The Cat Woman

Posted on June 10, 2003 in Attitudes Book of Days Cats Strange

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a compromise.

I had an online friend — lost now in a history that got trashed in a hard disk crash about seven years ago when the net was young and people didn’t blog — who slept with seven cats every night.

P was a timid woman who I imagine was small and trained in meekness by harsh parents. She allowed this attitude to so dominate her that she allowed each cat to pick its own spot on the bed and contorted her own body to suit them. One cat wrapped itself under her chin like a scarf; a second spread its four legs over the top of her head like the ribs of an umbrella. There was a cat who rested on her breasts and another who loafed on the soft hump of her bare stomach. Two more curled in the vicinity of her knees — one along the part of the leg below the patella and the second in the crooked crease behind the joint. The last feline — an introvert or an autist who did not like the touch or proximity of the others — selected a far corner of the bed away from the rest.

P was a woman who did not compromise when it came to the comfort of her pets or of anything else that entered her life. Her boyfriends moved into her house, used her as they would a rag, and moved out again. As for the cats, they caused her a measure of pain that bears remark. Every morning, she woke with a sore back and, though only in her early forties, hobbled like a crone across the street to catch the bus where she undoubtably allowed herself to be pressed into the cobalt blue pre-molded seats at whatever angle suited her fellow passengers.

I learned this from my shadow, who took the example of P and beamed knowledge through it on the photo paper that shows realistic thinking so that the negatives in this example revealed a positive lesson: In a compromise, you must be given enough for your own health and peace of mind as well as return the same to others.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a mistaken identity.