mouse twitching
my cat, Sofi Wan Kenobi (or Sofia Di Putzi, or Sofi Anon depending on my mood) is a runt with a tiny head and a tiny body. she has a funny off kilter walk and a lopsided, skittering run. in fact she gallops (i hear there’s a ten syllable German word for this) up and down the hallway of our apartment, thundering ‘hoofs’. i chase her in my socks, trying to imitate her, to make her run faster. she loves this. Sofi’s inky black, with yellow/green eyes and a few straggly white hairs on her chest. she distrusts everybody. she hid behind a couch for 2 weeks when i got her, used, from a girl moving to the West Coast. the girl called her Zoey, which was cool, but i had to name her for myself. if i was gonna feed her and solicit her affection, then i should call her what i wanted to. strangely she’s a one man cat and i’m her man. he who feeds her… but of course there’s more to it than that. i think she got kicked around in her old neighborhood, like Nixon and it’s still with her, the paranoia. she’s also sweet. when she watches TV in my lap, her purr is so loud you can hear it in the next room. she licks my hands and arms to wake me up in the morning and she’s a pro at those seductive ‘i love you’ eyes. last summer i had to extract a few of her teeth. they were rotten at the root. it cost a small fortune. she survived the surgery, but had to be fed mushed-up tuna and water for weeks, hating the dry pellets when forced to go back. an embarrassing result — her tongue gets caught in her missing tooth gums during a licking session. it gags her tiny throat and she reels it back in, like a birthday curly horn contracting back into place. it makes her a Turette kitty. i refuse to let her get fat. i’m obsessive about it. too much to ask of a dime-sized heart, i rant. i feed her parsimonious portions 4 times a day which means she wakes me up at 6:30 in the morning staring at me. ‘NO,’ i say. ‘NO, SOFI!’ but she’s right. she’s always right about feeding time. i lumber out of bed, feet like ski boots and clink her pellets into the bowl. afterwards i can’t sleep. i read. noir fiction while my noir cat glares, nose-to-nose, hoping for a post breakfast scratch. i give in, pat, purr, scratch, lean, purr, read. she’s a super hunter. handling the mice problem is sport. i can tell she’s caught one when i hear her leap up and through the secret door in my closet making muffled ‘roar’ sounds, mouse in mouth. she lets it go, chasing it to bits until dead. i find the shriveled creature in the morning, tweeze it’s tail with a square of toilet paper and dump it in the toiilet. when she doesn’t kill it dead and it’s not alive enough to interest her, it twitches on the floor, partially upright, tiny feet just so. i touch the tail and one little matchstick leg shivers. i jump, horrified. i can’t put it in the garbage until i’m sure it’s totally utterly kaput. i won’t let it suffocate in the stench. but it hurts, this Mother Nature struggle, which Sofi always always wins. i’m proud of her, but i feel badly for da poor widdle mousey.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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