By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper, finally realizing the futility of his rants concerning outrageous human behavior, turns his attention to cats, largely on the strength of two stories out of Australia, one documenting a crop-destroying infestation of mice and the other describing a population explosion of feral cats to the detriment of natural animal species.
So while we know what the Aussie cats have been doing—and it wasn’t catching mice, the unfortunate Australian problem is reason enough for the keeper to lament how cats obviously did permanent psychological damage to him by making the most god-awful mating sounds directly outside the window where he was trying to sleep during his developmental years.
The yowling and howling was so bad that the young keeper sometimes had to summon his mother in the middle of the night to hear once again her apparent ridiculous explanation that it was “just the cats.”
It was not “just the cats,” it was “mad monsters of the night,” and they were described as such when the keeper recounted his childhood cat-fright experience in previous writing, always incurring the displeasure of cat-loving readers who say cats can do no wrong.
Cats can do wrong! How else to explain the keeper’s inability to concentrate, his inclination to procrastinate, and his waking up in the middle of the night for other than personal plumbing reasons?
It is the cats—the monsters! They are out there in the dark night waiting to do in the keeper as if he were nothing more than an overgrown mouse. There is no way to get back to sleep when that verity climbs into your bed. The keeper would wake Phyllis for reassurance but there is no certainty that she would to react with the patience of a comforting mother.
Featured Image by Tudor Baicu https://unsplash.com/photos/V5pZ9F0M4vU Unsplash Free License
