Pets in prose

Leo Li writes about the mysterious black cat in ‘Black Cat Syndrome’

Iam the black cat in the corner.

As yet I have no name, nor home.

There was a time, centuries and lives ago, when humans loved me as the Sun loves to tinge my back rust-red, and bejewels my pupils with onyx radiance; a time in which my ancestors were household gods pedestalled on lacquered-wooden pantheons, and death was not the colour black. But in this city, in this particular intersection of Dundas St. and Sai Yeung Choi St. S., memories and passions go with their times like they’ve never existed. And there’s nothing as ominous as a cat that looks just like its shadow.

So, just maybe, if I were rust-red all the time, if the Sun’s always out and night never falls, wayfarers would set their eyes on me without unconcealable disdain for once. Because I still remember their glares as cold as car roofs in winter dusks. I remember hearing their unspoken convictions –7 th February, Muriel the blue-braceleted busker was hit by a taxi, whose 56 year-old driver was high on LSD, died on the way to Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Landladypawnbroker Wong at 25 Tung Choi St. called me a witch’s death-charm. 16 th March, two men in their forties fought over a Godzilla figurine in CTMA Centre; three teeth from each of them and the tail from the figurine had been broken o when the police arrived. With the figurine’s tail in his left hand and a gaping wound on his right, the storeowner almost added my hind legs to the set of broken things.

1 st April, two 16 year-olds thought April Fool’s jokes were still a thing and attempted to throw me around like a volleyball. They didn’t know volleyballs don’t have legs.

20 th July, Patrick the low-to-no-earning salaryman was more drunk than ever, mistook me as the depressive black mist that had enveloped the city for a month; also mistook me as a cockroach until he tried to step on me and realised I’m much bigger.

31 st August, people were rushing to and from Prince Edward. Some of them called me ‘damn sabo-tabby’, others wished death upon my entire nonexistent family. All their shouts and screeches and squeals of horror and ecstasy dissolved in gaseous tears. My yellow eyes were watching like gods’. Christmas’ Eve, first in about five years since nobody remembered the jocular melodies of corals. All but indistinct mutterings and death threats against their own futures, accidentally and incidentally directed against me. ‘Back to the dark, where you belong’. Today, New Year’s Eve, I choose to hide in penumbral quiet. There is comfort in it, even without the Sun’s warmth, without the rust-red it gives, without the photonic rustling that breaks wintry silence. But tonight there are too many howls, and yowls, and disquiets from trail’s ends and roundabouts. Fling your curses at the core of malice and drive your speared chariots at time, instead of at me. Don’t you know we share mutual enemies, of the untouchable, coloured with hateful transparency?

As I walk into the reckoning light, shone upon the dirty dark by you lighthouse keepers and universal pacifists who read Szymborska and Kundera at tea, I am obliterated. Because I love you more than you do – Muriel, and Wong, and Patrick, and all the nameless ghosts your harbours fail to hold – a cat is too little to hold your kind of hatred, as big as the harsh Moon. Yet the world orphans me, like it does the truth-telling ravens on your windowsills, or the terriers whose barks are angel-songs instead of war-cries, or some of your kind, just not so fortunate that they’re casted out into the night. And we’ll stay in the night, as you wish, until you decide to step into our domain and see for yourself its borderless beauty.