*Bows head in huge apology.* Right, for those of you who I told I'd have
this story out a few weeks ago, well, here it is, just.not a few weeks ago.
^.^;; Hey, I'm a college student. I have good excuses, except when you
ask me for them.
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I, Luna
By Phoenix Cubed
Chapter 4
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Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life. --Bertolt Brecht
Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin. -- Denise McCluggage
There is little better time to be alive than in the never-ending afternoon of kittenhood. Young, content, and filled with immortality of youth, I was neither able nor caring enough to realize that every sun sets and every day dies, giving way to the inevitable night. Very long ago, a wise creature coined the adage, "all good things must come to an end," and though reluctant, I am inclined to agree.
In the early stages of life, however, my opinion of that was radically different. Time flowed in a steady, continuous line that stretched on forever, and even now I find it impossible to distinguish one moment from the next or one thought from another, save for a few blindingly clear flashbulb memories that are forever burned into my consciousness.
I remember clearly my first taste of fish. The mouth watering, nose tingling aroma that sets the taste buds yowling for more. Lightly smoked and fresh from port market, it was dropped on the awning one sunny morning by the gargantuan tom as a peace offering for a scuffle that had occurred between he and mother the night before. Knowing that we had never tasted fish, mother gave my brother and I each a small piece. My eyes, enslaved by my nose, watched in amazement at how the meat so easily sliced from the soft bone. And could tear them away only to shut them in bliss as the flesh slid like a dream down my throat. I purred loudly in the ecstasy of it all and proceeded to wash every bit of the flavor from my paws and muzzle, determined to savor every morsel of my first taste of heaven.
The tom's tail curled in amusement, and the lips of his muzzle turned upwards in a gesture of humor, "I think she likes it."
Mother paused from her delicate stripping of flesh from the inedible cartilage to look at me, "a cat at port always has fish at paw, but hardly a wit to catch it.
I felt my ears droop under the lecture, "yes, mother."
The days went on, but were as always, no more noticeable than the last. All there was to mark any change was my decreasing dependence on the rich warmth of mother's milk and the growing appreciation I felt for feel of solid food digesting in my stomach. Not that I was hunting all that much. Mother was as good for a bite to eat as she was for a soothing bath or warm nuzzle of comfort. My attempts were half-hearted at best and infrequent at most, for I found myself continuously lacking the necessary mindset for a successful hunt. Mother's willingness to supply a meal kept dull the edge needed to sharpen my skills, and it is largely because of this that I found myself answering to the call of the unknown, rather than that of the hunt.
I loved to explore the long alleyway of my home. Spacious, airy, with an easy on the paws feel to the ground, I would comb it up and down everyday, discovering something new with each pass. The humans, living in near ignorance of us, came nearly everyday to add something to my playground, and every now and then, more people would come along and take away the old and explored so that the humans living on the other side of the fence could redesign my alleyway sandbox.
It was a perfect world, and yet it was one that I was not content with. Somewhere between breakfast and lunch I realized that the world I had come to think of as all encompassing was actually little less than a closet, stuffy and small. In a blink of an eye, my endless fields of new and different transformed into a single, unchanging catalogue that was as eye catching as a half chewed mouse ear, but without the rest of the mouse to go with it.
And suddenly, from that day on I could recall every single excruciating detail of my life's activities; there was no challenge to remember what exactly I had done at what exact moment in time, for it all boiled down to one single, painful activity: absolutely nothing.
It was hard doing nothing. Going from a vigorous, active kittenhood to a lethargic one was a task that required diligence. Every morning after breakfast I would jump atop the awning and stretch out on my stomach with my feet and tail trailing behind me, lay my head down against the cool metal, and practice the art of statue imitation. Often there'd come the urge to race from one side of the alley to the other, just to see how fast I could go; or I would spy a bird twittering not far from me, begging to be pounced upon. Sometimes a fresh scent would drift past my nose, I would almost want to sit up and identify it. But I soon realized that if I simply stayed put, whatever it was could still be identified, because few things truly new ever found their way into my territory; and whatever urge I had to be active would pass with the realization that I had already done such an event, many, many times before.
Outside of my ever-diminishing urges, there was another obstacle in the path of pursuing my new habit. Or rather, two obstacles. Just as it was my habit to lie down flat and immobile every morning, it became my family's new occupation to come see me not soon after I had settled and see if they could convince me to do otherwise.
My tabby striped brother would always come first. Not bothering to turn my head, I could see from the corner of my eye as his two ears raised over the awning ledge, twitching like withered orange peels in the breeze. Soon enough his curious green eyes would peek over at me, shining with delight at some new hair brained scheme he'd come up with to break me of my funk. When the time came that I could see his nose, I knew it to be only a matter of seconds before I'd have the opportunity to shoot down whatever idea he'd managed to cook up for that day. Despite the invariability of our little routine, I would give him credit for his incredible persistence and occasional ingenuity. His schemes became more clever with each passing day, and even I in my apathy could see the developing intelligence seep into his manner of being and narrow his eyes from bright eyed innocence into an expression of worldly observation.
"Hey Sis," he called to me one morning, bounding upon the awning and rushing up to sniff me in greeting. "The tom caught a mouse last night, he says he'll give us half if we meet him at the end of the alley!"
"Half a mouse from Mr. Tiger usually means a tail and part of a foot." I said shortly, not liking the feeling of my head compensating for my jaw's inability to move against the hardness of the metal awning. "Why don't you go?"
"Because he won't split it unless the two of us'r there to ask!"
"So you don't even know if he'd really give us half, do you?"
"Well," my brother began to lick the tip of his tail very rapidly, "no, not for sure."
"Then why did you even bother to come up here?"
It surprised me when my normally imperturbable sibling suddenly put his ears back and hissed at me. "Because you're being stupid, that's why. What kind of cat just lays on her stomach all day, lazy as a hot dog in the shade on a summer day? Its disgraceful."
His words moved me enough that I gathered the energy to roll my head to one side and take notice of his angry posture. "What do you know about cat behavior? You're just a kitten."
"A lot more than you, that's for sure. And I'm not a kitten anymore." He began to relax and lick down his ruffled fur, "but if you ever bothered to do anything but sun yourself, you wouldn't be one either; and you'd know that there's more to the world than just a warm spot in the sun."
"No there's not," I replied, "I saw the world while you were still too afraid to leave the box. There's nothing in it that I can't see from up here."
"I'll bet you can't see water that never moves, or dry streams that shift pawfuls at a time of the roaring beasts that humans use to get around in."
I rolled my eyes upward to give him a blank stare, "what are you talking about?"
"Or houses that stretch so far to the sky that you can't see or climb to their tops; paths where more humans than is possible to count walk on all at one time. I'll bet you've never seen the docks where the fish comes from," his orange striped head inched closer to me and his green eyes burrowed into mine, "and I'll bet you haven't noticed mama dying."
That made me sit up.
"You woulda noticed, too, if you hadn't spent the last month lounging up here," he bit off. "Like I said, Sis. I'm four months old now. Tige says that's when most kittens are ready to be adults, but mama's been too tired most the time to teach us everything we need to know. That's why she lets you sit on the roof all day. But its gotta stop, Sis." He pulled his head back and sat up tall, "you need to learn from mama as much as you can as fast as you can. It won't be a far off day when we wake up and she won't. Because when she leaves, so do I, and there'll be one around to feed you but your own dull claws."
I eyed my brother carefully, "you're just trying to scare me."
