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He’s not a cat, he’s a cat-shaped hole in the universe. Oh, he moves like a cat, and he looks like a cat, and he sounds like a cat when he mewls and rasps, but his sleek lines and wave-like undulations are described by the field equation; nothing more, and his fur is only soft because of the disintegration of the exclusion principles.
I project pride on to him; imagining he licks himself clean. As though dust could do anything other than drift inescapably toward his horizon. Or that the sunbeams in which he basks could warm in any way; that they were not simply perfectly absorbed. His eyes might be the death of suns, or colossal nebula themselves; there is no parallax effect to tell them apart.
The harmonics of his purr resonate the eternal mantra, echoes that last fourteen billion years and speak of inflation and fluctuation, and are mapped in the cosmic afterglow. He is also heavier than he looks. The vet said to give him diet food, but I suspect dark matter. When he swishes his tail, it moves so fast through space that time recedes. This must be true, because the hairs on its tip are younger than those at the base.
The eyes of the bird left dead on my doorstep are wide, shocked and startled; the orbs of one who has stared into the deep, deep void of night. Mere beings of the earth were not meant to touch the infinite. She is an Icarus of the cold; flown too close the absolute, and taken for her presumption.
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One day, Charlie, as the children call him, disappears. They walk the streets all evening banging bowls and cooing. I let them hope. I copy their poster, enlarged and pixellated, a true distortion. We sellotape it to trees which constellate the sky with pink-white cherry blossoms, vortexing in the breeze. We sellotape it to sodium-lights whose orange fug encase us myopically to our dismal plane. I can’t tell them the truth, they are too young to understand.
After a few weeks of searching they learn to grieve and Charlie’s work is done. We buy a kitten, a real one, that eats and shits and plays. But I know that in a million years’ time, some being far away from here will observe that star beyond us, and see that it suddenly jumps back into place. And there will be wonder at how the music of the heavens must tease at all life so.
About Richard Denny
R.S.W. de Mox is based in London and writes contemporary fiction with a strong lyrical bent; hip-hop poetry and electronica prose. He grew up in Lancashire and is now based in south London. He writes fiction and poetry and has previously been published by Lighthouse Journal and Flash Fiction Magazine.
