Cats

A cat witnesses a murder.

Slinking through the darkness, my eyes pick out the darker darkness that surrounds me. Treading carefully through my world, I saunter delicately with dainty feet and a fine air.

Hopping on top of a cold metal cylinder, I preen under the yellow lamp light while eyeing the tasty piece of sooked meat on the ground. I consider it, as I stretch luxuriously on the rusty podium. Hmm… no. I want something wet, something hot, something pulsing. Usually a small glob of fur would do or a small glob of feathers would do, but I don’t feel like picking my way through the small hard bits in them. If only I was bigger, more scary, less fluffy. Maybe little Twolegs will stop prodding me with sticks.

Speaking of Twolegs, there’s two down the alley. Bang! Clatter! Such noise! If they were real predators they wouldn’t bumbling around like that, like drunken Buzzers. If I was bigger, if my claws were sharper and my teeth were longer, I could gut them and feast on their insides. I jump and hiss through my teeth at them. They don’t notice, lips locked, limbs tangled, wheezy grunts emanating.

Severely disgruntled, I hop off the podium and cloak myself in shadows. Some Twolegs aren’t like the little ones. They shout at me, call me ugly sounds, sometimes beat me. They’re unpredictable at times, to say the least.

The bigger Twolegs manages to free his mouth to say something in that thorny language of theirs, and the smaller one nods eagerly in agreement. What the smaller Twolegs didn’t see was the flash of light by the bigger Twolegs’ side. I’ve seen them before. Torch got lynched by one couple of weeks ago by a crazy Twolegs. Wasn’t pretty. Definitely wasn’t pretty.

The flash of light disappeared into the side of the smaller Twolegs. It yelled behind the paw that was clamped over its mouth, squirming like a small glob of fur when caught. Something dark spills out of its hide and seeps over the layers of pelt that covered her soft flesh. It smells hot and spicy and my stomach contracts with hunger. In that moment, I’m so hungry I feel hollow.

The smaller Twolegs’ knees start to weaken, and its face glitters in the lamplight. I’d seen Twolegs do that before as well. Their eyes leak. Why? It’s not scary, just rather pathetic. Like they wish to make the predator pity them. Never works.

She’s on the ground now and the bigger Twolegs is bent over her, removing scraps of leaves and metal discs from her pelt. It looks around shiftily, just the way I would have if I had just hunted and hurries away, leaving the nearly dead corpse behind. Why do that? Perfectly good meat! Ah well, more for me.

I slink towards the moist body and take a gentle sip of the hot liquid. It was wet. It was hot. It was pulsing.

Yum.