Suicide Cat

My scaredy cat tried to be Spiderman today.

My mum was mopping the floor at night, when she heard a soft meow. Thinking that it was just a stray, she ignored it and continued with the housework. She then walked past my cat's water bowl and found it dry, so she refilled it and called out for my cat. She heard my cat's soft reply, so, thinking he was at the balcony, she brought the bowl to the balcony and waited for him to come running in.

He didn't.

What she heard instead was my cat's pitiful whines which reminded her of the time she had locked my cat in the shower room. Thinking the worst, she looked over the balcony and saw my cat crouching precariously on the upper ledge of my neighbour's opened window, looking up at her with Puss-in-boots eyes. My mum shrieked in horror, but promptly ran to the kitchen to grab a clothes pole to use it to alert my neighbour downstairs. My quick-thinking neighbour grabbed an empty box and placed it under him, and with my mum's prodding with the pole, my cat hopped safely into my neighbour's arms.

We deduced later that he must have leapt onto my neighbour's window in pursuit of a butterfly, and unable to find stable ground because he had all four limbs in a straight line like a tightrope walker, couldn't jump back up onto our balcony.

To think I had come home that night unaware that my cat had such a close shave with falling to his death because he behaved as he would on a normal day whenever I got home, rubbing his cheeks against my ankles and hampering for a treat.

The next day, we left the balcony door open again to test his reaction to the traumatic experience he must have had the night before. Unfazed, my silly cat walked towards the end of the balcony and slipped his body through to the unsafe side of the railings. Apparently, my cat likes living his life on the edge.