Cat In A Leopard Spot

But he didn’t need to think of more meals yet. Now he was full. Sated. Lazy.

He dozed, his eyes shut, his purr an echo of his mother’s crooning.

When the sharp bite nipped his shoulder again, his muscle twitched, that’s all.

A fly. An irritating fly when life was so good.

Odd that the cub had come into his territory after he had eaten and was feeling drowsy. A brave cub. To enter his lair and wrest the naked bone away, through the tall shafts of iron grass.

A brave, strong cub. Where had it come from? He had heard no mewling of young here, just the snarls and cries of the old and forsaken….

He felt himself slump over on his side. On the side where he had been bitten. Again. Perhaps he would wake up with the two-legs he knew and trusted. Perhaps the food would come often from now on, as before, and this last vision was just the uneasy milk-dream of a besotted cub. A small spotted cub. No. Black. Solid black. Of the kind they call panther. White teeth, red tongue like fresh meat, heart of lion.

If he saw the cub again, he would share some of his meat with it. His head felt as big as an elephant’s. He tried to prick his ears, but they lay limp, dulled by the buzzing of a thousand tsetse flies.

*   *   *

The smell is odd. There is none.

No. There are traces of odor, but faint, like the scent the two-legs leave.

His head lifts. He now lies on grass.

No.

He lies on the short grass the two-legs line their lairs with.

It smells like the water in the pool in his home lair, pungent, sharp, not of blood and bone, but of nothingness. That smell had been all around his home lair, and his slowed heart begins to pound faster in the happy excitement of recognizing the familiar.

He is in his home lair again! Inside the two-legs’ lair, as he had been allowed now and again. For flashes from their machines, when they praised him like purrs. Good boy. Handsome boy. Osiris. Yes.

He pushes himself upright on buckling paws. Gets to his legs, wobbles like a cub. Good cub. He is still full.

He had heard of the old days. Feast and famine, the elders called it. Wild days of hunt and hunger, one first, the other second. Always hunt or hunger. He had not known hunger until these last hours, these last three sunfalls and sunbeams.

Now it is dark.

No, not quite dark.

It is a dark filled with the balls of the two-legs’ light. Warm when you sleep under it. Cool as sky-brights when it is far away.