He shook himself vigorously and stood up. "You think so?"
"You'd just leave your littermate?"
He twitched his left crop of whiskers, signifying a cat version of shoulder shrugging. It was in that moment I noticed just how much he was beginning to look like the burly tom that mother permitted to roam her territory.
"Its what cats do, Sis. Kittenhood was fun, but I've got a name to make for myself." And with that, he walked to end of the awning and dropped himself over the ledge, leaving me to wonder what his last statement could have meant.
The sun reached its zenith right on schedule that day, but I was not around to watch it maintain its reputation for punctuality. It had taken more tries than six cats could have lives, but my brother's words had finally jump-started my motivation. Concern for my mother's well-being overrode my aspirations of complete petrifaction. And since she had not yet bothered to lay upon me her daily reason-for-moving talk, I was obliged to seek her out in order to discover for myself just how true my brother's words rang.
I found her near the mouth of the alley, perched on a rack of boxes that had been laid out by one of the numerous houses on the other side of the tall wooden fence. From experience I knew it would be several more sun-ups before the humans riding the large truck would come to take them away; which was why mother was completely at ease on her station near the end of her territory. Not quite ready to approach mother, I walked at a sedate pace along the top of the thin-boarded fence line, studying her every feature and comparing it to the picture perfect portrait that I stored in my memory banks.
Even though it was only a physical comparison, with my brother's words feeding my fears, I could not help but see what should have been obvious weeks ago. Mother was thinner looking than she had been-- she had definitely lost her filled out appearance-and her coat no longer brought to mind thoughts of fresh white snow or frosted milk. I paused in my walking to watch her wash her face clean of a recently eaten meal. Her moves were slow and deliberate, but proud and meticulous. Perhaps that was why I had not noticed her failing appearance. She kept up such an air of dignity that it shrouded over her any physical faults she might have acquired over her long years of life.
"Do not gawk, dear," she spoke suddenly, never pausing in her bath. "Cats may stare, gaze, or look. But never gawk."
"Yes, mother," I responded, closing the distance between us and hopping down next to her. I waited patiently for her to finish grooming, knowing it impolite to bother an elder while they were occupied.
Some time later she set both paws sedately upon the box and gave me a measured look, "finished your brooding?"
"Mother," I asked her directly, "are you ill?"
Mother's whisker's twitched and she blinked at me. Then her eyes drifted into a lazy position and she pulled her whiskers back to smile at me, "no dear," she replied, "just old."
"Old?" This was a concept that I did not understand. I was, after all, very new to the world and filled with the immortality all youth possess. To me, I could apply the term old only to my surroundings. Well worn, yes, but something that had always been there and most likely always would be. But the way mother said the word made me think that her usage of the term differed in such an amount that I would need clarification.
"Yes," she repeated, "old." With that, she moved to lie on top of me, pinning me underneath her no longer considerably larger weight. It was more out of habit than any inability to push her away that I stayed for the inevitable bath. Her rough tongue rasped against my cheek, sanding away a bit of dried milk that I had missed earlier. "My lives are winding down, dear, and my time in this world is rapidly following. It won't be too long from now that I follow the moonlight home."
"Following" or sometimes, "finding the moonlight," was a feline phrase for dying. It was used often enough in the evening time after meals, in the stories that mother had told us about famous cats or Maus that had used the last of their lives to achieve some great benefit for their brethren. That mother was applying it to describe her forthcoming actions was both a frightening and awe-inspiring thought.
"So you're really going to leave us?" I asked her, "We won't be able to go with?"
"Where I'll be going is somewhere no kitten should want to be," she told me, pawing me onto my back so that she could better reach my chin, "and you'll hardly be alone."
"But Brother said that when you left, so would he."
"He won't be coming with me," she said, "he'll be leaving the alley to find his own territory. Most likely when I go, Tige will want all of the alley and he won't like sharing it with a kitten."
"But that's cruel, mother!" I forced my chin down and looked at her, "doesn't anyone care that you'll be dead, and we won't see you ever again?"
"No," she stated calmly, "and neither should you. Life is a cycle, my dear, and just as the moon comes and goes, so does the time of a cat. It is inevitable that even our nine lives shall one day run out. There is little more that can be done about it but to take note and move on. If you dwell upon such dark thoughts then you yourself will become dark, and not even moonlight will be able to shine off your coat. Now, it is not to say that you cannot be sad, for cats are not so callous as dogs to eat our dead or dying; but we have never seen the reason to weep and despair over death as humans do, burying their dead and causing a ruckus whenever such an event does happen. We cats understand death, more so than any creature, and that is why we neither fear it nor bother to regard it as anything momentous when it happens. Though this is not something I expect you to understand until you're older and have seen it once or twice."
After a few more gentle strokes with her tongue, mother eased off of me and stood, stretching out her long back to relieve what must have been a great deal of soreness in her muscles from staying still so long. "Mind what I have told you," she spoke, "but do not brood upon it, for you can no more prevent death than you can the sun from rising."
My ears swept back slightly in irritation from her words, but I nodded my acquiesce nonetheless. Without turning her head to see my agreement, she twitched her tail in at me to announce one more order, "and do try to attend a lesson, dear. You're getting quite far behind, you know."
I sighed, "Yes, mother."
And with that conversation, my days of ornamentation were over-at least, somewhat. I no longer spent every possible moment of daylight trying to see just how much sun a black coat could absorb, but I didn't fully abandon the hobby, either. While I had finally given into my family's demands of learning the nuances of proper cat behavior, the one truth no feline can deny is that a day is not complete without a good lie in the sun. So now, what was once a worrisome vice became an acceptable family activity. As mother put it, all things pleasant must be used in moderation, lest they lose their charm or become unsavory habits. I had to agree with her. There was little in life more rewarding than stretching out in the sun with family after a stimulating hunt or territorial prowl.
Yet there was a bitter taste to time the three of us spent together. It seemed to me that mother was beginning to waste away before my eyes. And despite the fact that I had agreed not to make fuss about mother's inevitable walk to moonlight, anger for her calm acceptance still gnawed at my insides. I was convinced that there was something I could do to prevent or delay her death. I swore off milk and threw myself into hunting, bringing back whatever I could for her to eat, but it did little good. It did not help that Brother was spending more and more time out of the alley, causing a quiet despair was to well in the pit of my stomach. Everyday he seemed to become more distant, more thoughtful. He could sit quietly on a ledge and do nothing but watch the alley for hour after hour. Once I caught him on the roof of a house on the other side of the tall fence. For one fleeting moment, I thought it was the Tom, but then the clouds had shifted to reveal Brother's bright marmalade pelt rather than the Tom's dark, gray brown fur.
It filled me with both feelings of annoyance and sorrow that though once upon a time we had been closely bonded littermates who had romped and played while mother tried to cuff us into good behavior, we were now as separate and different as day and night. When it had once been that I would come back home with stories of the marvelous wonders that I had witnessed, it was now my only sibling who would disappear for hours, even days. Only to come back with a smile and strange scents on his coat as he dropped a few brief words about some oddity that he had seen but could not begin to describe.
So while mother wasted away before my eyes and Brother began his own version of separation, I found myself struggling to find a suitable equilibrium between the turmoil that my fading family unwittingly dropped upon me. I found it to be difficult and highly unfair, and I often wondered how everyone around me could accept such a seemingly harsh existence with so little fuss. At times I knew not what bothered me more: my mother's impending death, or my brother's apathetic attitude toward her date with moonlight and the consequences that would ensue soon after.
