skonen_blades

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.




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