skonen_blades | Entries tagged with cats

Underwear comes in flavours, like a rainbow of mistakes.
Your warning signs were covered in camouflage spandex.
Elephants never forget, camels can go days without water, and you could hypnotize pinecones.
I knew violins less elegant than you.
You were a puzzle with too many pieces.
Trashcan carnival.
An optical delusion.
I made magnet with your steel-toed bunny slippers
Cat Ladies, Dog Men, and Horseshoe Crabs with buck-fifty teeth.
You pulled the pin and threw the donkey tail
There’s a reason why lightning seeks the ground.
It’s you.
You danced for the string puppets.
You rebel yelled the wrestler’s belt
Your sonar pings meant nothing on the prairie
You threw too many forgetful boomerangs
You were a shaved rabbit in a wig race.
A stay-puft marshmallow ballerina
A licorice black belt
The moral of the sorry
Your eyes pentagrammed the demons in the meek
Seances turned into alarm clocks when you walked by
Museums woke up like bears in the spring
Forget-me-nots got amnesia
Dill pickles started to wish they were candy canes
Spacesuits longed to be bikinis
Horseradish wanted to change its name to whipping cream
And it rained Nobel prizes
I’ve seen tornadoes with better brakes
I’ve smelled house fires less dangerous
You oceaned all the swimming pools and continented all the islands
Just by existing in our line of sight
All up in our grills like a sweating lunch-rush short-order cook
I wasn’t curtains but I played them on t.v.
I didn’t fall to pieces but I did try to scatter
You were the television static to my arctic mind
I wished you every kind of best that there is
I wanted to fondue myself
And memorize the drape of your leg
The nape of your crunk
And the snapping fingers of your grin
I can never remember your eyes
But I hear all over you
Your memories spiderweb across my face in the dark
You are not recent.
And I am not old.
But together, we were the grossest sandwich I couldn’t get enough of
An acquired taste that I acquiesced to
We met in meat
And even with tired teeth
Even with damp sockets where my hope used to be
I wash myself in the forgetful water of your absence
Blessing the time we didn’t have
Regretting the spending of it
Wishing I could keep it.
Wishing I could hoard it.
And live off the interest.

tags

In my cat’s dreams, she leaps from lily pad to lily pad
Shuddering the pond’s still surface and scattering thousands of fish beneath the mirror surface
Some of them leaping up in sprays of prisming droplets
Into her perfect trap of a mouth
The mice and birds want to be chased, laughing as she disembowels them
And she laughs, too
Blood speckling her lols
Invisibly quick, teleporting from kill to kill
Hissing from the top of the evolutionary predator ladder.
Lightning dressed in fur
All living creatures in sight are exactly bite-sized

She sheds
She sheds hair
She sheds gravity
She sheds fear
She sheds mercy

Bonelessly snaking out of her limits
She playfully claws with sudden extra legs
She grows to the size of an elephant
Ebony wings fan out from her shoulders
She is a house-sized bear trap imploding claws and teeth into dogs, horses, rhinoceroses
Her body twists, stretches, accordions, extends

But most of all, her body jumps
Soaring, gliding, leaping.
Tiger rainbow parabolas brushing the sky

Like her back legs work perfectly
Like she isn’t afraid to leave the house
Like she can jump higher than the couch
Like she can walk more than seven steps without falling over
Like her pelvis doesn’t betray her
Like she doesn’t shake when she hears loud noises

She jumps in ecstasy
The wind rustling her majestic luck-dragon fur
She closes her eyes to the slipstream

And wakes to our smiling stares

tags

The cat snakes were my favorite of all the gene splices.

I’m wearing one right now. Her name is Waffles. She’s coiled around my neck, turquoise fur with orange stripes, purring against my throat in a mutual exchange of warmth. An extremely fluffy Persian constrictor.

Cat snakes have been available domestically for years. Nothing poisonous for home use, of course. Warm-blooded with long legless bodies, their minds a wonderful combination of snake and cat. Utterly unreadable. Like a Cheshire playing poker. Moody, aloof and opaque.

My brunch friend Amanda has a meters-long albino pythelot draped around her shoulders, white with those black capital-C spots winding around its torso like stripes on a candy cane. A short-hair because she’s allergic. She calls it Twiggy. Its face is serenely dunked in a small bowl of dried mice on the table beside our food. This lunch spot caters to our class.

The cross between a meow and a hiss is wonderful and haunting. And those eyes. Two unreadable species put together to form eyes that are portals to another dimension of consciousness. Time does not exist in those eyes. Emotions are alien there.

Feral tomserpents dart through the alleys these days. Unspayed and unneutered Christmas gifts reproducing in the dumpsters. There are rumours of the massive cobra sphinxes used for security in the outlying corporate factories, rearing up in the moonlight in front of terrified trespassing spies. Fifteen-meter sabertooth tigercondas patrolling the fences of drug-lord fields, fat on junkies and mercenaries, hooked on opiates from digesting the hopped-up victims.

But domestic cat snakes were bred to be docile around people. Strong and fierce when it came to mousing, though. Vermin were a thing of the past in our gated community. Unfortunately, so were birds.

The entire body a tail that twitched when thinking about attack. More silent than a regular cat when crawling up stairs through carpet. Cat snakes were slow lightning. I loved my Waffles with all my heart.

