Chapter Three: Beauty and the Beast

BEAUTY IS ONLY FUR DEEP

My mistress says beauty is only skin deep. Well, I guess you can say beauty is only fur deep with a cat. I once knew a beautiful cat. She was a picture-perfect, pin-up cat. The type of cat that people use as a model to make delicate, porcelain figurines or a stuffed toy kitty cat that babies hug and take to bed.

She had a face like an angel. Heart-shaped, a small button nose with a pink tip, and eyes like enormous moons floating in a sea of smooth, gray silk. A gray and white cat, petite, delicate, and demur to look at, but underneath, she was a seething caldron of hatred and spite. I don’t know what turns a cat evil. It must be like people. Was she mistreated as a baby? Was her mother on drugs? Or is it some genetic disjunction passed on through cat DNA that sets the chromosome for destruction? Destruction of those around her, not her.

Anyway, here I am a baby kitty with my tail in the air, my legs weak and wobbly, and suddenly, I am catapulted across a space by a fistful of sharp claws. I squeal, and this causes everyone to run to my aid as I land on my back with all four legs in the air with a rounded belly held up as tempting as a rump roast fresh from the oven. My belly would not end up between the jaws of that beautiful gray and white cat this time, but there were so many other times, I lost count. I would crawl through a door---SWAT!---I was knocked for nineses. I would peek around a corner---SWAT!---around my box---SWAT! I would hold my breath, and wobble, wobble, wobble, and suddenly---SWAT! I was hit so many times, I could have applied for a job as a baseball.

I thought cats were supposed to love cats. But I guess I was wrong. Do people, because they are people, love other people? I guess not.

Well, I found the most wonderful friend, and in all places, in one whom cats consider an enemy. His jaws were bigger than my body. His teeth bigger than my head. His tongue twice the length of my back. Yet, I could crawl between his front legs, stick my head over the rim of his dinner bowl, and while his jaws and sharp white teeth went crunch, crunch, crunch over my head, and his pink tongue swirled over my ears like the mounting winds of a hurricane, he never touched my head. One misplaced lap of the tongue would have decapitated me. One, large, slipped slurp of Crunchie Munchies Dog Chow would have sucked into his esophagus as fast as Jonah slid into the belly of the whale. Yet, he knew I was there. Brave, little kitty sticking his head under the jaws of a huge, wolf-like dog.

And whenever that beautiful cat went SWAT! My friend, Bombadil, would snap his jaws. He would pull up the black skin rimming his mouth, and show his pink gums that held teeth, white, shinning and sharp, like the spikes of a drawbridge, and he would growl. You know, that beautiful cat who hated me so, almost died of freight. It took a long time, but eventually, she did.

Chapter Two : The Lamb and The Box

That first night, I graduated out of the red baseball cap and found myself in a hastily contrived breadbasket alongside a stuffed toy named Lammie --a lamb who was ten times my size, who was fluffy and pure white, and who had two black eyes, a button nose, and a soft underbelly, suspending four long legs. This was fine for me. I fit perfectly into the cavity between his legs. I later discovered the lamb was part of a Christmas Manger for the Christ Child. I knew I had good company. The lamb didn’t have wings, but somehow, I knew Lammie was my guardian angel.

The woman said I’d think the toy was my own cat mother because of the soft fur. Really? She was wrong, you know. I lost my mother when I found myself in that red baseball cap, and whether the woman liked it or not, I was hers. All hers.

The cooing started again in the morning when she picked me up. I was so small, I fit on the top of her hand, and when she put me on the floor, I wobbled. I wobbled with my tail straight up and my nose pointing toward the dish with milk. There were more oooohs and ahhhhs when she realized I could lap milk by myself. She doesn’t know how self sufficient we cats can be. You wouldn’t see a baby on the floor at my age, would you? "Baby, get off the floor. Baby, stop licking the cat dish!"

