"A Boy And His Cat"

Sean drowsily ascends the staircase with his hands slung in the tattered pockets of his blue terry.  Clump-clump-clump, each step making him feel a bit more obsolescent, like a lumbering dinosaur.  He steps into the kitchen and grabs a mug from off the wall caddy, noting the cuckoo clock with a sour disdain.  Horrible thing, cluttering up the wall for three weeks now.  He ought to leave it out in the bin, or maybe drop in a box someplace.  He knows he can’t, but he ought.

The kitchen is gathering filth.  Not a lot, he notes, but thereabout the makings of an unassailable mess in future.  He has all the time in the world now at his disposal.  But why bother?  He sets his mug on the counter and gives the kettle a lift, to feel how much water’s in it.  Half-full {or maybe half-empty}, he returns it to the stove and starts a flame.  Sean props open the icebox and ruts about for ingredients.  Bit of beef, block of cheddar, jar of horseradish, half an onion…

“Meow,” says the cat, who’s just come in from the bedroom with an air of sluggish contentment.  He always has a knack for appearing with the food. 

“Mornin’ cat,” Sean grumbles as he drops his things on the chop block.  It doesn’t seem at all right, the cat sleeping on his bed when he’s dropped off in the den again.  Where’s the loyalty?  He starts hacking up the onion, separating the rings from the skin and ends.  “Only the best things now, cat,” he begins saying.  “Life’s too short for chaff and scraps, eh?”  Sean feels a bit feisty this morning; it’s an odd, unpleasant sort of feeling, and one he can only attribute to the recliner downstairs acting up on his back.

The beef is still a bit frozen from the night before, so Sean cuts off a bit of cheese instead and puts the block back in the box.  “Might leave it sit a bit,” he says, and remembers the cat prowling about at his feet.  First the bed; his lunch will be next.  “Don’t even think about it,” he says to the cat in his sternest, most inconceivable voice.  The voice he uses with the neighbor’s kids when they play too close to the car.  It ends without punctuation, leaving it all rather open with an unsaid or I tagging not far behind.

Sean decides to take a fast shower before the kettle’s up.  As he lumbers {that word again} toward the bathroom, he wonders what he’d do if the cat did, in fact, made a go of his beef.  There’s not much he could do, really.  He wouldn’t kill the cat.  He couldn’t strike it, either; not only might he kill it, but he couldn’t be sure if it’d even hurt.  The cat certainly wouldn’t learn a lesson out of it, besides.  They’re shifty, unteachable things, cats.  It would only be his loss.  Anything more’d be shouting at the sky, with Sean feeling bad and ridiculous.

He breezes into the shower without so much as a glance at the mirror.  Sean can’t enjoy seeing himself naked anymore.  It only serves to remind what was, twenty or thirty years ago.  Like the cuckoo clock.  Like the half-empty bedroom, in a sense.  “Yes,” he ruminates as he enjoys the hot water off his shoulders, “chaff and scraps.”  Last vestiges of a life.

He isn’t surprised to find the beef where he’d left it, next to the kettle mutely spewing steam for want of a whistle.  He fixes up a sandwich on the stove and, mug in hand, joins the cat outside on the patio.  “You’re not a bad thing,” Sean tells him as he takes his seat at the table.  It’s a cool day out, but the sun above feels good and warm.  In a couple weeks the garden will need tending, and there’ll be projects about the house that will need doing.  He takes a bite into the warm juicy greasy beefstuff, savoring every bit of it.  Hearthy, wholesome good flavors and a goddamn cat hair in his mouth!

Sandwich spoilt, Sean rises to kick at the cat but the shifty bugger is gone.