I’m sitting at the computer, typing away, when out of nowhere a grape hits me in the elbow.
My daughter, Mel, is lying on the couch just a few feet away, sniggering, her back to me as she watches a dvd. My cat, Ralph, has just come around the corner of my desk and is looking up at me in my dismay.
“Did you just throw a grape at me?” I ask, indignant, reaching down to retrieve the offending fruit.
“What?” my daughter laughs.
I playfully toss the grape back at her and it bounces off her head.
“Hey!”
“You threw it at me,” I chuckle, “now pick it up before it gets stepped on.”
“I didn’t throw it at you,” she cries, reaching down to fetch it from the carpet.
“Uh-huh, sure,” I reply. “That’s why you were laughing.”
She gestures in explanation at the TV screen displaying the ever-nutty antics of the Monty Python troupe.
“A grape just bounced off my arm, Mel. There are two of us here. Three if you count Ralph. By the process of elimination it had to be you who threw the grape.”
“It wasn’t me,” she insists.
“Are you suggesting, then,” I ask in my best air of fatherly disbelief, “that Ralph threw the grape at me?” I gesture at the cat, who is watching the exchange from his haunches, phlegmatic.
My daughter laughs in protest. “I swear I didn’t throw a grape at you!”
“He’s a cat, Mel. A cat. Cats don’t throw things at people.” I look down at the cat who returns my stare. “Did you throw the grape at me, Ralph?” He doesn’t even blink.
Mel is laughing but shaking her head.
I lean down into the face of my cat.
“Ralph. Did you throw the grape at me? Because, if you did, it was very disturbing. I was sitting here, minding my own business, engrossed in my work, when a grape came hurtling out of nowhere to bounce juicily off my elbow and … don’t walk away from me when I am talking to you, mister!” The tip of his tail twitches once in disdain and he is gone.
Mel is curled up with laughter on the couch. I eye her in mock disgust.
“The cat threw the grape at me. Uh-huh. Suuure he did. Overhand, I suppose.”
“I swear …” she replies, her eyes teary with laughter.
Two weeks later we come into the kitchen and what do we see but Ralph on the counter. He is fishing grapes out of the bowl of fruit I keep there. He digs at them until they break free from the stem and then, with his claws embedded in their flesh, he curls his paw and brings the grape to his mouth for a bite and a lick or two before flinging it away. Then he either chases it to the floor for more play or goes back to the bowl for a fresh victim.
The thing is, when he flings the grape, it can really fly. Sometimes they just plap at his feet to wobble away, helpless and rotund, but other times they gain significant air, arcing halfway across the room.
“I TOLD you I didn’t throw the grape,” Mel says.
Son of a bitch.
Are you sure it wasn’t a guh-guh-guh-GHOST?
Ghosts don’t throw grapes. They throw cherries.
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