Lammie and the breadbasket were my whole world, for all I thought about was sleeping and eating. Tell you the truth, little has changed in seventeen years. When it became obvious that I was becoming more adventurous and would possibly climb out of my basket at night, the basket was placed in a huge cardboard box, and the box was placed by my new Mummy’s bed. It was like being in the bottom of an elevator shaft. These tall straight brown walls rose up to infinity. But I devised a game. I would leap from the basket, grab onto the wall with my claws and slide all the way to the bottom. Thummmpp! Scratccchhhh! Thump! Scratccccccchhhhhh! This made a wonderful sound at 2:00a.m. in the morning when accompanied by mewing, so the tempo increased into Mew! Mew! Thump! Scratchhhhhhhh! Mew! Mew! Thump! Scratch! And then, suddenly, Mummy’s husband would pick me up.

My Mummy said growing up in a box was good for me, because it would teach me to appreciate the world more when I was allowed to explore. She said a lot of people grow up in boxes like mine, but they never get out. They go through life only seeing the sides of their box. They never appreciate the wondrous world outside of their own confines, and sadly, carry their boxes filled with limitations, narrow mindness, and tunnel vision with them even when they travel. Isn’t that absurd? All those humans walking around with brown cardboard boxes over their heads. I am so glad cats don’t wear boxes.

But you know, my box had another side. Not to keep me in, but to keep someone out. That someone was another cat. The meanest, cleverest, most spiteful cat anyone would want to meet. "She’ll eat you, that’s what she’ll do," my Mummy said. "She’ll think you are nothing more than a rat."

Wow! I was growing up fast. I had a guardian angel, and now I had an evil presence---a cat!

Chapter One: The Red Cap - the very beginning

How I ended up in a red baseball cap, I have no idea.

I was shivering. I was the size of a small bird curled up in the bottom of the cap that belonged to a man who discovered me on a steep hill side that was blanketed with a tangled mass of foliage and cactus and plunged over limestone cliffs to the South Shore Rd. in Bermuda. Far below me, I heard the crash of waves on the rocky shoreline of Watch Hill Park, and filtering through the fabric, I felt the crisp, ocean breeze of a cold November night.

I was mewling pathetically. My eyes were barely open. I don't remember who my mother was or if I had brothers and sisters. Voices swirled overhead saying that someone must have ptiched me out of a car onto the cliffs to get rid of me. This made me mewl louder. I never did anything naughty. Who would want to "get rid" of me? Asides, no one was paying attention to how hungry I was. When a large, pink finger, dripping with a white bubble of milk, appeared overhead, I snatched the milk with my tongue and bit down hard, hoping to find more. My teeth were needle sharp. I broke the skin on the finger and tasted blood. May I assure you, I did not do this on purpose.

When the screech of the woman who owned the finger subsided, she replaced it with a soft bird-like cooing. "It's just a baby," she said. "Ahhhhhh...oooohhhhhhh.....ahhhhhhh. Isn't it beautiful?" Beautiful? It? It's me. Hungry kitty. I wished she would just shut up and give me some more milk.

"I'll take care of it until it gets larger, and then find it a home," the woman said. There was that 'it' thing again, and I wondered what the word "home" meant. Shortly after, I was lapping up more streams of milk as it flowed over her finger tips and was careful, this time, not to clamp down on her skin. I sighed. My balloon belly was full, gurgling with contentment. I flopped on my back, a blissfully, happy black and white kitten, and went to sleep, still in the red cap.

You know, that was the beginning. The beginning of my life. I don't remember my birth, but I do remember that my new Mummy did not have the elegant, sensuous face of a cat. She did not have long, handsome whiskers. She did not have blazing yellow eyes nor a pink sandpaper tongue to wash my face. She did not have a soft, furry belly nor feline teats to feed me. Yet, I look at her now, and when she tells me that I am still beautiful, even after seventeen years, I know she is most wonderful Mummy I could have wished for. I know she has loved me intensely every minute since she first saw me curled in the bottom of the red cap.

And you know what? I love her just as intensely in return.