The Staring Game

Day 8: One eye meets my one eye at the opposite end of the Tunnel. His pupil dilates into a gaping, dark hole which threatens to suck my soul straight through the pipe. The contact is held for a moment which feels like it might stretch out into infinity until his hindquarters begin to twitch. I blink, and in so doing, seal my fate because no sooner than my eye opens the barest crack, I am bowled over by a furry comet, which then streaks past me to make a slingshot loop around my backside, returning in its oval orbit to the original position at the far side of the wormhole. And the Staring Game begins another round.

The Tunnel has put a new dimension on this all-time favourite feline activity. Tippy and Skunk both played it with me as I lurked behind a table leg or around the corner of a doorway. The rules stipulate that only one eye of each player can be employed, and that the cat always wins, receiving the reward of a backwards-tumbling mama and/or a mock shriek of alarm. Sometimes I grab him as he rounds me. "Didja get me? Didja get me good?" Occasionally...rarely, that is to say...Merry gets a little carried away and forgets that it's "play," not "prey," and at that point, I call it quits until he remembers his manners.