The Adventures of Molly the Catatonic Kitty

We adopted Jessica’s cat on Tuesday. The poor cat was catatonic all day long. She hid between Lorraine’s mattress and the wall all day long. When Lorraine would pull her out of the space, Molly would go right back to the gap. After a number of hours, Molly finally would go about six inches from the wall and let Lorraine pet her, but only as long a Lorraine kept holding her.
This went on for a whole day and night. The next day Molly actually walked around the girls’ room. She wouldn’t venture out of the room, but she would actually sit on the desk, looking out the window and meow to get out. That was an improvement until the early hours of day two with the catatonic kitty, when she started meowing loudly and insistently that she wanted to go hunting at 5 am. In a battle of wills between a cat and a human, even two humans, the cat will win. Molly won. The girls came to our room to sleep, and Elizabeth went to try to sleep in their room for two good reasons: 1) she is a self sacrificial mother who will do almost anything for her “babies” even when her babies are almost her height, and 2) she was so sick that night that she hardly slept anyway, with or without the cat.
On day three the cat gave us a fright that she had run off. Andrew left the back door open and Molly couldn’t be found for a few tense seconds. She had gone to the porch but came back at Elizabeth’s call. Why are we keeping the cat locked up inside? We were told by cat people it takes a week for a cat to imprint on a new home, so we are keeping her locked in the house for a week to let her imprint on our house, then she can go back to her catly duties like hunting rodents and snakes and placing the rotting corpses under our bed. We can’t wait.
We are up to day four now, and Patty the mop dog is about to learn about his new competition for our cuddling affections. Right now he is just confused as to why we aren’t letting him track the red mud of Malawi into our house. In a mere three days we can open the doors again to let Molly out and Patty in. We can’t wait.