Gracie And The Dawning of Consciousness
"Oh my god," Eli 17.5 said. "Did you see that?""I don't believe it," Gloria said.
"Wait, what just happened?" I asked.
"Gracie just dipped her paw into the glass to get the milk at the bottom, and she's licking it off her paw," Eli said.
"That is not possible," I said. "Gracie is a moron."
"Look!" he said. "She's doing it again!" I looked, and it was indeed happening. This would have been an appropriate time to use the Groucho Marx line 'Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?', but I missed the chance.
Later that night, we were watching a show and I saw Gracie on the kitchen table, fiddling with a gift. Ribbon was involved. "Oh, no," I said, and ran over to the table, just in time to carefully pull a length of ribbon out of her mouth (she was trying to eat it, and had mostly succeeded).
"What did she do?" Gloria asked.
"She untied the bow on the gift and started eating the ribbon," I said. "She must have had at least a foot down her throat before I started pulling it out."
"Unbelievable," Gloria said.
"Face it, you guys," I said. "Gracie is sentient."
Eli started laughing. "No way. That can't happen."
"I know," I said, "but those are two separate incidents where she was smarter than she's ever been in her whole life."
"Still not possible," he said.
"This must be a 'Flowers For Algernon' situation, but with cats," I said. "In two more days, she'll be just as stupid as she normally was, and she won't remember the heady thirty minutes when she could think."
And so it came to pass. No longer sentient:
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