So it came to be one twilit evening that I sat upon the thin wood fence, brooding about the uncertainty of my life and not paying any attention to my surroundings, when my nose began to tickle and itch. I sneezed, hoping to rid myself of whatever pesky dust particle was causing my distress. To my surprise, a small ant flew from the tip of my nose to bounce along the rippled metal. It landed on its back, six legs kicking frantically in the air in a comically distressed manner as it tried to make sense of what had just happened to it. I felt sorry for it and used my paw it tip it upright. I watched it scurry around in mindless panic for a moment as it turned in circles and figure eights, trying to reorient itself. And then as suddenly as its behavior had started it stopped, and the miniscule creature began marching off in fashionable army style to some unknown destination. As it was, I should have left the situation at that and let the ant go on its way unmolested. However, being the age that I was and not ready to give up the all idiocies of kittenhood quite yet, I decided to make up for the time I'd lost while posing as an awning ornament by following the ant to see just where it might go.
My eyes, now much more focused and sharp than they were even a few weeks ago, were able to easily track the insect as it marched up the chain that held the awning secure to the fence, between the cracks, only to disappear down the other side of the fence. Now I was faced with a problem. The fence marked the boundary between the alley where we of the catkind lived and those who dwelled in the human world. Neither crossed into the other's territory, and that was simply the way it was. There was no reason for humans to come into the alley when they could throw their garbage over the side of the fence, and my brother and I had been forbidden to cross into their lawns since birth.
But then, we had been given many things that we could and could not do; and many of those rules couldn't be applied anymore. We were no longer restricted to the alley like we had once been as it was an obsolete limitation that mother could neither enforce nor had any desire to. Perhaps the rule applying to the humans' territories fell into the same category.
Well, I thought, probably not. But at the moment, mother wasn't around, and what she didn't know couldn't send her any faster to moonlight than she was already traveling.
So I flattened my ears, tucked in my tail, and made sure no one was looking, then slithered over the fence wall and into the world of humans.
From there I was easily able to pick up the trail of the ants, and I quickly noticed how one became many. A long line of duteous soldiers marched diligently through the dozen times larger forest of grass. Fascinated, I put one paw over the other as I tracked the line through the yard, my attention focused on nothing but how amazing it must have been to be an ant. They were hundreds of thousands of identical creatures all working together to achieve one single goal that perhaps even they did not know. How unlike cats they seemed to be. Mother had long ago instilled a sense of individuality into my brother and I, as well as pride and independence. It made me wonder how so many of one thing could manage to work in semblance with each other.
Becoming so engrossed in my thoughts and marveling about the petty differences of two species that had little to do with each other, I failed to notice my downfall until my skull collided straight into it. Bomp! What a pain there was to be had! My poor cheek crashed hard against a sharp piece of cold metal and I was so surprised by the sudden attack that I jump high and hard, trying to evade my attacker. With a questionable degree of intelligence, however, I failed to think about where I was leaping to safety and managed to do further damage to my ego by connecting my poll with the underside of a flat plate of more metal. Hissing in distress, I untangled myself and finally looked around for an escape root and then streaked away, crossing the length of the yard in less time than it took a rodent to blink. From there I landed on the awning as if I had never left, sneezed twice, and began bathing my tail like there was no tomorrow. All in all, it was an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that the last few moments of my day were a drunken illusion of some other cats poorly constructed imagination.
After an indiscernible amount of time I decided that if I cleaned my tail anymore, there would be no hair left to lick. What's more, I was almost completely sure that no one had been around to witness my embarrassing misadventure, so it was safe to drop the charade of denial and focus on my near death experience.
Ears flattened and eyes as large as tom cat paws, I pressed myself forward and ever so slowly tilted my head over the top of the fence, ready to identify my aggressor and take appropriate action.
The yard was a realm of deceptive calm. Nothing stirred in the breezeless air, and there were no fresh scents to identify save my own lingering excrement of adrenaline. Encouraged, I raised myself up slightly higher, surveying the still contents of the human domain.
There was little in the way of decoration. A stone tribute to the cleanliness of birds was the centerpiece of a treeless yard. Lined around it was a flattened circle of small rocks; and from that, churned earth where a thick bed of flowers whose bright petal hues danced on the edges of my eyesight's color spectrum. The diameter of the bed lasted for little more than the length of my body, and from there grass at the measure of a short crop swept out in an all encompassing carpet; marred only by the strange human contraptions for which I had no name.
Which was decidedly unfortunate, because one such device, its front tiled at an angle from the rest of its body to give it an almost coy appearance, was my attempted murderer. I pushed myself to my fullest height and set my eyes to the unmoving apocalypse, glaring at it for all I was worth. Several moments passed before I realized that my adversary was neither cringing in fear nor bursting into hellfire from the intensity of my glowering. It merely continued to sit with its front tilted at a jaunty angle in quiet laugher, ignorant of the havoc I was capable of unleashing upon it.
I growled and thrashed my tail in my most intimidating manner, my body raised to its largest size. No pawless hunk of foul smelling metal was going to make a fool out of this feline!
"Fascinating, isn't it?"
"Mrow!" I cried out in surprise, reacting in typical fashion with a jump best described as an eight-foot vertical. Coming down, however, was not so straight a path, and I had to do some desperate clawing to catch and cling to the edge of the sheet metal. Scrabbling at the awning's end with my lower half flailing about in a most undignified manner, I spluttered at the object of my most recent terror, "Mr. Tiger, sir! That was not at all nice!"
The very large tom merely purred as he sat on his considerable haunches, bathing his paw in a self-satisfied manner. "Don't blame me for your inattentiveness, young one. If you let yourself get caught up in only one moment at a time, I'd advice getting used to the dirt; because that's where you're going to end up every time."
I swung my back legs onto the awning and belly crawled away from the edge. "Still wasn't nice of you," I muttered, beginning to smooth down my frazzled coat.
"Yes, well, we all have our short-comings."
"Cats do not have short-comings, Mr. Tiger," I told him, "we have traits that we choose to adopt and those that we ignore. If a creature cannot adapt to this than it is they who lack-never the feline."
"I see you've finally gone back to your mother's lessons," the gray brown tabby mused, creases forming in his massive folds of skin as he pressed his whiskers forward into a lazy expression of amusement. "So tell me, little one, why is it that you are in the human's yard and not learning another belittling quote from the Duchess?"
I stopped grooming to look at the tom, my preoccupation with the vicious metal monster replaced by a more immediate curiosity. "Why do you call mother Duchess?"
The Tiger flicked an ear in a gesture of mixed irritation and amusement. "Did I not already ask a question?"
"I suppose so," I answered, twitching my short, kitten-sized whiskers.
"Don't you think you should answer it before posing one of your own?"
"Mother says that one should always try to answer a question with one of their own," I responded.
"Only if the first is rhetorical, or your question relates to the one posed originally," the tom countered.
"What's rhetorical?"
The tom sighed and dropped his head to his chest, his ears drooping to the sides of his head as he let out a morose yowl of "why me?"
I blinked at him, "am I supposed to answer that?"
"No," he said in a curt manner, then fell to his side on the awning, settling down in a manner that suggested he would be staying a while. This made me a trifle nervous. I'd not had much interaction with the Tiger before outside of him herding me back into safe territory when I was younger or having him listening in on an occasional lecture from mother. At these times he'd proffer comments of his own, which mother never took kindly, and lessons usually ended with the tom in a laughing retreat and mother hot on his tail. One time, after a particularly colorful remark, she had chased him out of the alley and down the street, but then had not come back for three days. When she finally returned she refused to speak of the incident but to say, "As a general rule, my dear, toms are a nuisance. Tige, however, is very much a necessary evil."
