In the bowl of a wooden spoon a single raisin, purple as the blackest pip. A gray, shorthaired tina cat watches. She waits for the raisin to drop its disguise, to zip droning into withered flight. Her master puzzles over the cat’s diet. She eats only dry food and then, only and exclusively ever, from the blue boxes with the picture of breakers curling white over white sand, beneath the disembodied hydrahead of a mewing Siamese. He has offered her cubed chicken, cooked and uncooked, has tempted her with shredded ham, turkey, olive loaf, has gladly spoiled her palate with shrimp and salmon, untainted with cream cheese, lemon juice, or capers. She is unseduceable, faithful to the click and clatter of her chosen dry, indiscriminate as to their shapes: five-pointed star; stylized fish; deformed triangles and perfect half-moons. From time to time, it’s true, she stalks an unfortunate fly. Bugs that crawl upon the face of the earth leave her less than curious, pulling her paws back when beetle or pod comes blundering up as though to ask directions, when ant or roach makes the steep ascent to the rim of her water dish from which, invariably, they go back down the wrong side, to thrash for a desperate quiet while and drown. But flies she hunts. In singleminded anger of rush freeze rush pause pounce that could, for all he knows, be closer to ecstasy than anger. She pursues them among the tea boxes atop the icebox, disturbs the dust bunnies hording the upper shelf of the bookcase, tailtip gathering cobwebs in its sweep across the ceiling corners. The flies themselves she bats into the sloping gnarl of the window sill, where they spin in stunned torpor, their spasmodic ragings against the mesh of the screen played out like the expulsion of a dense tenant from a little girl’s dollhouse of sucrose riches.
That other cat, the orange tom, is ruthless muscle housed in purring fat. The other cat, the one whose mistress refers to as her higher power, a murderous philanderer at the harrowing peak of his form. He eats from his mistress’s plate, from her hand, from among the oddities so skillfully tipped by paw and claw out of the garbage pail and batted for pleasure across the smooth linoleum floor. For dinner theater he carries home a wrestling mouse or two. Under false pretenses he bears the name of music and surgery’s patron saint, despite the fact that his balls remain intact and bulging, arrogant and gold beneath the ropelike pride of his lifted tail. Tom could tell the tale as well as any, given reason, and space, and time. And it would be a tale of flattery and detail, of misdirected love and bright-eyed self destruction, all puppeted by bipeds against a shadow screen, with incidental music made tolerable by habit (and powerelessness, a dying mouse might add) and troped for the merely curious as a necklace of moons, full, half, crescent, and each one wasting nearer and nearer to the broken clasp, that tarnished twist of silence and lights out.