I would like it noted, somewhere official, that I have never once doubted her hand. Her hand has fed me, held me, scratched the specific place under my chin that I cannot reach myself, and carried me bodily away from danger on at least two occasions I can recall with real clarity. Her hand is, as far as reliability goes, roughly on par with gravity. You do not expect gravity to turn on you.
And yet.
It happened this morning in the hallway, nothing leading up to it, no warning smell or sound, just her walking toward me in her wool socks the way she does, and me doing what I always do, which is arching up into the path of her descending hand like it’s the most natural transaction in the world, because it is. Her palm came down toward my head and there was a small sharp bite right on the bridge of my nose, a real one, a tooth of some kind, and I yelped and took off sideways into the bathroom so fast I clipped the doorframe with my shoulder.
She said “oh — sorry, buddy, static,” in a voice that suggested this was a known and boring phenomenon, which did nothing for me, because I had just been bitten by my own human’s hand with no animal involved anywhere in the room.
I spent a long time under the sink considering the facts. The facts were: her hand looked the same. It smelled the same, when I worked up the nerve to sniff it from a safe distance later — soap, and the oatmeal she’d had, and something papery from the folder she carries to the kitchen table some mornings. Nothing about it announced itself as armed. This seemed, if anything, worse. A hand that looks dangerous and is dangerous, fine, I can plan around that. A hand that looks exactly like the hand that has fed me every single day of my life and then bites you on the nose without explanation is a different category of problem entirely.
I avoided her for most of the morning. Not dramatically — I didn’t hide, I’m not an animal who hides from circumstances, I simply conducted my business at a slightly greater radius than usual, watching her hands the way you watch a pot that might or might not be hot. She reached for me twice to pet me while she had her coffee and both times I leaned back out of range at the last second, which made her laugh, which I did not love, because from where I sat this was not funny, this was a serious ongoing investigation into whether the primary comfort-delivery system in this house had developed a fault.
The worst part was that nothing else was different. She walked across the same rug in the same socks she always wears, and the air in the house smelled the way it’s been smelling lately, dry in a way that makes my fur stand up a little on its own when I groom, little crackling threads of it lifting off my back like something underneath wants out. I’d noticed that already this week and hadn’t thought much of it. Now I wondered if the dryness itself was involved somehow — whether the air had gotten into her hand, or into the rug, or into me, and was waiting around for an excuse.
By the middle of the day I had worked my way back to the arm of the couch nearest her, not touching, just present, watching her hand where it rested on her book. It did nothing. It just sat there being a hand, fingers curled slightly the way they do when she’s concentrating. I inched closer. Still nothing. I put one paw, very lightly, against the back of it, ready to retract at the first sign of trouble.
Nothing happened. It was warm the ordinary way it’s always warm.
I stayed there a while testing this, pressing a little harder, and when nothing bit me I allowed myself to settle my chin on her wrist, keeping one ear angled toward it the way I keep an ear toward the door when someone’s at it, just in case it changed its mind. She shifted her hand slightly to scratch behind my ear without ever quite dislodging my chin, and that went fine too, and I started to think maybe the whole incident had been a singular event, a fluke, something that had happened to her hand rather than something her hand had decided to do to me.
Then in the evening, reaching across me for the lamp switch, she grazed my ear with her knuckle and there it was again — smaller this time, barely anything, more a flinch of a bite than a real one, but enough that I was three feet away before I’d finished thinking about it. She apologized again, said the word “static” again like it was supposed to mean something to me, like I was simply meant to accept that this was a known, agreed-upon hazard of the season that everyone had quietly decided not to warn me about.
I slept that night in the usual place against her side, because whatever is wrong with the air or the rug or her hand, it apparently has nothing to say about the rest of her, and by the time the lamp went off I’d mostly stopped flinching every time she shifted under the blanket. Mostly. I kept one eye on her hand where it rested near my shoulder for a good while after she’d fallen asleep, just to make sure it had finished whatever it was doing for the day.