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I am still not quite sure what she meant by that. Though don't you dare suggest anything. There are children reading this, and the last thing I will be responsible for are nightmares about what parents do when the kids are away.
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"I'll make you a deal, little one," the tom proposed, "you start telling me about your little foray in the yard, and I'll finish it for you, as well as give you a lesson on names."
Finding no fault in his proposal, I accepted and began relating to him my ill-fated adventure with humanity. "Well," I began for lack of a better opening, "I was lying here thinking about mother when an ant crawled across my nose, and I brushed it off, then it went through the fence and disappeared. I was curious as to where it went, so I decided to follow it and find out."
"Did you now?" Queried the tom.
"Of course," I replied, "I felt it my obligation as a cat to satisfy my curiosity."
"Don't you also have an obligation to obey your mother, who told you to stay out of the humans' territories?"
"You're making this more complicated than it has to be," I sniffed, "the point is that I felt it necessary to know. And, after all, I am nearly an adult, and can make my own decisions about my obligations and duties."
"Ah," said the tom, his face set in an expression of stoic seriousness, "then, as an approaching adult, by all means, continue."
"Well," I said once again, "I followed the ant, which turned out to be many ants, but didn't see that big hard thing sitting in the yard until it attacked me. It caught me by surprise and I had to run away before it caught me again. And that's where you came in, sneaking up on me when I was trying to think of the best way to overtake that thing."
The tom's expression of seriousness melted away into blatant amusement and his vocal chords thrummed with muffled laughter. "The 'thing,' my dear, is a tricycle. A toy for human children. Though I suppose, it could be for kittens, as well."
"A tricycle?" I repeated, trying to wrap my tongue around the strange word.
He dipped his head in confirmation, then stood and motioned for me to join him. Looking out over the yard, we focused our eyes on the contraption as he explained it to me. "Do you see the flat plate that you hit your head on? That's where the child sits, then he uses his feet to push the petals, the twisted bird wings on the sides, to make vertical paws, the wheels, turn."
I slowly worked out what the tom said in my head, twitching my whiskers and flicking my ears as I applied the words. "How do they find this a toy?"
Tiger shrugged, a casual flick of his ear and tail, "who knows how humans find anything. It's a tribute to how backwards they are that they give their young such dangerous toys. I've seen human kittens do injury to themselves while working the contraption. It's heavy and falls on them sometimes and makes them yowl." He stopped and slanted his eyes towards me, "if that had fallen on you, not even I, your mother, and brother combined could have lifted it. You would have been trapped and starved to death, or been caught by the humans. And they don't like uninvited guests in their territories. You remember the stories the Duchess has told you about what humans do to animals they find to be nuisances."
"Mother was exaggerating," I told him, "such things can't be possible. Humans are clumsy and ignorant. Why would they bother with something they have to look down at their feet to see? Honestly, Mr. Tiger, they're just stories. There's no reason for a human to use cat's insides to make music, or our fur to make their own prettier."
"You're right, little one," Tiger nodded, "and that's what makes them so dangerous. I've seen the places where they do horrible things to dogs and mice and our own kind for no obvious reason. They make us drink water that rots our flesh from the inside out, steal our sight, or take away our ability to walk; and there is not a night that passes where a creature does not walk in moonlight." The mighty tom looked me straight on, his face lowered even with mine so that I could better see the marring feature that streaked across his brow and muzzle. "Tell me, do you think I got this scar from a cat fight? It's too precise to be made by claws. Humans did this, and for no other reason than that they could. Yes, they are ignorant and clumsy. But it is their ignorance that leads them to believe they have the right to maim those they can overcome, and their clumsiness that leads to our deaths and dismemberments. Your mother tells you frightening tales for good reason. Listen to her, listen to me, stay away from humans."
My body crouched down and I flattened my ears, listening to the high whining song of the Tiger's warning. His green eyes were sharp and fierce as he pinned me to the spot. I felt that all I could do was but nod my promise to avoid humans at all costs.
Finally, the tom blinked, and his gaze lost its severity. He sat back on his haunches and twitched his ears back and forth a bit as he calmed himself. "Now," he continued, "for the next part of our deal."
It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about, but when I did, I sprang to my feet and waved my tail in an expectant manner. "Yes!" I said, "you call mother the Duchess, and you are Tiger, but brother and I are just kittens, why?"
"This is a simple and complex question," he began. "We cats have no real need for names or titles to identify ourselves, but it is a tradition dating back to the time of the Mau, and so we honor it as best we can. Every feline at birth has a name. However, no kitten knows its name, and very few cats ever discover theirs. Your true identity is one that is locked deep within you, and can only be discovered in an event of great occasion. Usually, you've gone through several lives before you find it. A cat who knows his name is one that deserves a great deal of respect, as it is a rare and difficult thing to achieve."
"How did you find yours, Mr. Tiger?" I asked.
"Fighting for my dignity while confined by humans," he replied, his voice careless and never losing that lazy air, "I snarled and scratched for all that I was worth, until one of them exclaimed how I fought like a tiger. And I knew, in that moment, who I was, and it was not a human's plaything."
It was then that I began to understand exactly what it meant to be a cat. The Tiger's vague way of telling the most important event that had ever happened to him was in the same tone of voice that announced the sun was setting. His voice was not quite bored, but carried in such a way that I was able to see his underlying message. Great things can and do happen to cats, but they are meant to, as they are to any deserving species. What makes a cat is not the event, but how we take it. And that, I realized, is why the dog howls every night that it has discovered the moon in the sky, but the feline carries moonlight in her eyes and hunts in the path of its murky light, even as she walks it to her death.
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Does that sound vague to you? It's meant to. After all, I am a cat.
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"Well," said the tom, shaking me out of my epiphany, "that'll do it for me, young one. Keep in mind what I said, and stay far away from humans. Don't go looking for trouble."
"Yes, sir," I muttered, getting the impression that I receiving yet another lecture.
"Keep your whiskers clean," he told me as he stretched, though I could not help but notice the similarities between the tom's stiffness and my own mother's problems after she had been still for any length of time. "And mind your lessons-however much longer they may last."
And with that, he hopped off the awning and onto the fence. Tail cocked at a jaunty angle, the gargantuan creature ghosted along the line of narrow boards and out of the alley. Whatever positive thoughts the tom has planted in my mind died with his parting words, and I found myself back in the depressing location of square one. Mother's predicament was fresh in my mind, but now there was a new twist.
Burdened with the realization that the tom had given me, I knew that no true cat neither fussed nor gave any mention of their approaching deaths. With the prime examples of proper feline behavior in both the Tiger and mother, and even my own brother showing signs of the aloof acceptance necessary to be a good cat, I could not help but wonder what was wrong with me, and why I could not adopt the universal attitude of my species.
I was a cat. I had the same lithe body type and musical voice for communicating in the darkness of night. I was a cat. I was nearly proficient at hunting without a sound and walking wires less than a whisker's width. Wasn't that what it meant to be a cat? I condoled myself, thinking that I was young, and could be forgiven for still having curiosity about humans, and not yet understanding why no one would care when mother died or brother left. And even though Brother better understood these things, that could only mean that I would in time.
I was a cat. I had to be.
