this sounds like a potential children’s book title that could be really fun. like if you give a cat a bath, then they will want a fluffy towel and if you give a cat a fluffy towel, they will want a pedicure…something like that. it could end so well with the cat having some warm milk and a nap at the end. maybe someday i’ll write that story but…
this is no such story unfortunately.
one thing (of so so many) that’s interesting living in a country when smart phones are still a thing of the future and internet costs per minute at a cafe, information just travels much more slowly. rumors are truth and spread like a spilled bag of marbles on a tile floor.
so here’s the story:
one day after we got home from work, we found a kitten right in front of our apartment. he was emaciated and just not thriving but he was oh so adorable. we took pity and did the responsible adult thing (or something) of keeping the cat and deciding to nurse it back to health. we started with giving it some food and love and soon the whole neighborhood was around us wanting to know what was going on. because if anything is going on with the white people, everyone else needs to know about it. everyone in the neighborhood came to check it out the time that we were beating a cockroach to death with a mag light (story to come), they came to check it out the day we were trying to wash our laundry by hand because we realized we didn’t have any way to wash clothes, and well they came pretty much every day to check in and find out what crazy shenanigans the white people were up to that day. so yeah pretty much story of our lives…
anyway, all the neighbors were flocking to try to figure out why we cared about some scrawny alley kitten and we told them we were going to clean him up and save his life. once we said the word bath though, you would have thought that we were talking about murder or something. turns out we sort of were. the cambodians said, oh you can’t give a cat a bath, it will die…the other expats on the street, the philipina ladies said, oh you can’t give a cat a bath, it will die…more neighbors showed up and said the same thing. we really made our neighbors even more interested in the antics of white people after this.
so we fed the cat and it seemed to perk up a bit. he was super dirty and gross so we went against all sage advice because i mean, come on, you can give a cat a bath right?? we gave him a bath, wrapped him up in a towel, put him in a basket and left for work!
when we came back, he was dead. i’m not joking. we gave a cat a bath, and it died! what in the world?!?! of course all the neighbors came by looking through the doors when we came back and we basically confirmed it for all cambodians, possibly the whole world:
people…when you give a cat a bath, it dies!
p.s. the photo above is not this cat, we never got a photo of our cat we had for a few brief hours…this is the one our over involved neighbor brought us the next day to, you know, mend our grief over the first one…we didn’t even really want a cat but then we ended up with this psycho of a cat…