Part one
The sun sparkles on your fur as you rise to your paws. You are a cat and you have a human named Suzy. It’s early Monday morning as you decide whether whatever woke you up is worth investigating or if you should just go right back to sleep in the warm patch of sun.
The sun was behind you when you first lay down on the cushion − now it’s glaring in your eyes. You decide it’s not worth finding a new position and get up. Where is Suzy? It is time for lunch and you are hungry! An earsplitting meow will probably bring her running from any corner of the house. So you scream for her.
She doesn’t come. You begin to get worried. What has happened to Suzy? Usually around this time she’s staring, fascinated, at one of the leafy things she calls a book while you nap somewhere on the floor nearby. But today she is missing.
You go and walk around the house. You don’t search in all your favorite nooks and crannies to see if she’s hiding there because you know that Suzy is only a human and can’t fit into your special places. When you can’t find her, you decide to look out the window to see if her car is there.
You sit on your favorite front-facing windowsill and look out on your yard. It is perfect, with long grass perfect for stalking. You’re glad that Suzy doesn’t know one end of a lawnmower from the other and doesn’t particularly want to. Your yard may not be as big as Henry’s down the road, but at least you can actually defend all of it. Henry doesn’t even know that he has five or six stray tabbies living on his yard. Now you, you would know if another cat moved in before it could even sit down if not sooner!
You realize in all of your territorial thinking you have forgotten what you came up to this windowsill to do − look for Suzy’s car. Since you can’t see it, she must have gone out on an errand or something. The problem is solved. Now you think you will go out for a stroll and see what that sparrow you noticed yesterday is doing.
You hop off the window sill and over to the back door. There’s your cat flap, and it swings invitingly. You slip through it and saunter through your yard.
There’s that sparrow, and he’s in his tree. Unfortunately it’s a springy sapling, with really thin branches that bounce when you walk on them. Sometimes they bounce you right off. If you really wanted to, you could get that annoying sparrow. And his little family of chicks for dessert. But you don’t think a couple of lean sparrows is worth getting flung up and down until you lose your kitty chow, so you check the fence.
The fence is an excellent boundary. You like it. It shows other cats that this is your main place, the heart of your territory! Of course, you can always get over it and extend your hunting territory as far as you like past the fence.
Today you’re not feeling solitary, so you find your favorite launching point to get over the fence − a low-arching tree branch − and scale it. If looking for more of a challenge, you could always use a corner of the fence to get over, or just go straight up it. Even though the fence doesn’t have any gaps in it, like some fences you’ve seen, it wouldn’t be that hard for an experienced climber.
Once you’re over, you ramble off to the place where no cat can claim as territory, but where every cat can meet.
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Short story in five parts. I wrote it as an experiment with the 'you' point of view.
The Somewhat Odd and Mostly Random Musings and Writings of a Young Would-Be Author
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