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Right. Well, a few months late.^.^;;
Ah well. Comments? Rants or opinions in dire need of expression? Give me a review, if you've a mind!
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I, Luna
By Phoenix Cubed
Chapter 4
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Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life. --Bertolt Brecht
Change is the only constant. Hanging on is the only sin. -- Denise McCluggage
There is little better time to be alive than in the never-ending afternoon of kittenhood. Young, content, and filled with immortality of youth, I was neither able nor caring enough to realize that every sun sets and every day dies, giving way to the inevitable night. Very long ago, a wise creature coined the adage, "all good things must come to an end," and though reluctant, I am inclined to agree.
In the early stages of life, however, my opinion of that was radically different. Time flowed in a steady, continuous line that stretched on forever, and even now I find it impossible to distinguish one moment from the next or one thought from another, save for a few blindingly clear flashbulb memories that are forever burned into my consciousness.
I remember clearly my first taste of fish. The mouth watering, nose tingling aroma that sets the taste buds yowling for more. Lightly smoked and fresh from port market, it was dropped on the awning one sunny morning by the gargantuan tom as a peace offering for a scuffle that had occurred between he and mother the night before. Knowing that we had never tasted fish, mother gave my brother and I each a small piece. My eyes, enslaved by my nose, watched in amazement at how the meat so easily sliced from the soft bone. And could tear them away only to shut them in bliss as the flesh slid like a dream down my throat. I purred loudly in the ecstasy of it all and proceeded to wash every bit of the flavor from my paws and muzzle, determined to savor every morsel of my first taste of heaven.
The tom's tail curled in amusement, and the lips of his muzzle turned upwards in a gesture of humor, "I think she likes it."
Mother paused from her delicate stripping of flesh from the inedible cartilage to look at me, "a cat at port always has fish at paw, but hardly a wit to catch it.
I felt my ears droop under the lecture, "yes, mother."
The days went on, but were as always, no more noticeable than the last. All there was to mark any change was my decreasing dependence on the rich warmth of mother's milk and the growing appreciation I felt for feel of solid food digesting in my stomach. Not that I was hunting all that much. Mother was as good for a bite to eat as she was for a soothing bath or warm nuzzle of comfort. My attempts were half-hearted at best and infrequent at most, for I found myself continuously lacking the necessary mindset for a successful hunt. Mother's willingness to supply a meal kept dull the edge needed to sharpen my skills, and it is largely because of this that I found myself answering to the call of the unknown, rather than that of the hunt.
I loved to explore the long alleyway of my home. Spacious, airy, with an easy on the paws feel to the ground, I would comb it up and down everyday, discovering something new with each pass. The humans, living in near ignorance of us, came nearly everyday to add something to my playground, and every now and then, more people would come along and take away the old and explored so that the humans living on the other side of the fence could redesign my alleyway sandbox.
It was a perfect world, and yet it was one that I was not content with. Somewhere between breakfast and lunch I realized that the world I had come to think of as all encompassing was actually little less than a closet, stuffy and small. In a blink of an eye, my endless fields of new and different transformed into a single, unchanging catalogue that was as eye catching as a half chewed mouse ear, but without the rest of the mouse to go with it.
And suddenly, from that day on I could recall every single excruciating detail of my life's activities; there was no challenge to remember what exactly I had done at what exact moment in time, for it all boiled down to one single, painful activity: absolutely nothing.
It was hard doing nothing. Going from a vigorous, active kittenhood to a lethargic one was a task that required diligence. Every morning after breakfast I would jump atop the awning and stretch out on my stomach with my feet and tail trailing behind me, lay my head down against the cool metal, and practice the art of statue imitation. Often there'd come the urge to race from one side of the alley to the other, just to see how fast I could go; or I would spy a bird twittering not far from me, begging to be pounced upon. Sometimes a fresh scent would drift past my nose, I would almost want to sit up and identify it. But I soon realized that if I simply stayed put, whatever it was could still be identified, because few things truly new ever found their way into my territory; and whatever urge I had to be active would pass with the realization that I had already done such an event, many, many times before.
Outside of my ever-diminishing urges, there was another obstacle in the path of pursuing my new habit. Or rather, two obstacles. Just as it was my habit to lie down flat and immobile every morning, it became my family's new occupation to come see me not soon after I had settled and see if they could convince me to do otherwise.
My tabby striped brother would always come first. Not bothering to turn my head, I could see from the corner of my eye as his two ears raised over the awning ledge, twitching like withered orange peels in the breeze. Soon enough his curious green eyes would peek over at me, shining with delight at some new hair brained scheme he'd come up with to break me of my funk. When the time came that I could see his nose, I knew it to be only a matter of seconds before I'd have the opportunity to shoot down whatever idea he'd managed to cook up for that day. Despite the invariability of our little routine, I would give him credit for his incredible persistence and occasional ingenuity. His schemes became more clever with each passing day, and even I in my apathy could see the developing intelligence seep into his manner of being and narrow his eyes from bright eyed innocence into an expression of worldly observation.
"Hey Sis," he called to me one morning, bounding upon the awning and rushing up to sniff me in greeting. "The tom caught a mouse last night, he says he'll give us half if we meet him at the end of the alley!"
"Half a mouse from Mr. Tiger usually means a tail and part of a foot." I said shortly, not liking the feeling of my head compensating for my jaw's inability to move against the hardness of the metal awning. "Why don't you go?"
"Because he won't split it unless the two of us'r there to ask!"
"So you don't even know if he'd really give us half, do you?"
"Well," my brother began to lick the tip of his tail very rapidly, "no, not for sure."
"Then why did you even bother to come up here?"
It surprised me when my normally imperturbable sibling suddenly put his ears back and hissed at me. "Because you're being stupid, that's why. What kind of cat just lays on her stomach all day, lazy as a hot dog in the shade on a summer day? Its disgraceful."
His words moved me enough that I gathered the energy to roll my head to one side and take notice of his angry posture. "What do you know about cat behavior? You're just a kitten."
"A lot more than you, that's for sure. And I'm not a kitten anymore." He began to relax and lick down his ruffled fur, "but if you ever bothered to do anything but sun yourself, you wouldn't be one either; and you'd know that there's more to the world than just a warm spot in the sun."
"No there's not," I replied, "I saw the world while you were still too afraid to leave the box. There's nothing in it that I can't see from up here."
"I'll bet you can't see water that never moves, or dry streams that shift pawfuls at a time of the roaring beasts that humans use to get around in."
I rolled my eyes upward to give him a blank stare, "what are you talking about?"
"Or houses that stretch so far to the sky that you can't see or climb to their tops; paths where more humans than is possible to count walk on all at one time. I'll bet you've never seen the docks where the fish comes from," his orange striped head inched closer to me and his green eyes burrowed into mine, "and I'll bet you haven't noticed mama dying."
That made me sit up.
"You woulda noticed, too, if you hadn't spent the last month lounging up here," he bit off. "Like I said, Sis. I'm four months old now. Tige says that's when most kittens are ready to be adults, but mama's been too tired most the time to teach us everything we need to know. That's why she lets you sit on the roof all day. But its gotta stop, Sis." He pulled his head back and sat up tall, "you need to learn from mama as much as you can as fast as you can. It won't be a far off day when we wake up and she won't. Because when she leaves, so do I, and there'll be one around to feed you but your own dull claws."
I eyed my brother carefully, "you're just trying to scare me."
He shook himself vigorously and stood up. "You think so?"
"You'd just leave your littermate?"