I felt a ripple down the length of her. Embarrassed, I realized my little Waffles was about to cough up a hairball right here in public.

I excused myself from Amanda and our table and headed to the bathroom before Waffles’ undignified whorfing could begin in earnest. Amanda seemed none the wiser but Twiggy’s thin arrowhead face poked up from the mice bowl, one eye smirking at me.

In the morning I may take a trip to the pet store for an exchange. Come to think of it, the hairballs had always been an annoyance.

Maybe I was more of a fishdog person.

tags

When Death came in quietly on its unfair legs and took up residence in our oldest cat, we barely noticed. We were in the middle of a move and all that happened when we were finally unpacked in the new house was that she stopped going outside.

She was one of those black cats from Halloween calendars with glowing green eyes. She was a bitch. She shared our house with another cat through no fault of her own and she made that point whenever she could. The other cat, fat and stupid, was merely tolerated but she, the black cat from a Parisian art nouveau poster, ruled the house. She was forthright, mean, majestic and aloof as only a cat can be.

And death seemed like a trophy hunter.

She was found as a kitten 15 years before near a dumpster behind Café Deux Soleils in Vancouver British Columbia. She was taken all the way to Halifax and lived there for nearly a decade before being driven across Canada back to Vancouver. She had seen more of this country that I have. When she died, it was six blocks from where she’d been found.

And death seemed to have a sense of comforting irony.

She became lethargic and thin. I’ve never felt a cat so thin. We took her to the vet to see what was wrong with her and the vet made it clear that there were a lot of things wrong with her. Four or five organs were failing. We were given saline to keep her hydrated. We administered it through an IV line. We were told to keep tabs on her and comfort her. That was the best they could do.

And death seemed inhumanly patient.

She would forget to retract her claws and get caught in the carpet, anchored by her paw’s betrayal. She fell down the stairs near the end. I’ve never seen an act so unnatural as a cat falling down stairs. I’ve never seen a cat unable to walk on a hardwood floor because her weakness made her slip. I’ve never seen a cat unable to keep its head up.

And death seemed cruel.

A strong cat. A smart cat. A mean cat. She faded out of this world, soul turned inside out and funneled away by Death’s silent climate into a different place. Looking back, it had been coming for a while yet it seemed so sudden at the time.

And death seemed like a complex plan with no hope of being evaded.

Her death seemed natural in a bad way. A cruel trick to play on an unsuspecting cat. A cat with no means of language or defense made clumsy and embarrassed by ‘natural causes’. An athletic cliché of a cat that belonged on the broom handle of a cartoon witch, turned into a shaking caricature of sickness. Tuna fell out of her mouth. Water dribbled down her chin. Her eyes became infected. That last night, she lay on the ground and meowed without sound until her shallow breathing wound down in the middle of the night like an untended watch.

She died the day before Christmas near the fake Christmas tree beside the fake fireplace, her empty body the realest thing in the room.

And death seemed as powerful and as kind and as inevitable and as terrible as our sun.

Rest in Peace Ingeai

tags

The elegant muscles of the tigerclown are bands of steel as it makes its way down the main tent pole to where I’m held. There’s an almost mechanical ticking to its subterranean growl. Its claws slowly pluck and sink their way down the vertical oak like it’s creeping across a hardwood floor. Its grace is frightening to behold. Her bright white fur is patterned with polka dots and triangles. Her bright blue and green stripes criss cross in a deadly plaid that mix with the circus shadows in the abandoned tent as she slithers gleefully down. Slowly, she descends. I’m shaking. There’s another deep deadly purr and a second jestercat pads out from the shadows. This one’s a deep panther black with white zebra stripes. Its bright red nose is supposed to be comical but I can’t help seeing it as a blood stained snout. It has a bright gold earring. There are white triangles above and below its cold yellow eyes.
I’m twitching and staked out in the center ring. There’s Pedro tied to the seesaw over in ring one and there’s Jake chained to the low hanging trapeze in ring two. We all look at each other with the wild eyes of sinking horses and mute sweaty faces. We’ve been caught and it’s all over except for the screaming. And there will be lots of screaming.
I hear the soft pad of patient feet. There’s another harlequin hellcat with glowing white eyes looking at me from under the empty seats. It pads out into the light and I can see its little party hat and ruffled collar. Its retractable claws have razored through his little kitty clown shoes. There’s nothing funny about these animals. They’re bigger than bears from where I’m sitting. They circle.
A feline mime comes forward, low to the ground and teeth bared in a silent snarl. My bladder lets go. They seem to be concentrating on us one a time. It looks like I’m first.
A cougar with a top hat jauntily comes out the haunted black, tail swishing and bright plastic flower bobbing. She licks her long teeth and looks to her friends before looking back at me and standing quite still in anticipation.
Punch and Jaguar, the Bengal buffoon, Calico cutups, and Patches the Maneater. Alley cats the size of ponies with a raspy taste for meat surround us. We’ve been smeared with blood and cotton candy to further entice them. I can hear more behind. Laffy Leopard and the Lion King, I think. I swear to God they’re smiling. They’re waiting for their cue.
I give it to them.
I scream.

Tags

Current Mood: silly
Current Location: yanking on the cord for the reserve chute
Current Music: Owner of a Lonely Heart - Yes