kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"CatAndMouse.0"

words

F&C:: 20041117 :: Cat and Mouse ( http://www.stwa.net/scrawl/viewtopic.php?t=17164&highlight=kaolin )

Horatious Crimm was perplexed. The cat had survived every last obstacle he presented it with, its fine marmalade fur never ruffled, its gait never stumbled. Last week, he'd personally seen it ingest enough ketamine to down a tiger--he'd wrapped the powder in lightly foiled paper.

And the cat was a damnable nuisance--it had caught another one of his birds.

Regardless of how he seeded them, his birds always took on the characteristics of the truebird flock; most of the time they flew about, or sang, and yet they would still lazily pause to peck at the birdseed the gardener tossed out. A cat should not have been able to tell the difference.

Yet the truebirds had apparently nothing to fear from it--it was only his precious creations that slowly shut themselves off after irreparable damages from the beast, winking off his monitor no less suddenly than any other life so cruelly taken.

He had assumed his creations were somehow inferior--that nature was working its wiles and his somehow seemed the old or the infirm of the flock. He had assumed that he was the only tinkerer in the apartment, it being a highly refined skill in a less-than-refined area.

But he'd found one of his birds in the bins waiting for the incinerator--he'd seen the marks of the cat and brought up the bird for diagnosis. Nothing untoward was immediately apparent, but the circuitry was subtly damaged--it had been the subject of some electromagnetic attack.

And so he tinkered some more. Soon enough, he'd know where the cat lived. And his broken birds would be safe to fly once more.