He twitched his left crop of whiskers, signifying a cat version of shoulder shrugging. It was in that moment I noticed just how much he was beginning to look like the burly tom that mother permitted to roam her territory.
"Its what cats do, Sis. Kittenhood was fun, but I've got a name to make for myself." And with that, he walked to end of the awning and dropped himself over the ledge, leaving me to wonder what his last statement could have meant.
The sun reached its zenith right on schedule that day, but I was not around to watch it maintain its reputation for punctuality. It had taken more tries than six cats could have lives, but my brother's words had finally jump-started my motivation. Concern for my mother's well-being overrode my aspirations of complete petrifaction. And since she had not yet bothered to lay upon me her daily reason-for-moving talk, I was obliged to seek her out in order to discover for myself just how true my brother's words rang.
I found her near the mouth of the alley, perched on a rack of boxes that had been laid out by one of the numerous houses on the other side of the tall wooden fence. From experience I knew it would be several more sun-ups before the humans riding the large truck would come to take them away; which was why mother was completely at ease on her station near the end of her territory. Not quite ready to approach mother, I walked at a sedate pace along the top of the thin-boarded fence line, studying her every feature and comparing it to the picture perfect portrait that I stored in my memory banks.
Even though it was only a physical comparison, with my brother's words feeding my fears, I could not help but see what should have been obvious weeks ago. Mother was thinner looking than she had been-- she had definitely lost her filled out appearance-and her coat no longer brought to mind thoughts of fresh white snow or frosted milk. I paused in my walking to watch her wash her face clean of a recently eaten meal. Her moves were slow and deliberate, but proud and meticulous. Perhaps that was why I had not noticed her failing appearance. She kept up such an air of dignity that it shrouded over her any physical faults she might have acquired over her long years of life.
"Do not gawk, dear," she spoke suddenly, never pausing in her bath. "Cats may stare, gaze, or look. But never gawk."
"Yes, mother," I responded, closing the distance between us and hopping down next to her. I waited patiently for her to finish grooming, knowing it impolite to bother an elder while they were occupied.
Some time later she set both paws sedately upon the box and gave me a measured look, "finished your brooding?"
"Mother," I asked her directly, "are you ill?"
Mother's whisker's twitched and she blinked at me. Then her eyes drifted into a lazy position and she pulled her whiskers back to smile at me, "no dear," she replied, "just old."
"Old?" This was a concept that I did not understand. I was, after all, very new to the world and filled with the immortality all youth possess. To me, I could apply the term old only to my surroundings. Well worn, yes, but something that had always been there and most likely always would be. But the way mother said the word made me think that her usage of the term differed in such an amount that I would need clarification.
"Yes," she repeated, "old." With that, she moved to lie on top of me, pinning me underneath her no longer considerably larger weight. It was more out of habit than any inability to push her away that I stayed for the inevitable bath. Her rough tongue rasped against my cheek, sanding away a bit of dried milk that I had missed earlier. "My lives are winding down, dear, and my time in this world is rapidly following. It won't be too long from now that I follow the moonlight home."
"Following" or sometimes, "finding the moonlight," was a feline phrase for dying. It was used often enough in the evening time after meals, in the stories that mother had told us about famous cats or Maus that had used the last of their lives to achieve some great benefit for their brethren. That mother was applying it to describe her forthcoming actions was both a frightening and awe-inspiring thought.
"So you're really going to leave us?" I asked her, "We won't be able to go with?"
"Where I'll be going is somewhere no kitten should want to be," she told me, pawing me onto my back so that she could better reach my chin, "and you'll hardly be alone."
"But Brother said that when you left, so would he."
"He won't be coming with me," she said, "he'll be leaving the alley to find his own territory. Most likely when I go, Tige will want all of the alley and he won't like sharing it with a kitten."
"But that's cruel, mother!" I forced my chin down and looked at her, "doesn't anyone care that you'll be dead, and we won't see you ever again?"
"No," she stated calmly, "and neither should you. Life is a cycle, my dear, and just as the moon comes and goes, so does the time of a cat. It is inevitable that even our nine lives shall one day run out. There is little more that can be done about it but to take note and move on. If you dwell upon such dark thoughts then you yourself will become dark, and not even moonlight will be able to shine off your coat. Now, it is not to say that you cannot be sad, for cats are not so callous as dogs to eat our dead or dying; but we have never seen the reason to weep and despair over death as humans do, burying their dead and causing a ruckus whenever such an event does happen. We cats understand death, more so than any creature, and that is why we neither fear it nor bother to regard it as anything momentous when it happens. Though this is not something I expect you to understand until you're older and have seen it once or twice."
After a few more gentle strokes with her tongue, mother eased off of me and stood, stretching out her long back to relieve what must have been a great deal of soreness in her muscles from staying still so long. "Mind what I have told you," she spoke, "but do not brood upon it, for you can no more prevent death than you can the sun from rising."
My ears swept back slightly in irritation from her words, but I nodded my acquiesce nonetheless. Without turning her head to see my agreement, she twitched her tail in at me to announce one more order, "and do try to attend a lesson, dear. You're getting quite far behind, you know."
I sighed, "Yes, mother."
And with that conversation, my days of ornamentation were over-at least, somewhat. I no longer spent every possible moment of daylight trying to see just how much sun a black coat could absorb, but I didn't fully abandon the hobby, either. While I had finally given into my family's demands of learning the nuances of proper cat behavior, the one truth no feline can deny is that a day is not complete without a good lie in the sun. So now, what was once a worrisome vice became an acceptable family activity. As mother put it, all things pleasant must be used in moderation, lest they lose their charm or become unsavory habits. I had to agree with her. There was little in life more rewarding than stretching out in the sun with family after a stimulating hunt or territorial prowl.
Yet there was a bitter taste to time the three of us spent together. It seemed to me that mother was beginning to waste away before my eyes. And despite the fact that I had agreed not to make fuss about mother's inevitable walk to moonlight, anger for her calm acceptance still gnawed at my insides. I was convinced that there was something I could do to prevent or delay her death. I swore off milk and threw myself into hunting, bringing back whatever I could for her to eat, but it did little good. It did not help that Brother was spending more and more time out of the alley, causing a quiet despair was to well in the pit of my stomach. Everyday he seemed to become more distant, more thoughtful. He could sit quietly on a ledge and do nothing but watch the alley for hour after hour. Once I caught him on the roof of a house on the other side of the tall fence. For one fleeting moment, I thought it was the Tom, but then the clouds had shifted to reveal Brother's bright marmalade pelt rather than the Tom's dark, gray brown fur.
It filled me with both feelings of annoyance and sorrow that though once upon a time we had been closely bonded littermates who had romped and played while mother tried to cuff us into good behavior, we were now as separate and different as day and night. When it had once been that I would come back home with stories of the marvelous wonders that I had witnessed, it was now my only sibling who would disappear for hours, even days. Only to come back with a smile and strange scents on his coat as he dropped a few brief words about some oddity that he had seen but could not begin to describe.
So while mother wasted away before my eyes and Brother began his own version of separation, I found myself struggling to find a suitable equilibrium between the turmoil that my fading family unwittingly dropped upon me. I found it to be difficult and highly unfair, and I often wondered how everyone around me could accept such a seemingly harsh existence with so little fuss. At times I knew not what bothered me more: my mother's impending death, or my brother's apathetic attitude toward her date with moonlight and the consequences that would ensue soon after.
