…so I have written a story. I didn’t like any of the prompts I found online; they were all things like “lol describe your worst experience” or “write about three objects in your room,” and I am not quite bored enough to write a story about my computer, desk, and Nalgene bottle. This morning Quark, my little hellacious fluffball, met Pandora, who belongs to Tracy and who briefly escaped the guest room she’s been trapped in for the past few weeks. Here’s a story about their encounter:

She smelled funny. Not funny like the bizarre new mush-in-a-can that his owner had been dishing into his bowl for the past few days, the can certified ORGANIC with a smiling dopey tabby on the label, but funny in a bad way. Here before him, three yards away, was a fellow member of his species, and he didn’t like it.

She narrowed her eyes. Not a hiss or meow, which offended him. This was his territory. He had been hard at work every day, rubbing his fur against every square inch within reach, and there had been a lot of surface area to cover in the vast and cluttered living room. This was his territory, by all rights, and who was this thing anyways? That was his cardboard box lid she now perched upon, narrowing her eyes at him and not even having the decency to say hello or touch noses.

She crept forward. One of the big clumsy beings, not his own, was making nonsensical noises at the intruder, attempting to coax her out from under the table, no doubt. His table. Avoiding the big clumsy being, she crept closer to him, and he now had a better look at her. Suddenly confused, he drew back, sitting up straight and tall, hoping he’d fluffed up his tail enough to give the impression that he was bigger than her.

Which, as he now discovered, he was not. In fact, now that he could see her, she looked uncannily like what he saw in the tall reflective glass that his big clumsy sometimes stood in front of in the mornings, blocking his way to the food bowl. He had some vague notion that the image he saw was himself. Now the image had escaped the glass and perched before him, in his cardboard box lid, smelling funny and pissing him off.

Wiggle, said a voice from within, the same voice that urged him to eat the tasty houseplants when the big clumsy one wasn’t looking. Wiggle.

And he wiggled his rear end, gathering momentum for the kill. And he pounced.

The act of pouncing evoked some ancestral memory, deeply wired beneath the domestic softness and torpitude that generations of inbreeding and co-habitation with the big clumsy ones had engendered. The three yards of cheap, dingy gray carpet beneath his thundering paws transformed into the wild savannah; she was the rival lionness that had strayed into his territory. His non-existent front claws extended to become long blades, sharp as the knives in the adjacent kitchen. Alarmed and humbled, the lionness turned tail and scattered, into the welcoming arms of the clumsy one, who ushered her back into the guest room, out of his territory, off the lush savannah.

Satisfied, he reclaimed the cardboard box lid. It didn’t matter to him that he could not quite all the way inside, and that his fur and fat draped over one of the edges. It was his.