywhere he runs. The reality strikes us both at once.

"I cannot believe this his happening," I say as I start to get out of bed to investigate. "I knew we should have taken him to the vet."

All the while, Fat Jonah is still running around our house like Walter White’s newest customer, spray-painting shit graffiti every time he stops. He's literally afraid, uncomprehending, trying to run away from his own butthole. It’s like he’s chasing his own tail, just the exact opposite, and if his tail was made out of cat shit.

Before my feet hit the floor, he turns and comes into our bedroom. Riiiip! The smell is so strong now that it literally is gag-inducing. It's a horror flick. It's a war movie's most horrific hospital scene.

As if to prove a point, which would be, See, I tried to tell you two idiots to take me to the vet, Fat Jonah ends his shit massacre by bolting under our bed, spinning around in circles, and pooping steadily for five seconds. It was as if someone filled a giant balloon with cat shit, let go if it, and it flew under our bed for its horrible, sputtering finale.

After the hellish crescendo under our bed, it gets real quiet. Jonah's not running around anymore. And the smell becomes so pungent and revolting that we both throw shirts over our faces and fling the windows wide open in 20 degree weather.

When the lights came on, our worst fears were confirmed: there was shit everywhere, including but not limited to:

• Carpet

• Walls

• Curtains

• Lights

• Chair legs

• Chair upholstery

• Our bed

• Our entire life

It was now 2:10 AM, and our house had become a giant litterbox. We have 20-degree air streaming in from outside, and even that cannot cut the smell.

We spend the next hour canvassing our house and cleaning up what had to be 20 instances of semi-liquid cat shit. The worst part was indeed under our bed, and we had to take apart our entire bed - careful all the while not to dip it into the mess underneath - to clean everything up.

We finished at 4 AM, after reassembling our bed. The house still smelled like a crime scene, only one laced with carpet cleaner and OxyClean.

Jonah is no longer with us (RIP big fella, you were the best), but this story, now buried under several layers of elapsed time and errant human memory, will never not be funny.