So it came to be one twilit evening that I sat upon the thin wood fence, brooding about the uncertainty of my life and not paying any attention to my surroundings, when my nose began to tickle and itch. I sneezed, hoping to rid myself of whatever pesky dust particle was causing my distress. To my surprise, a small ant flew from the tip of my nose to bounce along the rippled metal. It landed on its back, six legs kicking frantically in the air in a comically distressed manner as it tried to make sense of what had just happened to it. I felt sorry for it and used my paw it tip it upright. I watched it scurry around in mindless panic for a moment as it turned in circles and figure eights, trying to reorient itself. And then as suddenly as its behavior had started it stopped, and the miniscule creature began marching off in fashionable army style to some unknown destination. As it was, I should have left the situation at that and let the ant go on its way unmolested. However, being the age that I was and not ready to give up the all idiocies of kittenhood quite yet, I decided to make up for the time I'd lost while posing as an awning ornament by following the ant to see just where it might go.
My eyes, now much more focused and sharp than they were even a few weeks ago, were able to easily track the insect as it marched up the chain that held the awning secure to the fence, between the cracks, only to disappear down the other side of the fence. Now I was faced with a problem. The fence marked the boundary between the alley where we of the catkind lived and those who dwelled in the human world. Neither crossed into the other's territory, and that was simply the way it was. There was no reason for humans to come into the alley when they could throw their garbage over the side of the fence, and my brother and I had been forbidden to cross into their lawns since birth.
But then, we had been given many things that we could and could not do; and many of those rules couldn't be applied anymore. We were no longer restricted to the alley like we had once been as it was an obsolete limitation that mother could neither enforce nor had any desire to. Perhaps the rule applying to the humans' territories fell into the same category.
Well, I thought, probably not. But at the moment, mother wasn't around, and what she didn't know couldn't send her any faster to moonlight than she was already traveling.
So I flattened my ears, tucked in my tail, and made sure no one was looking, then slithered over the fence wall and into the world of humans.
From there I was easily able to pick up the trail of the ants, and I quickly noticed how one became many. A long line of duteous soldiers marched diligently through the dozen times larger forest of grass. Fascinated, I put one paw over the other as I tracked the line through the yard, my attention focused on nothing but how amazing it must have been to be an ant. They were hundreds of thousands of identical creatures all working together to achieve one single goal that perhaps even they did not know. How unlike cats they seemed to be. Mother had long ago instilled a sense of individuality into my brother and I, as well as pride and independence. It made me wonder how so many of one thing could manage to work in semblance with each other.
Becoming so engrossed in my thoughts and marveling about the petty differences of two species that had little to do with each other, I failed to notice my downfall until my skull collided straight into it. Bomp! What a pain there was to be had! My poor cheek crashed hard against a sharp piece of cold metal and I was so surprised by the sudden attack that I jump high and hard, trying to evade my attacker. With a questionable degree of intelligence, however, I failed to think about where I was leaping to safety and managed to do further damage to my ego by connecting my poll with the underside of a flat plate of more metal. Hissing in distress, I untangled myself and finally looked around for an escape root and then streaked away, crossing the length of the yard in less time than it took a rodent to blink. From there I landed on the awning as if I had never left, sneezed twice, and began bathing my tail like there was no tomorrow. All in all, it was an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that the last few moments of my day were a drunken illusion of some other cats poorly constructed imagination.
After an indiscernible amount of time I decided that if I cleaned my tail anymore, there would be no hair left to lick. What's more, I was almost completely sure that no one had been around to witness my embarrassing misadventure, so it was safe to drop the charade of denial and focus on my near death experience.
Ears flattened and eyes as large as tom cat paws, I pressed myself forward and ever so slowly tilted my head over the top of the fence, ready to identify my aggressor and take appropriate action.
The yard was a realm of deceptive calm. Nothing stirred in the breezeless air, and there were no fresh scents to identify save my own lingering excrement of adrenaline. Encouraged, I raised myself up slightly higher, surveying the still contents of the human domain.
There was little in the way of decoration. A stone tribute to the cleanliness of birds was the centerpiece of a treeless yard. Lined around it was a flattened circle of small rocks; and from that, churned earth where a thick bed of flowers whose bright petal hues danced on the edges of my eyesight's color spectrum. The diameter of the bed lasted for little more than the length of my body, and from there grass at the measure of a short crop swept out in an all encompassing carpet; marred only by the strange human contraptions for which I had no name.
Which was decidedly unfortunate, because one such device, its front tiled at an angle from the rest of its body to give it an almost coy appearance, was my attempted murderer. I pushed myself to my fullest height and set my eyes to the unmoving apocalypse, glaring at it for all I was worth. Several moments passed before I realized that my adversary was neither cringing in fear nor bursting into hellfire from the intensity of my glowering. It merely continued to sit with its front tilted at a jaunty angle in quiet laugher, ignorant of the havoc I was capable of unleashing upon it.
I growled and thrashed my tail in my most intimidating manner, my body raised to its largest size. No pawless hunk of foul smelling metal was going to make a fool out of this feline!
"Fascinating, isn't it?"
"Mrow!" I cried out in surprise, reacting in typical fashion with a jump best described as an eight-foot vertical. Coming down, however, was not so straight a path, and I had to do some desperate clawing to catch and cling to the edge of the sheet metal. Scrabbling at the awning's end with my lower half flailing about in a most undignified manner, I spluttered at the object of my most recent terror, "Mr. Tiger, sir! That was not at all nice!"
The very large tom merely purred as he sat on his considerable haunches, bathing his paw in a self-satisfied manner. "Don't blame me for your inattentiveness, young one. If you let yourself get caught up in only one moment at a time, I'd advice getting used to the dirt; because that's where you're going to end up every time."
I swung my back legs onto the awning and belly crawled away from the edge. "Still wasn't nice of you," I muttered, beginning to smooth down my frazzled coat.
"Yes, well, we all have our short-comings."
"Cats do not have short-comings, Mr. Tiger," I told him, "we have traits that we choose to adopt and those that we ignore. If a creature cannot adapt to this than it is they who lack-never the feline."
"I see you've finally gone back to your mother's lessons," the gray brown tabby mused, creases forming in his massive folds of skin as he pressed his whiskers forward into a lazy expression of amusement. "So tell me, little one, why is it that you are in the human's yard and not learning another belittling quote from the Duchess?"
I stopped grooming to look at the tom, my preoccupation with the vicious metal monster replaced by a more immediate curiosity. "Why do you call mother Duchess?"
The Tiger flicked an ear in a gesture of mixed irritation and amusement. "Did I not already ask a question?"
"I suppose so," I answered, twitching my short, kitten-sized whiskers.
"Don't you think you should answer it before posing one of your own?"
"Mother says that one should always try to answer a question with one of their own," I responded.
"Only if the first is rhetorical, or your question relates to the one posed originally," the tom countered.
"What's rhetorical?"
The tom sighed and dropped his head to his chest, his ears drooping to the sides of his head as he let out a morose yowl of "why me?"
I blinked at him, "am I supposed to answer that?"
"No," he said in a curt manner, then fell to his side on the awning, settling down in a manner that suggested he would be staying a while. This made me a trifle nervous. I'd not had much interaction with the Tiger before outside of him herding me back into safe territory when I was younger or having him listening in on an occasional lecture from mother. At these times he'd proffer comments of his own, which mother never took kindly, and lessons usually ended with the tom in a laughing retreat and mother hot on his tail. One time, after a particularly colorful remark, she had chased him out of the alley and down the street, but then had not come back for three days. When she finally returned she refused to speak of the incident but to say, "As a general rule, my dear, toms are a nuisance. Tige, however, is very much a necessary evil."
