Girl & Kat

This is Casper. He is a green-eyed, black and white floof pudding, and one of the stray cats that visits my balcony for food. Multiple times a day. Sometimes in the same hour. He’s also a new star of a hot new video game.

I was standing semi-naked before of a completely featureless door with no handle and smelling of cat urine.

Slowly, I reached out with my hand and tickled her gently around the ears. Cassie lifted her head so I could scratch under her chin.

That was new. And sudden.

I looked back at Norah, who was head-butting my other hand. And then back at Cassie. I lifted an eyebrow and eyed the two cats. “You’re both jealous.”

One sunny day at the end of February, I spotted a young female cat in heat.

How did I know she was in heat?

Because there was a queue of male cats that had been summoned by her siren’s pheromonal song waiting to jump her. I grabbed my trap and joined the line, with a similar objective but quite a different end game in mind.

Admittedly, saving every single stray cat in the world would be a slightly tough challenge. But this is one of those situations where you can make a surprisingly big difference with a very simple act: you can TNR the neighbourhood stray cats.

After ten years in the Japan Cat Network shelter, Cassie was perfectly house trained. She used a litter box, grazed without over indulging on dry cat biscuits, and dug her claws into scratching posts and never the furniture. There was just had one rule:

Don’t touch the cat

One month after I lost my cat, Tallis, I realised I was feeling two separate emotions. The first was grief for Tallis herself, for which there was no quick fix. But the second emotion was one of loneliness. The rooms of my apartment seemed to yawn their emptiness, and my crockery did not ever once look pleased to see me. As I made a cup of tea in one such ungrateful mug, I wondered why I had bothered coming home.

In November last year, I said goodbye to my beautiful mog, Tallis. She was the very best of furry friends, and I am quite determined to prove that to you all right now.

I was sitting at the edge of a black hole. Below me (in the gravitational sense), material was being dragged off a small moon to swirl in a brilliant white arc around a central region of impenetrable darkness. Behind this terrifying visage, Saturn loomed with the indifference of 100 trillion cubic kilometres of gas.

“What you need to know about Brandy,” —I was told— “is that his default mode is to stop. Your job is to keep him going!”

But here’s the thing. My default was to stop too. Brandy and I were kindred souls. Which would have been just fine if I wasn’t trying to learn how to ride. Movement is somewhat of a prerequisite.

Remember when your mother told you not to take sweets from strangers, don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and never NEVER accept blue sushi handed to you from a mythological water demon?

"I erased him from my world," the girl sat with her friends in a restaurant, discussing a failed date with one of her housemates. The outing in question was with a guy named Yuudai who had the tenacity of wet spaghetti and wanted a girlfriend who would do everything for him, down to putting on his socks. I knew these details because I had watched the entire proceedings unfold the week before.

I took a bite of chocolate cake as I gazed out at the enchanted Medieval village. Overlooking the beige stone turrets, the evening sun was sinking into the snow-capped summit of Mount Fuji. I chewed thoughtfully. There were many aspects of my current situation that were surprising. 

“So here we are.” The samurai was robed in black, his dark hair tumbling over one side of his face, partially concealing the eye patch. He looked around the small chapel. “I’ve never been to a wedding like this... I mean...” he clarifies awkwardly. “This is the first time I’ve been married.”

"I have never seen anything like this in my medical career."

This was not a reassuring comment. 

"The MRI machine is free at 11am. Can you go then?"

Neither was that. Especially since I had only dropped into the women's clinic for a routine pap smear. 

"There has to be something we haven't completed in this town."

"But our last primary quest was the discussion panel yesterday!"

"... then there must be a side quest."

The princess agreed to marry the prince if he completed a thousand temples in one night. By summoning a horde of demons, the prince completed 999 temples before the cock crowed. When the princess refused her hand, he turned her to stone and she became the 1000th statue.

The conference in Indonesia was the strangest I'd ever attended. This was partially because it was a mix of scientists, artists and space enthusiasts. And partially because there was an alien in the foyer. 

Today, I got scammed in Yogyukarta. I knew I was being scammed because the method was described word-for-word in reviews I'd read just the day before. And I couldn't stop it happening!

"But how does the mountain caretaker receive the message that the volcano will soon erupt?"

"Spiritually."

"... wouldn't seismometers be preferable?" 

"We land softly like a butterfly," the instructor told me. "We don't need to jump."

It was a gentle way of saying I looked like a sack of potatoes tethered to a stick in high winds. I supposed that might not be the look 'Pole Dance Tokyo' was trying to cultivate in its students. 

"This will hurt a little."

I have a general rule that if you have to hurt me for medical purposes, I'd much rather not know about it in advance.