Cat In A Leopard Spot

He moves a step or two, feeling his pads sink into the shaven grass. He brushes a rock. One of the two-legs’ rocks that sits on legs.

It shudders and shakes, as if oncoming hooves are thundering. He has heard hooves here. Like the great tall beasts in iron shoes he has seen from time to time, who also play for the two-legs.

The four-legged rock tumbles onto its side, as he had done not long ago, dropping some things that tinkle like stones and shatter.

He sees a long low shape in the night, much like his mother to his cub eyes. He goes to rub against it for warmth and purr and recognition. But it is cold and still, though somewhat soft. He stretches and feels a need to sharpen his dulled claws. Rip, rip, rip. They sink in as they have never done before, catching in the mother shape, making a sharp, shearing sound that both frightens and pleases him. Now there is a smell. Raw meat. Tangy juice.

He leaps back, his claws snagging as they never have before. The mother shape wobbles, then falls over on its side with a loud thud.

He leaps away, free, and skitters across the short grass, his amazingly long and sharp claws digging into polished wood, sending rags flying as he courses through the darkness shuddering into rocks and hummocks and toys, perhaps, like the huge smooth balls he has learned to perch on.

Noises follow this progress as they do in the dark lair lit by falling stars to which he is brought almost every night to perform his rituals that bring food.

Hunting, he calls it. He performs the rituals, and the food follows and he is full and happy and gets to sleep afterward for long, lazy hours.

He knows the rhythm of that life and those places, but all here is jangled and misplaced. He is clumsy and hurling into unseen, unsuspected barriers, all vaguely familiar, but all specifically strange.

His heart is pounding, as is his head. He is glad he has eaten, because the Hunger that was with him earlier was like a ravening ghost of himself and he could not say that he would be friend to any two-leg no matter how familiar because the Hunger said Eat, and the two-leg was to be Eaten. That is a terrible thought. Thank the Mother-cub that came to feed him. He is not driven by the alien Hunger. He is himself, though lost and confused and afraid.

A noise.

The startled sound of a two-leg.

A bright light sunshine all around him so he can see nothing through his narrowest slits of vision.

A two-leg, roaring with surprise or anger.