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I am still not quite sure what she meant by that. Though don't you dare suggest anything. There are children reading this, and the last thing I will be responsible for are nightmares about what parents do when the kids are away.
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"I'll make you a deal, little one," the tom proposed, "you start telling me about your little foray in the yard, and I'll finish it for you, as well as give you a lesson on names."
Finding no fault in his proposal, I accepted and began relating to him my ill-fated adventure with humanity. "Well," I began for lack of a better opening, "I was lying here thinking about mother when an ant crawled across my nose, and I brushed it off, then it went through the fence and disappeared. I was curious as to where it went, so I decided to follow it and find out."
"Did you now?" Queried the tom.
"Of course," I replied, "I felt it my obligation as a cat to satisfy my curiosity."
"Don't you also have an obligation to obey your mother, who told you to stay out of the humans' territories?"
"You're making this more complicated than it has to be," I sniffed, "the point is that I felt it necessary to know. And, after all, I am nearly an adult, and can make my own decisions about my obligations and duties."
"Ah," said the tom, his face set in an expression of stoic seriousness, "then, as an approaching adult, by all means, continue."
"Well," I said once again, "I followed the ant, which turned out to be many ants, but didn't see that big hard thing sitting in the yard until it attacked me. It caught me by surprise and I had to run away before it caught me again. And that's where you came in, sneaking up on me when I was trying to think of the best way to overtake that thing."
The tom's expression of seriousness melted away into blatant amusement and his vocal chords thrummed with muffled laughter. "The 'thing,' my dear, is a tricycle. A toy for human children. Though I suppose, it could be for kittens, as well."
"A tricycle?" I repeated, trying to wrap my tongue around the strange word.
He dipped his head in confirmation, then stood and motioned for me to join him. Looking out over the yard, we focused our eyes on the contraption as he explained it to me. "Do you see the flat plate that you hit your head on? That's where the child sits, then he uses his feet to push the petals, the twisted bird wings on the sides, to make vertical paws, the wheels, turn."
I slowly worked out what the tom said in my head, twitching my whiskers and flicking my ears as I applied the words. "How do they find this a toy?"
Tiger shrugged, a casual flick of his ear and tail, "who knows how humans find anything. It's a tribute to how backwards they are that they give their young such dangerous toys. I've seen human kittens do injury to themselves while working the contraption. It's heavy and falls on them sometimes and makes them yowl." He stopped and slanted his eyes towards me, "if that had fallen on you, not even I, your mother, and brother combined could have lifted it. You would have been trapped and starved to death, or been caught by the humans. And they don't like uninvited guests in their territories. You remember the stories the Duchess has told you about what humans do to animals they find to be nuisances."
"Mother was exaggerating," I told him, "such things can't be possible. Humans are clumsy and ignorant. Why would they bother with something they have to look down at their feet to see? Honestly, Mr. Tiger, they're just stories. There's no reason for a human to use cat's insides to make music, or our fur to make their own prettier."
"You're right, little one," Tiger nodded, "and that's what makes them so dangerous. I've seen the places where they do horrible things to dogs and mice and our own kind for no obvious reason. They make us drink water that rots our flesh from the inside out, steal our sight, or take away our ability to walk; and there is not a night that passes where a creature does not walk in moonlight." The mighty tom looked me straight on, his face lowered even with mine so that I could better see the marring feature that streaked across his brow and muzzle. "Tell me, do you think I got this scar from a cat fight? It's too precise to be made by claws. Humans did this, and for no other reason than that they could. Yes, they are ignorant and clumsy. But it is their ignorance that leads them to believe they have the right to maim those they can overcome, and their clumsiness that leads to our deaths and dismemberments. Your mother tells you frightening tales for good reason. Listen to her, listen to me, stay away from humans."
My body crouched down and I flattened my ears, listening to the high whining song of the Tiger's warning. His green eyes were sharp and fierce as he pinned me to the spot. I felt that all I could do was but nod my promise to avoid humans at all costs.
Finally, the tom blinked, and his gaze lost its severity. He sat back on his haunches and twitched his ears back and forth a bit as he calmed himself. "Now," he continued, "for the next part of our deal."
It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about, but when I did, I sprang to my feet and waved my tail in an expectant manner. "Yes!" I said, "you call mother the Duchess, and you are Tiger, but brother and I are just kittens, why?"
"This is a simple and complex question," he began. "We cats have no real need for names or titles to identify ourselves, but it is a tradition dating back to the time of the Mau, and so we honor it as best we can. Every feline at birth has a name. However, no kitten knows its name, and very few cats ever discover theirs. Your true identity is one that is locked deep within you, and can only be discovered in an event of great occasion. Usually, you've gone through several lives before you find it. A cat who knows his name is one that deserves a great deal of respect, as it is a rare and difficult thing to achieve."
"How did you find yours, Mr. Tiger?" I asked.
"Fighting for my dignity while confined by humans," he replied, his voice careless and never losing that lazy air, "I snarled and scratched for all that I was worth, until one of them exclaimed how I fought like a tiger. And I knew, in that moment, who I was, and it was not a human's plaything."
It was then that I began to understand exactly what it meant to be a cat. The Tiger's vague way of telling the most important event that had ever happened to him was in the same tone of voice that announced the sun was setting. His voice was not quite bored, but carried in such a way that I was able to see his underlying message. Great things can and do happen to cats, but they are meant to, as they are to any deserving species. What makes a cat is not the event, but how we take it. And that, I realized, is why the dog howls every night that it has discovered the moon in the sky, but the feline carries moonlight in her eyes and hunts in the path of its murky light, even as she walks it to her death.
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Does that sound vague to you? It's meant to. After all, I am a cat.
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"Well," said the tom, shaking me out of my epiphany, "that'll do it for me, young one. Keep in mind what I said, and stay far away from humans. Don't go looking for trouble."
"Yes, sir," I muttered, getting the impression that I receiving yet another lecture.
"Keep your whiskers clean," he told me as he stretched, though I could not help but notice the similarities between the tom's stiffness and my own mother's problems after she had been still for any length of time. "And mind your lessons-however much longer they may last."
And with that, he hopped off the awning and onto the fence. Tail cocked at a jaunty angle, the gargantuan creature ghosted along the line of narrow boards and out of the alley. Whatever positive thoughts the tom has planted in my mind died with his parting words, and I found myself back in the depressing location of square one. Mother's predicament was fresh in my mind, but now there was a new twist.
Burdened with the realization that the tom had given me, I knew that no true cat neither fussed nor gave any mention of their approaching deaths. With the prime examples of proper feline behavior in both the Tiger and mother, and even my own brother showing signs of the aloof acceptance necessary to be a good cat, I could not help but wonder what was wrong with me, and why I could not adopt the universal attitude of my species.
I was a cat. I had the same lithe body type and musical voice for communicating in the darkness of night. I was a cat. I was nearly proficient at hunting without a sound and walking wires less than a whisker's width. Wasn't that what it meant to be a cat? I condoled myself, thinking that I was young, and could be forgiven for still having curiosity about humans, and not yet understanding why no one would care when mother died or brother left. And even though Brother better understood these things, that could only mean that I would in time.
I was a cat. I had to be.
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Right. Well, a few months late.^.^;;
Ah well. Comments? Rants or opinions in dire need of expression? Give me a review, if you've a mind!