Category: Character

Cat Tales, 15


While the pernickety old woman pruned the rosebush in the front yard, a cheeky tom pranced along our back fence. I streaked over there, intending to see him off! I ran up the fence, made to dance along the top, thinking to tip the top crossbar every couple of paces with my right side foot and paw. For balance.

I was stuck! My rear claw too deep in the soft old timber! I wrenched and jerked to get free, tore my toe almost from my foot. Hurt! Hurt!

I miaowed and wailed and screamed for help. “Hurt! Tearing! My foot!”

My human came running. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

“Oh no!” she said. “I’ll have to cut you loose and there’s blood already!”

“Hang on!” She pulled my leg back at the same time as snipping my claw through with the secateurs.

I screeched, would’ve jumped down and run, but she gripped me by the scruff of my neck. She moved me onto her shoulder and kneeled down to where she’d dropped her gardening apron. Moved me onto that and had me rolled up in it in a flash.

“Phew!” she said. Got to her feet. “I know I can’t trust you not to get free so you’ll have to come.” She took me into the garage. “We’re looking for the cat carrier. Give me a nudge when you see it.”

Me give her a nudge? I hate the cat carrier!

“Found it! Don’t move now!” She lay me on the work bench and slid the cat carrier out from under it. “It’s dusty! Where’s a rag?”

I wrenched and wriggled. Just about got myself free when she grabbed me and fed me into the cat carrier.

Yowling, I hung onto the doorway as usual but my heart wasn’t in the struggle. I smelled my blood. I wanted to be licking my foot. Let myself be pushed in.

She shut the little gate and barred it. “Well, let me think,” she said. “I doubt that I can carry you—carrier and all—all the way to the vet.”

I pressed into the back of the carrier. Really not interested. Found my wound and started licking.

The pernickety old woman went to the garden shed. Got out the wheelbarrow and lifted the carrier onto it. Trundled me down the drive, left turn into the street, across the road. Another left turn and a couple of blocks along. Right turn into the bad place.

I yowled. Felt sick. The turns and trundles dizzy-making. Give me peace and quiet. I don’t like it at the vet’s. They have pointy things they stick into me. They have rules. Dogs on their leashes, cats in their carriers. I wailed as the pernickety old woman carried me into the waiting room.

“Oh dear,” the secretary said while I took a breath. “Bleeding?”

“Yes, quite a bit of the red stuff,” the pernickety old woman said. She explained what she thought had happened.

“Come through,” one of the vet nurses said.

My human picked up the carrier and we went into the scary place.
————
Yes. They stuck me with something. I spent the night. Refused their food. In the morning, I was bandaged up. When we got home, the carrier and the wheelbarrow again, my human locked me in the shed. “Go to sleep,” she said. “They said you would want to. I’ll be back in a jiff.”

Lodestar 40, Kes and Ahni

A big one today. Well, big in events and emotions. I’m positioning this as the final chapter in the second installment. I’m undecided about Part III.

It can either be Sard’s story, The Remaindered Avatar, posted already as far as it goes, but needing me to write a finale.

Or I can break new ground with Srese’s ongoing story? With Srese as the viewpoint character in this installment, Kes and Ahni continue their lives in the background with every so often a spot-lit action.

40-finally-together-lp-223-1Download

Cat Tales, 11

Me, Hand-of-God, hunting skinks in my backyard

Finally I could learn to hunt, and me a large middle-aged cat with a low-slung belly. As a kitten, and with my mother and my brothers and sisters, we were ‘contained’ in a cattery yard. Where my mother could teach us only how to hunt flies and cockroaches.

As a teenage cat, I was contained in the basement of a large house. A large basement that meant, but all of it indoors. Cockroaches there, too. Then I came here.

After studying my new territory, I decided that my first prey animals up from cockroaches would be garden skinks. About the length of my foreleg including my paw, and very fast.

These little lizards live on all the fences surrounding my backyard, about one per metre, but come down onto the ground to catch insects. Where I’ll catch them. When I get fast enough.

The first time I was nearly successful the pernickety old woman took a photo of me, as above, and then laughed.

She laughed at me?

“Too slow!” she chortled. “They know all about big black and white marauders, and have evolved to be very fast!”

I set out to prove her wrong. Days later, I managed to snag with my paw a look-alike from the house wall. I laid it proudly outside the laundry for the pernickety old woman to inspect.

“An Asian Gecko,” she said. “Very good! You can eat as many of those as you like. They’re not native and starting to be a real pest, running over people’s faces at night, and the like.”

I ate it but it was nothing like my kibbles. The tail had spines on it. Yuck!

Cat Tales, 1

Hi, I’m the Hand-of-God. So called because I was born with a hand-outline, two hairs wide, on my back. But which was only my second name. At the cattery they called me Zorro.

The hand is hard to see now because I grew, and grew, and expanded and the hand expanded too, and became a blob.

Which is how the ignorant old woman now looking after me, calls it.

Hand-of-God? she says. You wish! Go on! I dare you go do something that God told you needs doing.

She obviously doesn’t know God is another name for Life, or Nature, if you’re pernickety like she is.

That night I hunted and ate all the cockroaches in the house. If that isn’t nature, what is?

What else can a Hand-of-God do locked up in an old house?