by Nic Saint
“So is this happening or not!” yelled Gran, who was clearly getting fed up.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” And before I could convince myself this was a very bad idea, I stepped up to the paddling pool, put one paw over the edge, and stepped in. When the water suddenly reached my belly, there was a momentary panicky cry bubbling to the surface but I heroically stifled it and hoped for the best—and Gran’s immediate response if I would, indeed, suddenly find myself submersed in these cold waters.
“Max!” said Dooley, running up to see if I was drowning. “Are you all right?”
I gulped a little. “I-I’m not sure, Dooley," I said. I glanced down, and had to admit that Odelia had been right about one thing: the water wasn’t nearly deep enough to drown in. And even though the sensation of getting wet set off a sense of rising panic, I also found the coolness of the water quite… enjoyable.
The day was really hotting up, and being up to my shoulders in these cooling streams—even though the water wasn’t actually streaming—was actually not all that bad.
I looked up at Gran, who gave me an expectant look.
“It’s… not so bad,” I finally announced, causing the elderly lady to give three rousing cheers, and pump the air with her fists.
“He did it!” she cried. “Max has braved the raging waters of the paddling pool!”
I smiled and looked back at my fellow cats, who were all staring at me, mouths agape. “Come on in, you guys,” I found myself saying. “The water is fine.”
Now it was their turn to gulp, but before long, and after careful deliberation, they all followed suit, and moments later four cats were standing side by side in the plastic paddling pool, not entirely happy, but not all that unhappy either.
“I think we can call lesson one a total win,” said Odelia with a satisfied smile on her face. “That’s it for today, you guys. You can stay in there for as long as you like. And tomorrow we’re moving to the outdoor municipal swimming pool for lesson two.”
Harriet closed her eyes. “Somehow I’d hoped lesson one would also be the final lesson,” she said.
“No such luck,” said Brutus.
“Oh, don’t be so glum,” I said. “It’s fun to be in the water, isn’t it? Nice and cool.”
They gave me dark looks, conveying the sentiment that I’d lost my mind, then stepped out of the pool, carefully examining the damage the water had done to their fur.
Dooley sidled up to me. He’d been trying to suck in his belly, hoping to avoid contact with the water, but since his legs were pretty short, it was swimming against the stream. He relaxed his belly, fully immersing it in the water, and let out a high-pitched scream.
“It’s all right, Dooley,” I said. “It’s just water. It won’t kill you.”
“No, but it will make me wet,” he said with undeniable logic.
“I’m getting out of here,” said Gran, stepping out of the pool. “Too hot,” she grumbled, and headed inside for some cooling shade.
“It is pretty hot out here,” I said, peering up at that big ball of searing heat bathing us in its relentless rays.
“It’s global warming,” Dooley announced knowingly. “I’ve seen it on the Discovery Channel. The planet is heating up, and soon it will be so hot we’ll all melt.”
“I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that," I said as I gawked at the water reflecting my face. For a moment I contemplated submersing myself fully but then dispelled the silly notion. Soon we’d be floating in an actual pool, but why hasten the terrifying process?
Odelia, who was tapping away on her smartphone, was walking back toward the house, and Gran, our self-appointed lifeguard, had also vanished from view, as had Brutus and Harriet. So now it was just me and Dooley, alone in that paddling pool.
“Max?” said Dooley. “The floor of this thing is really slippery.”
I’d noticed the same thing. The bottom of the paddling pool was extremely slippery.
“What if we trip and fall and go under?” he asked, a rising sense of panic making his voice quake.
“Let’s all try to stay calm,” I said, even though I was starting to lose my cool, too.
We were in the middle of a water-filled paddling pool, far away from the safety of the shoreline, and if we slipped and fell now we’d go under with no one there to save us!
“Let’s just… not move,” I suggested therefore.
“What do you mean?” asked Dooley, giving me panicky glances while he stood frozen to the spot, afraid to move an inch for fear of slipping on that slippery bottom.
“If we don’t move we can’t fall,” I pointed out. “And if we don’t fall we can’t go under.”
“You’re right,” said Dooley. “If we don’t move we can’t fall, and if we don’t fall we won’t drown. I like your idea, Max. It’s a very good idea.”
So we simply stood there, motionless, hoping someone—anyone!—would come and fish us out of the paddling pool, which was slowly but surely becoming a death trap.
And as the sun beat down upon our heads, I was starting to rue the day I’d said yes to Odelia's cockamamie idea!
Chapter Two
Marge was cleaning out her kitchen cupboards when suddenly a very large specimen of spider took a running leap from the top shelf and jumped right at her.
She uttered a blood-curdling scream and nearly fell off her stepladder. The spider had cleared the cupboard and had actually disappeared into her décolletage, however modest, and was now wriggling its way along the front of her T-shirt.
So when Tex walked into the kitchen five seconds later he found his wife of twenty-five years screaming her head off and performing some sort of tribal dance on the spot.
“What’s wrong, darling?” he asked, immediately starting to diagnose the symptoms and trying to come up with the name of the terrible disease that had afflicted her.
“A spider!” she screamed. “It jumped me!”
