Cat of Signs

I think she is also me, a me/she, but she has no fur and I never see her lick herself to wash. When she eats I feel it in my stomach as a purr, particularly if it is a dish of vanilla ice cream, of which we are particularly fond. To witness small lumps of it move from the china dish to her mouth by means of a silver spoon is exquisite delight. And sometimes it is then I think I love her without reserve; and sometimes I think we are simply the same creature. She leaves the dish for me to lick clean.

She spends even more time lying on the bed than I do. I have noticed. The other one gets up while it is still dark and leaves the house but she stays sleeping, sometimes lifting her head to say something to me. She says, hello baby or hey, and sometimes she says oh or no. I come close to her face and sniff. It is almost my own body but a little sweeter if she has had a bath and covered herself with lavender oil. Sometimes she gets up in the middle of the night (the other one never does). She walks from room to room, restless for water, or I feel a need to pee and so she goes to have a pee and I put my head around the door which she always leaves open, and I watch her. And sometimes we don’t sleep. I keep her company on the night watch for a while, but I would rather be sleeping so mostly I carry on doing that while she goes on being awake and rummaging in the shoe box where she keeps all her white pills.

I help her with her work. The work I like best is when she stands by her wooden board with a knife in her hand and begins to chop carrots to put in a stew, or when she rubs yellow oil all over the smooth skin of a chicken before it roasts golden in the oven and fills our house with its rich body perfume that makes me think of birds. And I like the work where she writes words into a big book with a metal spiral down the spine. I jump onto the table and walk across the page, bring my bottom close to her face so she knows I am with her. But mostly she has been lying in the bed, which I like, but just sometimes it makes me lonely and then it is the same as when I am all by myself in the house for a very long time with her and him gone from me and just the feeling of some part of me missing. I like it when she opens her eyes.

One of my best times is when he points the black thing with buttons at the moving picture box and we sit watching men running around a field while someone kicks a ball, and she sits in the little room across the landing by the word box, tapping her fingers on letter buttons saying, can you turn the volume down when there is too much cheering from the crowd of people in the picture box.

I like it when they plant a tree in the sitting room and put candles and small shiny things on it, and underneath the tree there is a tiny house with just one room that is filled with animals, a woman dressed in blue, a man in brown and a baby lying in some straw. On top of the house, at the front, there is someone with wings blowing a trumpet and she is fixed to it with an elastic band.

Elastic bands are one of my favourite things. I also like pieces of wire, pom poms and balls of wool but you can’t chase them as much as elastic bands.

I can’t think of anything else to say, so she can stop tapping now. There is a piece of fish lying in the kitchen and I am thinking about it. Interested.