Cat licks his fur all day long on sunny days, rainy days, cloudy days, pretty much all kinds of days, three hundred and sixty-five days per year. A person can go a day without washing her face, but no cat could do without their tongue bath. A cat’s tongue serves as both towel and hairbrush, and keeps its owner spic and span, clean and comfortable, making its body more alert. Cats strike all kinds of poses as they lick themselves, showing great flexibility, executing complicated movements to get at those hard-to-reach spots, making sure to get every inch from the gaps between their toes to their bumholes, paying great attention to each cranny. As time goes on, cats accumulate large amounts of fur in their bellies, which they’re unable to digest. As a result, they develop hairballs in their guts, which get vomited up from time to time.

A human who chooses to live with a cat will inhale large quantities of fur every day. That builds up inside us too and, over time, forms even larger hairballs.

As more and more cat fur comes together, it gets braided into rope, which then is coiled up, just like the balls of wool my mother used to knit sweaters from back in the day. Everything gets clumped together into a little cat. We unintentionally lick up the fur floating through the air, just like licking a cat. Which is how I came to have a cat named Woolly in my stomach, because I’d ingested the equivalent of a ball of wool.

The little cat hopped around inside me, but she was still unsteady on her feet and fell over, giving me a bit of a tummy ache. It was a charming pain though, and I was willing to put up with it.

I went about my life as usual: eating, sleeping, writing, drawing. Now and then I’d remember the wool in my stomach and smile gleefully to myself. No one knew this secret. No one could tell I had a clump of wool inside me, growing larger by the day, as if I had an actual baby, a child of my own.

No matter where I went, the ball of wool went with me. Now I think about it, that was quite unusual. I distinctly remember hearing the wool rolling this way and that inside me, grr grr grr. People probably thought it was my stomach rumbling. None of them could have guessed my secret.

Until the day came when I needed to cough up my hairball.

I was on the couch watching TV with Cat sitting motionless by my side, staring straight at me. He might have sensed what was going on before I did. Having thrown up countless hairballs, a cat is always going to be more experienced than a human who’s never done it. And he must have known this moment was coming.

Just as the program came to an end and the credits started rolling, I abruptly barfed up onto the floorboards. It didn’t hurt at all but hit me so suddenly I wasn’t prepared. And there before me was a round blob of fur, still dripping with stomach juices, sticky to the touch. Cat reached out a paw to tentatively prod it but shrank back before he could make contact. None of us had seen such a large hairball before—it was the size of a two-month-old kitten. An alarmed look came into Cat’s eyes, and the same into mine too.

The hairball stirred. A short while later, four legs protruded from the clump, a pair of eyes blinked open, and there was a tender little kitten!