Cats Can’t Talk
Bella hated her name. Corrupted by the last K-cup pumpkin cappuccino from last Halloween and four cups of instant coffee, her mind was stirred up with inspirations.
“Bell,” she typed on the screen. “Bell Marvin.”
That would look good as a unisex pen name, she thought to herself. Bella does not sound like a cool writer.
Bella grabbed her iPhone 4S from the floor, next to an old underwear, and took a selfie. Of course, she thought, I need my background to be blurred so that nobody can see the mess.
She pressed the App icon labeled “Facechanger,” but was only led to an updating page in App Store.
Fine, I would update it. She pressed the button, and the phone instantly claimed that she did not have enough room to do so.
“Piece of shit!” She said. She banged the phone against the mattress, but immediately picked it up.
Bella opened the “Usage” section and found out that the albums took 4GB. She opened the middle one of the three drawers of her desk, trying to find the cord to the phone.
It was not there.
She opened the left, and then the right one. No trace of the cord to be found.
“Screw it!”
Bella opened the albums. The Camera Roll, biggest of the four, contained over 2400 pictures. She started browsing the pictures.
Ladybug, her cat, starred in most of them. Bella saw him sleeping, yawning, screaming, eating, playing, sleeping on her keyboard, getting ready to attack nobody-knows-what, etc., each captured by at least three or four pictures most of which were a little blurred except the sleeping ones.
“Fuck the selfie.”
Bella crawled back to her laptop, and typed “Talk to Me” on top of “Bell Marvin” before aligning this line to the center.
She pressed “Ctrl” and “S” keys, only to add an “s” to “Me.”
“Stupid shortcuts!”
She attempted again, and saved the new file under the title of “Talk to Mes.”
“Fuck!”
Bella renamed the file, and succeeded.
“How about a talking cat inspiring a miserable writer?”
Bella reached her coffee mug, sipped up the rest of her fourth cup of instant coffee, and got her tongue covered by undissolved creamer.
“Unbelievable piece of crap!”
She scowled at the mug, and saw the “Genius” spelled with Periodic Table of Elements symbols.
“Yeah. Right.”
She stood up, searched the room, and spotted a half bottle of water right next to an X-box One covered with dust.
Bella kicked the console over, hurt her toes a bit, and grabbed some old laundry on the floor to cover it.
“OK. Talk to me, my Lady.”
She carefully sipped the water from the bottle first, and then finished it.
“The cat was on the mat,” she wrote. She had no idea what kind of mat she should describe or was she supposed to say anything about the mat at all.
Bella then decided to check out some writer’s guideline first. She opened Firefox, searched for the most popular fiction magazines, and chose the third one listed in the results.
Reading their submission guideline, she found herself giggling for the first time in perhaps two or three days.
“What we DO NOT want:” she read, and her giggling faded as the third line popped up as she scrolled down. “No talking cats. Seriously.”
“Fuck your guideline!”
Bella closed the laptop, and crawled back to bed. “I need a nap.”
Bella opened her eyes. The sheet is clean and soft.
“Your editor called, asking if you have got the first payment for your new book,” asked her boyfriend, Martin.
“Oh,” Bella looked around, trying to adjust again to this familiar room. “Actually I have. I should have emailed him back. My bad.”
She smiled, staring at Martin’s ice blue eyes.
“Have you finished it?” She asked.
“Yeah. I love it, except the name of the cat, though,” he said.
“Why? What’s wrong with Lady Bug?”
“Because I’m no lady!” Martin roared in a eerie, extremely high-pitched tone. His ice blue eyes grew to an unhuman size, and sharp fangs thrust out of his lipless mouth.
Bella instantly opened her eyes. A mixed odor of coffee, junk food, dirty laundry, and cat litter managed to calm her down. Ladybug was still sleeping. She now remembered that his eye color was a lot darker than than what she saw in her dreams.
“Fuck the guideline!” She sat up, got out of the bed, and started cleaning up.