Tex immediately lost interest. An occupational hazard with doctors is that they’re only interested in a physical phenomenon when there’s a disease to be diagnosed and medication to be prescribed. He even went as far as to utter a light chuckle. “A spider,” he said. “Oh, dear.”
But Marge was too buy divesting herself of her items of clothing and trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the spider to bother about her husband’s lack of empathy.
Finally, after having hopped on the spot and failed to locate the bug, she was relieved to find it scuttling away from the T-shirt she’d dropped on the floor and making haste in the direction of the stove, then disappearing underneath, where Marge’s wrath couldn’t expend itself on its hairy form.
Just then, Vesta walked in. She directed a critical look at her daughter. “I know it’s hot and all, Marge, but do you really have to strip down to your underwear?”
“There was a spider,” said Marge, still breathless, as she clasped a hand to her chest, where she thought she could still feel the animal’s hairy little feet scratching her skin.
“Deep breaths,” said Tex, as he placed a hand on his wife’s wrist and started monitoring her heartbeat like the medical professional he was. “In and out. That’s it.”
“A spider?” asked Vesta. “And is that a reason to perform an act of indecency in my kitchen?”
Marge was still too preoccupied with her recent encounter with one of the animal kingdom’s least cuddly denizens to point out to her mother that it was, in fact, her kitchen. Slowly she was getting her breathing under control, though. Sufficiently so, in fact, to give her husband a scathing look, which made the latter recoil with surprise.
“You just stood there and laughed in my face!” Marge cried.
Tex, who had the gall to smile, said, “But, honey, you looked so funny just then. Hopping and screaming and hollering like a maniac.”
“I was under attack!” she yelled.
Tex raised a single eyebrow. “From a little spider?” he said, less than impressed with the serious
ness of the allegations she was hurling at him. “Oh, puh-lease.”
She glanced up at the cupboard, and wondered if more of the same species weren’t lurking there, waiting for the right opportunity to follow where their hairy mate had led the way. “There could be more,” she murmured. “Tex—can you see if there are more?”
Tex frowned at this. “More?”
“More spiders,” she explained, and pointed to the cupboard in question, which she’d supposed, until only five minutes before, completely devoid of spiders, and only filled with the ancient dishware Vesta had brought when she’d moved in so many years before.
Tex seemed reluctant to take a look, his smile quickly having been replaced with a look of distinct horror. “You know I don’t like spiders, honey,” he said in a low voice.
“Oh, men,” said Vesta with an eyeroll. “Let me have a look.” And to show her son-in-law how it was done, she righted the stepladder that had fallen over and mounted it, then directed an inquisitive look into the depths of the cupboard under inspection.
“Nah,” she said finally. “Only my old dishware. Unless…” And much to Marge’s surprise, she inserted a hand into the gaping hole and moments later returned with a figurine. “That’s not mine,” she announced with a puzzled look on her face. She turned it this way and that, then descended the stepladder to subject the object to closer scrutiny.
“What is it?” asked Tex, his interest drawn.
“I don’t know,” said Marge. “I thought it was yours, Mom.”
But Vesta shook her head. “Never seen this before in my life.”
It was a hand-sized figurine of a female goatherd, complete with complimentary goat, and Marge had to admit she hadn’t set eyes on the peculiar object before herself.
“How did it get up there?” she asked.
Tex, however, had already lost interest. “It’s just a figurine,” he said. “Who cares how it got up there?”
Marge and Vesta were studying the item closely, turning it this way and that. “It’s nice,” said Vesta. “I like the colors.”
Whoever had created it clearly had a penchant for all things pastel, for both the girl goatherd and her goat were festooned in festive light pinks and blues and yellows. The girl was seated on a rock, and smiling gaily as if loving life in all its goatherding splendor.
“Turn it over,” said Marge. “Maybe there’s something written on the bottom.”
Obligingly Vesta turned the object over, and they both frowned when they saw that on the bottom a sticker had been glued, announcing that the object was actually part of a collection of objects, number 141 in a series of 360, in fact, and made by one Otto Spiel.
“Otto Spiel,” said Vesta. “Sounds German. Do they have goats in Germany?”
But Marge was already pointing her phone’s camera at the object and entrusting Google Lens with supplying the solution. Promptly a picture popped up, and she clicked through to a Wikipedia page. “Otto Spiel,” she read, “was an early twentieth-century Austrian sculptor and artist, famous for his series of female goatherd figurines, which are highly sought after, and which sell at exorbitant prices at auctions held all over the world.” Her eyes widened when she read on. “An original Otto Spiel goatherd figurine typically sells for one million, and in some cases even up to four million—Oh, my God!”
“Oh, my God,” her mother echoed, as she reverently turned the figurine over in her hand, then ever so carefully set it down on the kitchen table. “Four million dollars!”
Tex, who’d returned to the kitchen, laughed when he saw his wife and his mother-in-law staring at the goatherd as if it were the Second Coming. “Still looking at that thing?”
“Tex?" said Marge, slowly raising her eyes from the goatherd to her husband. “It’s an Otto Spiel.”
