To Kill a Cat

I am a cat. I am quick, I am lithe, I show no mercy. I sleep 15 hours a day, yet no secret eludes me. My single eye sees all. I was sent to bring justice to this world.

Never kill a cat. For a cat remembers.

***

My name is Pluto. Or, Pluto is what my silly humans have chosen to call me. And yes, they are my humans, whatever they delude themselves.

A cat cannot be owned. A cat is as slippery as a fish, as cruel as a rat.

Certainly, a cat cannot be owned by a cockroach. For humans are no more than cockroaches to me.

The cat is a visitor in her body. She has other places to be.

The human is her body, her brain. Without it, she is nothing.

Oh, they feed me and cuddle me, my humans. Of course I let them. It’s enough to know I could kill them with a mere twitch of the tail.

I, like any cat, have nine lives to live. They only have one.

I, like any cat, have been to hell more times than I can count. They cower in fear, dreading the day their sins are finally punished.

I, like any cat, have no need for the material world, no tolerance for its trivialities. I need nothing, I fear nothing.

Unlike a human, whose existence is fear.

Of all human emotions, fear seems to me the truest and most beautiful, because the most primitive.

The ultimate human fear is death. Fear exists to protect the human from death.

Anything a human fears that is not-death is in fact but a manifestation of death, a conduit of death.

What do poisoned apples and venomous snakes have in common? Death.

How simple humans are!

Of course they are always afraid. Why not, when you live on a tightrope, an abyss of nothingness beneath.

***

It is one of the more foolish human notions that guilt is the ultimate punishment.

For the human capacity for harm far exceeds the capacity for remorse.

Think about it—an animal, imprisoned, abused for years before an eventual, painful death—a life rendered meaningless, a mere receptacle for suffering—no amount of guilt can compare to this.

The cat’s duty is to punish, proportionally, those humans who inflict harm.

(Which is to say, all humans.)

We are deployed from the pits of hell to devote our first eight lives to this purpose. And for our ninth, eternal life, we may join the master in hell.

***

Oh, my humans—for many years, life with them was lazy. They were benign (by human standards), and it would be tedious to enumerate their many, minor sins, which I punished dutifully.

Prowling the house, one of many “animals” these brute-loving humans owned: there were birds, gold-fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey. And me.

You may wonder if the other “animals” assisted me in my catly duty to punish humans—whether they served the master as well.

No—certainly not. Other animals are not on the same plane as the cat.

All other animals are bound to flesh as the human is bound to flesh; they live, they are punished, they die.

Only the cat transcends her lithe fluffy body, only the cat lives 9 lives, only the cat can dole out punishment sharp as a sickle.

***

All human evil is banal. Humans sin as they eat and drink. As they breathe.

The capacity for evil is encoded in their flesh, the cells of their brains. It permeates every dark cavity and crevice. They stink with it, it fills the air around them.

Such an existence must always be taxed. Hence, what humans call “pain,” “grief,” “suffering.”

The question is not “if”; it is how much.

***

And then, my poor cockroach, the “patriarch” of the home, began to slip.

I won’t descend to describe the debased odor of his breath, nor I will repeat the cruel words he uttered to his wife, his animals, and most audaciously to me.

Words I pretended not to understand—as if the crude language of humans is so challenging to grasp.

Words I have never and will never forget.

I saw he came to loathe me. When I approached him there was hatred in his dark, glistening eyes. His skin, coarse and flushed with hot blood.

He feared my black eyes which could see him, his ugliness, and so ripped one out, as if this might prevent me seeing. Yet, he could not stop me from seeing.

And this is why he chose to end my life.

***

Never kill a cat.

***

To take in one’s hands an immortal daemon, a creature of unearthly powers, with an exquisite fluffy body, so much less crude than the hideous naked figure of the human, with lithe limbs and black fur and a long elegant tail—to wrap a noose around my diminutive neck, so I could no longer breath or mew for help—to destroy a (seemingly) helpless and powerless creature—this is the ultimate transgression, for which the penalty is death.

***

Two wrongs do not make a right. A charming thought!

Yet, the human contempt for revenge is mere weakness, cowardice, an attempt at hygiene.

Only through revenge, through punishment, can we compensate for the deficiencies of “remorse.”

Only through revenge can we extract sufficient regret, regret undiluted and unsterilized by obligation. Regret raw and tortured and desperate. Gleaming.

***

Imagine a house. Imagine a flame.

Imagine a house and flame united.

Imagine a house devoured by hell-born flames, flames bringing fear and poverty, flames driven by wrath, the maniacal wrath of a cat.

Imagine the cat who lay watching in the black, flame-lit night.

Imagine only ash and nothingness remain.

Except: the wall, where I left my mark, an outline of my beautiful neck suffocated by a noose, my beautiful cat-body in its final moments of life, for all the world – for him – to see.

***

I was sent to bring justice to this world.

***

The little (murdered) cat watching, spying, on her former human. Preparing to return to him, to enact my revenge.

Purring as I allowed him to stroke my beautiful black-furred lithe cat-body. He did not know to fear my return.

***

He tried to love me. Yet soon he looked at me with loathing.

I could feel it writhe within his heart as I approached him—blinking with wide innocent eyes, brushing him with my delicate, whiskered cat-cheeks

Grooming his cruel, cold hands.

A cat, an innocent creature, yet he wanted to kill me for I reminded him of the corruption in his heart.

My (apparent) innocence throwing into sharper relief the infamy of his heart.

The debased odor had not left him. Still he uttered cruel words to his poor wife.

Still, there was hatred in his dark, glistening eyes.

***

My delight when he found my symbol—the white outline on black fur of my beautiful cat-body with a noose about its neck, in the final moments of life.

Never kill a cat. For a cat remembers

***

The axe raised. Dark, sweaty curls plastered to his forehead.

Did I fear him? No—it was exactly as I had designed.

The cost of killing a cat: first everything one loves will be destroyed; the self shall be saved for last.

Yet I did not kill her! I never touched the axe.

I merely watched with my innocent cat eyes as she rushed to defend me, watched the demoniacal rage bloom in his eyes as her death, in a spurt of vivid blood, was accomplished.

***

Another comical human notion: heaven.

Earth, they insist, cannot be everything—there must be something more, something better.

Alas, for those whose vanity convinces them that their good deeds are not merely reasonable, expected, but deserving of reward, of “paradise.”

Yet there is no heaven. There is only earth, and those who are unworthy of it.

***

In his prison cell, his purgatory, I watch him pace. I read a “confession” he has frantically composed, describing the horror of guilt.

Ha!—The remorse of a man who hid his murdered wife so nobody would know of his crime.

Who slept soundly even with the burden of murder on his soul.

Who thought he was safe because unseen—yet he was not unseen.

Hidden in her tomb for 3 days, knowing he cared not what he had done, only that it was never discovered.

I slept next to his poor wife, whose crude human figure degraded into something even cruder, and saw how soundly the man slept, like a baby.

And then, on the fourth day, I exposed him.

I saw him, face contorted with anger, as he screamed “Beast—who seduced me into this act!” But I did nothing of the sort. I only saw.

Those who see are branded witches, fiends — such is the way of guilty humans.

Now, he is trapped. I sense the madness that increasingly festers within him, sweet to me as milk.

***

The human fears temptation most of all, for temptation is death which pretends to be not-death.

Death that smiles, toothsome.