Help for the Kitties

I shook the box and it rattled. It was small, like a candy box that you buy at the movies. Then I opened it and tiny creatures with four legs poured out. They were barely more than one quarter of an inch long.

“These look like little mice,” I remarked. “I thought they were something else, something that you are supposed to put in your litter box to clean it.”

My friend replied, “They will clean your litter box, and they will also clean the fleas and dirt out of your cats’ fur.”

Well now, I thought, let’s see if this works. The little creatures were indeed extremely tiny mice, not much bigger than fleas themselves, but they were real workhorses. They got busy in the litter boxes, raking through the litter and leaving it sparkling clean. It did seem, though, that maybe they were eating some of the litter, because there was not as much in the boxes after they raked it. It looked rather thin.

Then they worked on the cats, gleaning all of the fleas and flea by-products out of their hair so that they were also squeaky clean.

But look, in the blink of an eye, these little guys had grown into huge, for them, animals. They were now the size of the cats themselves, and my cats are very large. I began to worry that there would be fights, but everyone seemed to get along.

Now, remember, this had been a whole box full of tiny mice-like beings, and now they were large and running all over the place. Everywhere I looked, they were working, or eating, or playing, in the grass and under the trees, and I don’t even have a yard. Sometimes they looked like cats, and sometimes they were more like squirrels, big squirrels. I wondered if I was going to have a problem, but then I decided to just live with it for a while and see what happened.

Then I woke up.