Dear Murphy the Customer Service Cat

The day I saw you in the horse barn, just a little ball of orange fur and giant eyes, I knew we'd be fast friends.  You were swinging your little body around on a pitchfork like it was a jungle gym, then running full tilt into your brother's side like a bull.  Maybe that should have been a warning sign, but I just thought it was adorable.  When you came home, you'd fall asleep at random, like everything was just too wonderful and magical for your little body to handle.  While you were awake, you'd sit on my lap and suck on my finger.  Had I known you were just acquainting yourself with a taste for human flesh, I'd have stopped you.  Again, it just seemed adorable.

Look at you, laying there with your little paw out.  Like a little Rory Calhoun.

As you grew, you and the old cat, Sneakers, would get into epic play fights.  Returning home, there would be large swatches of your orange fur and much more of his white fur all over the carpet, seemingly ripped out and scattered to the wind.  Even when he developed a large tumor on his head, and lost the ability to remember where he was, or if he'd eaten, or how to stop meowing at top volume, you tried to cheer him up with a rousing donnybrook.  I specifically remember an instance where you had been chasing him around the upstairs hall, and he had simply stopped running at the top of the stairs, most likely forgetting he was being pursued.  You proceeded to jump on his back and ride him down the stairs like a cancer riddled toboggan because, like Jonathan Gerald Rambo, you do what it takes to survive.

Things with you were mostly hijinks and snuggles until a year or so ago.  You weren't eating right, and the vet aid that many of your teeth needed to be pulled.  Somehow, this became addition by subtraction because even though you only had one fang left, hanging from your top jaw, it became stronger and more powerful than we could ever imagine.  All weakness had left with the diseased teeth, and you stopped being Murphy.  You simply became Toof. 

Here you are, recovering in the vet.  You are as large as the vet tech, and from the look of your eyes, you are tripping massive balls.

When something displeases you, you casually raise your upper lip, letting the sun glint off the mighty tooth.  There are no arguments, because everyone knows that if they give you sass, they get back the Toof.  You have never liked to be picked up, but now, there were consequences should I try.  You test me on this every day.  When I wake up, I hear you scuttle across the floor, cackling to yourself.  By the time I get to living room, you are in my chair. 

As I approach you, you will not acknowledge my presence.  You will, however, start canting to the side until you go completely boneless and start mewling like a deranged feral toddler.  Any attempt to pick up your formless blob of a body intensifies the mewling into a blathering word salad of unpronunciated hate, which softens back to the mewling the further away I move from you. 

The Toof has also brought out a killer instinct in you.  Small bugs were no longer a worthy prey for someone so mighty.   You must hunt the most dangerous game of all.  You hide behind furniture and under beds, and strike quickly, always going for the Achilles.  I curse the day I let you see Pet Semetary for that very reason. 

It stands to reason then that you couldn't be happy being fed dry cat food.  Toof doesn't want to be fed, Toof wants to hunt, right?  Wrong.  In every other instance, you refuse to eat anything not put directly into your food bowl, and then only if your food bowl is place directly on your food tray.  You will follow me incessantly screeching like a pterodactyl until I get your bowl, then you will sit patiently, intently, almost perversely calm, staring directly down at your food tray, willing your food to return to that spot. Once consumed, you return to my chair for a hearty ten hour nap. 

Why nap, you ask?  So you can be up at 3AM, screeching in the hallway as you thrash your body into the walls, a little fuzzy ball speared by the Toof.  3AM is rumpus time.  There is no sleep during rumpus time.  There is only Toof.