One weekend my young cousins were over at our house and they brought along toys with which to play. One of the toys was a water filled squishy plastic tube- the type of toy created solely to slip out of your grip. Somehow the toy burst and spilled its contents of glitter and small oddities including four tiny, bouncy eyeballs. The kids took turns playing with the eyeballs, putting them on top of their closed eyelids and taking pictures.
Then the kids got bored, I suppose, left the balls on the ground, and moved onto other, more intact toys.
The cat somehow discovered these tiny eyeballs and took a liking to them. We discovered to our own amusement the cat would lay low, ears perched and eyes wide when a ball rolled or bounced across the room, and run after it with intent to pounce. As it turns out, the cat realized she could put the eyeballs in motions and then make them stop. We watched in amazement the methods the cat devised to play with her toy:
Method #1- The cat picks the eyeball up in her mouth, walks to the top of the basement stairs, opens her mouth, and lets the ball fall down the stairs. At this point she shoots down the stairs after the ball, retrieves it, and repeats the process.
Method #2- She picks up the eyeball in her mouth, jumps onto one of the kitchen chairs, opens her mouth and lets the ball fall through an opening in the back of the chair. As the eyeball bounces away from her, she leaps off the side of the chair in hot pursuit. And she does this over and over.
My little sister Megan, who lives in the room below the kitchen, says she wakes up every morning to this repeated series of sounds: the ball bouncing as it drops off a chair (loud and long in frequency at first but quieter and with shorter time between bounces as the ball loses momentum) and the subsequent sound of the cat running after the ball like a bat out of hell.
Over time, the four balls have whittled themselves down to one, their tendency being to lodge themselves in places long-lost-small-things are attracted to like the heat vent and the space under the stove or couch. So now the cat only has one dirty, brown eyeball with the veins, iris, and pupil peeling away. Once in a while, after the cat is exhausted from playing with the eyeball, you can find her laying on the floor, her eyes closing in a satisfied way, with the dirty eyeball resting on the floor in front of her.
This cat is not the only animal we've had to become attached to an inanimate object. We once had a dog with an underbite named Daisy (she looked exactly like the Luck Dragon from The Neverending Story) who became partial to a baby pacifier she found. She would hold this binkie in her mouth just like she was sucking on it.
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