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.