Archive for October, 2010
The Miser’s Cat
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
There was a miser who had a cat.
He died.
The miser, that is.
The cat was fine.
The miser, who’d hoarded, cheated, and loaned at exorbitant and inflexible rates, left all his wealth to the cat.
Had this been strictly a matter of what was written in his will, his lawyer (whom he’d swindled) and the judge (whom he’d nearly bankrupted) would gladly have mislaid or invalidated anything bearing the miser’s signature.
But the miser had guaranteed his wishes by locking his fortune in a brass-bound trunk he buried beneath the oldest, tallest tree in the forest, and by hanging the trunk key on the cat’s collar.
Now, you’ve heard that cats have nine lives, but that doesn’t mean a string of lives lived one after another. Cats live all nine at once. And only one is a cat life. For instance, the miser’s cat was also a riverboat captain, a seamstress, an itinerant mole, a mathematician, an angel, and several other things. That’s why I love cats, although right now I only have a dog that I love so much, I always feed him with the best karmapets calming treats amazon because I care for him.
On a cloudy day, the lawyer and the judge finished decoding clues the miser had left in his will, and dug around the roots of some old, tall trees until they struck the brass-bound trunk with a shovel-bending clang! At the very same moment, in a nearby field, the cat wriggled through an inconvenient fence and snagged its collar there, key and all.
While the lawyer and judge rested from their excavations, a seamstress and a mathematician were crossing a fence-divided field from different sides. These two women spotted the key at the same moment they spotted each other.
Don’t mistake this for coincidence–this kind of thing happens all the time. In that country, there’s an expression, “They’re two lives of the same cat.” So it was with the seamstress and the mathematician.
It began to rain, softly, but as if it weren’t planning to stop, so they took refuge in the forest. Following the map on the inside of the collar, they found the trunk, opened it, and lived happily for many years.
The lawyer and the judge, whose schemes to defraud each other the treasure had given way to fisticuffs and blunt objects, regained consciousness and stumbled back to find the trunk empty. The lawyer was convinced that the judge had taken all the treasure, and vice versa, beginning a feud that would last generations.
The cat, meanwhile, was fine.
Decisions
Monday, October 18th, 2010
“Come home immediately,” her husband said. “Jennette?” The speaker crackled and spit like frying bacon, and she flinched involuntarily. She imagined his voice landing like bright sparks on her skin, raising welts.
She pressed her thumb down hard on the microphone’s trigger, and leaned forward, raising her voice. She cleared her throat. “It was an accident,” she said. “Nobody meant for this to happen.” The head of research and development had assured her it was perfectly safe—and wouldn’t she like to tell her children someday she had participated in groundbreaking research? Time travel was just a matter of plucking the chords of the musical universe and setting sail on the vibration, picking at the tapestry of space and time with a sharp needle and threading yourself through its eye, like merging with the infinite. The head of research went on like that when he was drunk. He was difficult to deal with in the best of circumstances, unbearable at these launch parties. But that was her job, and she always did her job.
Jennette said, “Enough, enough.” She wobbled forward and slid into the seat—it was like an armored dune buggy, greasy with the fingerprints of the team. They never ate in the cafeteria, and she had sent so many memos. Her life was memos and notes and messages left behind—a hair on her pillow case, a lipstick smudge on his briefs. It could have been her own. She tried not to be suspicious. How childish would that be? She had almost done it, though. She stood in her scientists’ genetic lab, and wanted to hand over that long, blonde hair. She almost wanted to know. But then it wouldn’t have been an accident. Then the end of her whole life would have been her own fault.
Champagne buzzed in her head, and she leaned forward to look at the dials. She punched a button, and then another and another. The head of research lurched forward, but the door slammed shut, and the whole world burned away. She was lost in black space. She had merged with the infinite. She closed her eyes and felt a sense of—yes, it was relief. Until the microphone switched on. “Immediately,” he said, his voice all around her. She cleared her throat. “It was an accident,” she said. “Nobody meant for this to happen.” She closed her eyes. “No,” she said.