in the beginning

Our Cat Tom

Sue was woken by the persistent lisp of another breathing insidiously stealthy cunnilingally near her. Nick lay stertorously wheezing in an aura of sewage. She shook him but the strange insistent noises continued. A debilitating wave of fear swept through her. In her minds eye the image of a great long tongued demon performing on itself on her dresser – and watching her.

Summoning up all her courage she tried to rise to face her fears but found herself unable to move pinned to the bed by a great weight that drove the air from her lungs and seemed to increase in a crescendo of pressure in response to her feeble stirrings. A strange primeval terror rose within her and realising she was powerless unable even to cry out she surrendered to her fate. She felt the unrolling of some huge supernatural being as it gathered itself above her then a breeze of warm foetid air awash with memories of the slaughter of innocents hellish scenes in flickering lamplight – a shadow fell across the rictus of her terror gripped face – and a great brown marmalade head appeared over the horizon of the bedspread, ears like steeples a furrowed brow like ozymandias broad as the Pennine mountains that bore him.

He cast one reproachful glance upon the amazed creature beneath him then drew back his mottled lips from his great white felines lifted his head and as the world stood still awaiting the word produced a boneshattering miaow of such plaintive sorrow such disappointment heightened by the pre lapsarian nuances implied in such heartrending loss that a great vista opened in the awestruck consciousness of the poor amazed wretch beneath – a window showing sylvan scenes of loss unearthed from the collective unconscious the anima mundi of all mankind – the dejected exit from Eden, Krishna’s sorrow for radha on the edge of the underworld where his lack of faith lost her, Nigel tufnel leaving spinal tap, the death of chatterton, the Elgin marbles, Jesus, the last pair of great auks sailing into the seamist out of loch Neagh seen by a wildfowler later admonished by the royal society of natural history for not shooting them for posterity, bonfire night. Maybe i'd better feed him thought nick reluctantly.