Tops, or rather, topS

We have a fat cat, a calico. She was meant to be Boone's cat, after his calico that he'd named Spot (after Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation) died. So he turned Spot's name around and named our new kitten topS. I much prefer Tops.

She wasn't always fat. We wanted to allow her to have kittens because we wanted another calico, and sure enough, her first litter contained one calico, along with four other kittens. And then Jeffrey, a long-haired scaredy cat, got in on top of her nursing her kittens in her box, and had a litter of kittens! We didn't even know Jeff was a female, much less that she was pregnant! (It was her hairiness that misled us.)

Jeff was an awful mother. She was too antsy. If one of the dogs even looked in her direction, she'd disappear. We caught her several times taking the kittens (Topsy's kittens or her own) out of the house and hiding them under the house, and she'd forget to go back and feed them. Tops ended up feeding all 12 kittens. She became very, very skinny and was eating all the time that she wasn't nursing the kittens.

So when the kittens were old enough, we took them all to the vet to get them spayed. The vets reported that Tops has some kind of white meal surrounding her inner organs. They'd never seen anything like that before. They scooped the meal out and sewed her back up. After research, I figured that she had had a tapeworm. The "meal" was the eggs of the tapeworm. After that, Tops became fat.

So now we have her on a diet, eating diet cat food. She doesn't like that so much. She keeps bothering us to get us to feed her more. When I sit at my computer on the counter, she crosses under my face back and forth, making sure I get a noseful of her hair and typing odd things on my laptop. And when I try to push her off, she gets very stubborn, using her weight to pull all sorts of things down with her.

Well, today, I heard a suspicious noise on the other counter. I look and Tops freezes. I keep looking and very slowly, Tops continues, with her front paws, shoving the bag of markers I have sitting there, inch by inch, closer to the edge.

"Tops," I say in my warning tone. She stops and looks ups at me, innocent big eyes. But she stops. After a moment, she turns away from the bag, pretending she wasn't doing anything.