without pausing to consider 10.3.95
Last night he almost stepped on a cat. All the cats in the neighborhood where he lives seem to suffer from an indeterminate mental affliction which manifests itself in a certain listless meandering and general inattentiveness quite different from the purposeful and somewhat enigmatic pursuit of obscure desires which had in his past experience characterized examples of the species. Also, their tails seem abnormally short.
He wonders if perhaps they have suffered the fate of the cat employed for the purpose of warning subway patrons of the manifest danger of closing doors. Every day he sees this unluckiest of all possible felines on the window of the subway door, its tail eternally caught between the two halves of the sliding portal which delimit its two-dimensional existence. Attention being given to the cat's tail, highlighted in a way that is meant to suggest pain by a sort of amoebic red explosion, which would need at its center merely a single onomatopoeia instead of the tail to be mistaken for an escaped effect from a Batman episode, and without failing to consider also the single tear inside the circle of its one colored eye, all in all it seems in good spirits, satisfied that its fate will have served an exhortatory purpose.
There's a kinetic astonishment in the illustration, he thinks, as if the unfortunate animal has been caught unawares by a burst from the animator's flash bulb, if in fact animators utilized such devices, or even imagined them.
Anyway, he thinks, at least that cat is always trying to get away, unlike the cat he almost stepped on in the drug store, which seemed a different sort of creature altogether.
This was, in fact, his first close encounter with a neighborhood cat, although he had observed several in the parking garage a few nights before, albeit at some distance, as he hadn't wanted them to alter their behavior on his account. As it turned out he needn't have worried, as demonstrated by the several times aforementioned example of the species it was his something other than good fortune to narrowly avoid crushing between his foot and the floor.
To paint a clearer picture, suffice it to say that he had begun to walk towards the creature, occupying as it was a vital space between a rack full of what appeared to be cough syrup and shelves filled with cotton puffs (our hero's immediate objective, for all intents and purposes), fully expecting it to follow what he assumed was a behavioral pattern etched into the neural pathways of the feline brain, a summary of which might have been: My own safety being of paramount concern, all large masses if indeterminate origin moving in my direction will motivate me to flight...
It was while his foot was suspended in midair over the unwitting creature that he began to think that this particular cat was having a different sort of reaction altogether, that being in fact no reaction at all, choosing to remain (or rather not choosing, but remaining nonetheless), in a posture at once unbelievable and grotesque, its head cocked back at an obscene angle, legs splayed in all directions, mouth open in a grimacing yawn which seemed eternal, most likely never fulfilling the purpose for which yawns are begun in the first place, an objective he would have been hard pressed to put a finger on himself.
It was (to reiterate) at that moment, that cusp of impending feline fatality, that the proprietor of the store, an old woman with a penchant for hair pins and eyeglasses seemingly as thick as the safety glass which had one day appeared, surprisingly, at the Kentucky Fried Chicken near his childhood residence, this old woman halfway across the world from the place of his birth, who had probably never even seen how safe a Kentucky Fried Chicken could be, with eyes like synchronized fish inside of adjacent glass sanctuaries, and not the sort of healthy, alluring, tropical fish promised in pet store brochures or under Fish in Volume VI of the Encyclopedia, but the kind of disconsolate, sickly, slightly-duller-than-gold fish one might win by bouncing ping-pong balls into bowls at a county fair, this same senior citizen let out a shriek like an overwrought banshee, a sound which somehow formed itself into the syllables he recognized as those which greeted every customer in every store in this superficially ceremonious country, "Ir-ra-shai-mas-se!," while simultaneously seizing from what he assumed was a location adopted with some foresight a tennis ball which seemed the same lackluster yellow as the animal still imperiled beneath his foot and hurling it with a startling accuracy which bespoke a long period of training towards the unfortunate creature which finally reacted in a more conventional fashion to avoid the projectile whose trajectory caused it to bounce once and come to rest in a basket adjacent to the shelf it was his intent to access whence it would no doubt be retrieved in short order in preparation for its next motivational enterprise. Without pausing to consider the possibilities, he purchased a box of cotton puffs and went home to wash his face.