Cat

With darker forces at work, a half a pounder brain was considerably easy to defeat. All they had to do was roll their tongues and slur Texan; “Stick ‘em up, buster! Game’s up!”

Now our not so quick somebody, in a philosophical outburst, says “What game?! I’ve been sitting with nothing to do in the middle of the day and the middle of the night for I do not know how long now and you accuse me of having completed this “game”, which I refute, for I do not know what this game is that you are talking about and even if I did, I can most certainly assure you that I am not playing it right about now and have not been playing it.

The darker forces, thicker than their owner, of course, let bollocks be bollocks and repeat “Stick ‘em up, buster!”

A duh moment; nobody speaks and while we wait for something to cull the silence, the man and his devil’s breathing in and out are all our sources of happening. Another dull day.

Breathe in; and a couple of airborne chopped moustache pieces fly in and choke our man. He coughs and as he coughs, a couple more from the previous breath fly out. Adamant kids at a theme park. “Wheeeee! Can we go back up the water-slide, Daddy?!” “Sure, son! Just wait for the next breath.”

It was art; existential silences. An art that nobody died perfecting; they just went on and on, like journeys back home, and eventually, either gave up or died giving up. But our man was in the middle of one such vicious silences; so edgy, that he spent two days observing rust patterns on his last customer’s shaving blade. That did not mean that his last customer dropped in two days ago; just that he started noticing it then.

And like televised economies with tuxedoed grouches screaming for goodness-gracious-some-money, his cash box just excused itself, blaming it on the dog that ate all the cash. No money, no heat, no electricity; boy was this getting boring.

So one day, he sprang upon a resting cat that smelled fresh from the night’s hunt. And while it squealed in purrs to get away from his grasp, he ripped a new blade off its casing, slid it into the razor, kachinking it in place, he slid the lather off the disgruntled cat. In patches through the lemmego protests and in expert moves as it white-flagged defeat after yesterday’s mouse burned itself out.

Tada! A shaved cat.