I once spend a day hanging out with a friend of mine, who like many people do, owned cats. Wall-E and Eva were a rambunctious pair, as you get with two felines cooped up in a Boston apartment, and would switch between periods of hyperactivity and extreme sloth at a moments notice, as cats will.
On the day in question a friend of hers had presented her with a gift of flowers, which she had returned and proudly displayed in a vase on a stand in her room across from her bed. The cats looked upon this new addition to their domain with feigned ambivalence, that is until she departed the room.
Eva had always been the more adventurous of the two, and didn't take lightly to the additional foliage in her room without her inspection, and so sauntered over to the display.
She came to rest at it on her haunches, and peered up casually with no clear intention of her next action. That is until she turned and looked at me, sitting on the bed, and shot me a dismissive glance that said,
"You're new here buddy, but I'm going up there."
Now what I failed to mention was that the stand was also adorned with an ornamental table cloth, which the vase rest on, and hug off the edge. With Eva sat coiled in front of it, it was clear to me what was about to unfold, and that there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Her leap was effortless, perhaps if she'd given a bit more effort things could have gone another route, but she didn't. Instead of landing on the stand, she made it half over the edge, landed, and sunk her claws into the tablecloth for purchase.
I saw the fall as if it was in slow motion, she went backward over the edge, a fall of no particular issue for a cat. What she hadn't accounted for was the vase full water and flowers following her over as she dragged the tablecloth with her.
She saw it coming mid descent, and had already begun her mad scramble from beneath it before she hit the ground. Little good it did, for moments after I accurately predicted the result, was the room filled with five pounds of mad, wet, cat.
Wall-E had witnessed this entire fiasco unfold from across the room, and took the crash as his cue to leave, as he'd been blamed for her accidents in the past, and probably took this to be a particularly bad one.
Eva, embarrassed, soiled, no longer wished to be at the scene of her crime and beat a hasty retreat from the room, just as Wall-E saw fit to depart as well.
Both cats collided with my friend at the door, as she reentered the room, bouncing of her and then running past her as she gave them a forlorn look. And then gazed across the room at the pile of broken China with a lone flower left sticking upright from it.
She turned her gaze to me, and I shrugged.
I could do nothing.