Dennis' Attention

Sara sat on her haunches with her arms wrapped around her knees, shifting her weight from foot to toe to high heel with no rhyme or reason, creating this awkward sway, as though she were being blown by cold wind coming from every direction. Her eyes were wide and fixed upon my new kitten, Dennis, who was splayed out across the wooden floor. Dennis was wildly oscillating his head in the way that kittens do when focusing on a moving object of considerable interest.
“Awwww, look at the ki-en,” Sara cried, omitting the two t’s in kitten’s pronunciation. The bottom half of her face split open into a huge gummy smile. You could hear spit stretching across the inside of her cheeks. Her teeth were tiny and kinda brown, as if her baby teeth hadn’t fallen out 24 – 19 years before like they should have. They looked soft, vulnerable. She intensified her sway so that her ponytail swished around behind her and the floorboards creaked beneath her oddly distributed weight.
How on earth does she do that in high heels? I thought. Dennis rose to his feet and assumed pouncing position. His head continued to magnetically follow Sara. He meowed and Sara almost lost it.
“Oh my gawd,” she said, “what an adorable ki-en!” I thought she was going to tip over and fall crashing across the wood floors, Dennis bolting away in terror, ruining their charming moment together. But she maintained her balance, keeping her new friend’s interest. Dennis clawed at the floor, piercing through the polyurethane and extracting tiny little splinters.
“Hey!” I said to Dennis.
“Be nice,” Sara said.
Sara somehow managed to untangle one of the arms which had been wrapped around her knees. She wobbled a little, widening her eyes, drawing in a short, sharp breath and pivoting her feet to readjust.
“Haha – my arm fell asleep!” she said, looking up at me and smiling. I made what I felt to be a look of caution and swayed sympathetically with her, hoping she wouldn’t fall, waiting for her to fall. She rubbed her arm against her skirt and leg, consciousness eventually flowing back into the sleepy appendage. She turned her attention back to Dennis, or the ki-en, who was still in ready-mode, his paws positioned in such a way that he could leap into space. Or into Sara. She reached her hand out to stroke Dennis’s face. Her dangling fingers and Dennis approached one another in slow motion. I heard the music from Gone With The Wind playing somewhere in my hippocampus – that music when the two people are running toward each other, madly in love. About an inch floated between Sara’s hand and Dennis’ head. Dennis lifted up its paw to greet Sara. Sara arched her eyebrows and nodded, emphasizing her interest in petting him. Just as her index finger graced Dennis’ whisker he brought his paw down across Sara’s hand, unsheathing his claws at some invisible moment known only to Dennis.
“OW! You little shit!” Sara shouted. Dennis dashed to the far corner off the room, licking his claws and squinting in that way that cats do when they are immensely pleased with themselves. Sara held up her hand and studied it. Four clean claw marks jogged about an inch just under her thumb. They hadn’t even begun to bleed yet.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m used to this sort of thing.” She glared at me severely. I looked away sheepishly. “You wanna go dip a cotton ball in some hydrogen peroxide for me?”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, of course.”
I tip-toe ran through the kitchen and into the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out and uncapped the big, brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I didn’t actually have any cotton balls, because nobody actually has any cotton balls, so I unraveled what I felt to be a sufficient length of double-ply toilet paper, crumpled it up, and doused it in 67 cent generic hydrogen peroxide from K-Mart.
Maybe I should give Sara more credit, I thought.
I walked back through the kitchen, wielding a drippy wad of sterile toilet paper. When I reached the living room Sara was still on her haunches, perfectly balanced, once again holding Dennis’ attention with her arrhythmic sway.