Eerie by Gillian

Cats.

It’s all about cats.

I love cats, but, face it, they are not completely of this earth. They inhabit a slightly different plane, or at least they see this one very differently. Anyone who has spent much time in the company of a cat knows this. They sit completely still and stare fixedly at something in the corner that none of us can see. They wake from one of a dozen daily dozes to rush off into another room for no reason that we can comprehend.

Growing up as I did in a farming community, everyone had cats. Mostly they were of the marginally domesticated kind who lived in the barns and sheds and fed primarily on the other critters living there. Before the days of spaying, they reproduced prodigiously and the kittens were traditionally drowned as soon as they were discovered.

My mother discovered Delilah with her latest brood, burrowed into a pile of leaves under a hedge, and my poor father was summoned to do the dastardly deed. A gentle, kind-hearted man, he hated this job, which always fell to him. He waited until Delilah had temporarily vacated her position, scooped up the kittens and did the dirty deed. A couple of days later we discovered Delilah, again, half asleep and purring lazily behind a hay bale, curled lovingly around a single kitten.

Had she known what was about to happen? Had she figured one was better than none? And how did she know that not one of us could even begin to think of depriving her of her hidden child? The Mona Lisa look she gave us, an extraordinary yet eminently decipherable mixture of triumph and challenge and love, seemed to answer all our questions.

    

My Mother with Delilah

When I was married we had a huge war-torn, old, yellow cat called FatCat. One day he jumped up onto my lap, nothing unusual, then pushed under the book I was trying to read, lying flat on my chest. He purred loudly, also nothing unusual. He pushed himself further up towards my face, with front paws on either side of my neck, and stared into my eyes.

I couldn’t say why this was so unnerving. There was simply something about the intensity of those eyes peering searchingly into mine as if trying to see something there, or perhaps actually seeing something there. Or yet again, it was more as if he was trying to tell me something. I threw him roughly off me, at which he and my husband both gave me a surprised look. 

"He was staring into my soul." No of course I didn’t say that. “He was digging his claws in my neck,” was all I actually said, feigning nonchalance.

FatCat gave me a disappointed look like a parent might cast upon a child who has let him down, and stalked off. A few hours later I received a phone call that my mother had died, peacefully in her bed as the saying goes but in my mother’s case it was true, in England. When I adjusted for the time difference, my mom had died right around the time that old FatCat was peering into my eyes.

OK OK it’s all coincidence and a product of that kind of overactive imagination that kicks in around the death of a loved one.

I knew that.

I know that.

But there’s a tiny spark in me that still somehow manages to wonder.

FatCat

© 5 March 2012

 About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.