“A what now?” asked Tex, opening the fridge and taking out the jug of OJ.
Vesta now turned the label in Tex’s direction. “An actual Otto Spiel, Tex.”
Marge reread the Wikipedia entry, bringing her husband up to speed on all things Otto Spiel, but even then it took some time for the good doctor to put two and two together. But when his brain finally had made the necessary computations and permutations, his jaw dropped precipitously, and so did the jug of OJ. He actually had to support himself against the kitchen sink as his eyes goggled at the little girl goatherd.
“Oh, my God!” he cried, earning himself knowing nods from his family members in response. He then glanced up at the kitchen cupboard. “But… how did it get up there?”
“That,” said Marge with a shrug, “is the million-dollar question.”
Vesta grinned. “And you can take that literally.”
Chapter Three
One of the disadvantages of being a cat is all of that fur that we carry. Humans did the smart thing and lost most of their fur a long time ago, possibly around the time they learned how to walk on their hind legs, but cats never made it to that stage—yet.
So there we were, Dooley and I, standing stiff as boards in the middle of that paddling pool, the sun relentlessly beating down on us from a clear blue sky, and our thick coats of fur doing very little to make our position more agreeable.
“Maybe we can move inch by inch,” Dooley suggested. “In a couple of hours we might reach the edge.”
We both glanced at the edge, which seemed miles away, but when I moved a paw, it immediately lost traction and I almost submerged into the cold waters of the pool!
“Max, careful!” Dooley yelled, horrified at watching an accident in progress right under his nose.
“I’m not moving a muscle,” I announced, thoroughly shaken by my brush with death.
For a long moment, we were both silent, then Dooley suddenly cried, “I've got it!”
“Dooley, please don’t yell like that,” I said plaintively. “You're giving me heart palpitations.” I was indeed starting to feel a little faint.
“Why don’t we make a hole in the bottom of the pool? That way the water can escape and before we know it the pool will be empty!”
It was an excellent idea, and proof that when placed under considerable pressure, the feline mind can come up with some of its best ideas.
“Great idea, Dooley,” I said therefore. “Let’s give it a shot.”
So I extended a claw, and dug in, and since Dooley did the same, I was sure that soon we’d see the water level start to drop precipitously.
Unfortunately between dream and reality there’s a huge chasm at times, and this was clearly one of those times, as the water level wasn’t dropping, precipitously or otherwise.
“The holes probably aren’t big enough,” Dooley said. “Let’s try again.”
So we tried again, and dug in all of our nails in equal measure, giving that thick, slick plastic the full acupuncture treatment.
Alas, to no avail, as half an hour passed and nothing happened. Probably the pool was pressing down on the lawn too tightly, and the water had no avenue of escape—like us.
“Max!” Dooley said suddenly. “I am starting to feel weird. As if I’m going to pass out.”
“Me, too, buddy,” I said. “But we’ve got to hang in there. We’ve got to survive long enough for Odelia to save us!”
Odelia, or any other human who might pass by. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any human within earshot, for we’d already given hollerin’ and yellin’ for help a shot, and that hadn’t brought success either.
“I-I can’t take this anymore, Max,” said Dooley all of a sudden, as I could see his legs quaking. “I’m going down.”
“No, Dooley!” I cried, and tried to stop him from buckling under the pressure by sticking out one paw, and balancing on three paws as a consequence. But it was to no avail. Dooley’s legs couldn’t carry him anymore, and I could see him sinking further and further, just like the Titanic on that auspicious night to remember.
Just then, and much to my elation, a familiar male figure rounded the corner and came within view. It was Chase
Kingsley, and he was whistling a happy little tune.
“Chase!” I cried. “Help us, please! We’re drowning!”
Chase, even though he couldn’t actually understand what I said, must have understood immediately that the situation was a precarious one, and rushed to our aid. Without hesitation, he stepped into the pool, then bodily lifted Dooley with one hand, and me with the other, and carried us to safety! And when he set us down on solid ground, both Dooley and myself collapsed onto the grass, and sighed with relief.
“Chase, you saved us!” I cried, and gave the intrepid cop’s hand a heartfelt lick.
“You saved our lives, Chase,” said Dooley, much chastened by this horrifying experience, and gave the cop’s other hand a lick.
Chase merely smiled, and petted our heads affectionately. “There, there,” he said. “You fellas really don’t like the water, do you?”
“No, we certainly don’t,” I said, then shivered at the sight of that paddling pool. “And now even less than before!”
“You’re all right now,” Chase said, and got up, leaving Dooley and me to recover from our terrifying ordeal.
“Never again, Max,” said Dooley, shaking his head. “Never again am I setting paw in that death trap.”
“Me neither, Dooley,” I said. “No amount of Cat Snax in the world will induce me to repeat this experience.”
Cats simply aren’t made for going out on the water, and our most recent brush with death had brought that simple truth home to me once more in all its starkness.
Chase must have told Odelia what had happened, for she now came rushing out of the house, and when she crouched down next to us, she was the picture of solicitousness.
“Oh, you guys—were you still in that pool?”
“We were,” I announced, a little stiffishly.
