Short Story: 'The cat and the curtains'

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By Kaya Burgess

The odd moment of madness keeps you sane, in the end. Staring out of a window at a frosty sunrise and laughing for no reason, apparent or otherwise. There’s nothing funny in the sunrise, not inherently. It’s just that it’s there, and there you are, staring at it. Maybe it’s staring back at you through sky eyes, laughing too. What an idiot, it thinks, standing there, pyjamas on weary legs, fatigue-laden eyes struggling to re-open after every blink, chuckling into an amber sunrise long-broken over the corrugated rooftops.

A white cat with no tail looks sceptically up from the garden below, eyebrow cocked in quiet purring disdain. You catch its gaze. It's as if she knows what you’re thinking, knowing to look into your eyes just in your flickering moment of insanity. Perhaps there’s someone trapped in the cat! staring out of it – a woman’s mind trapped in the body of a tail-less cat, doomed to wander the kempt gardens of blustery suburbia and stare back at half-clad early-risers still wincing from the alarm clock’s wail.

MAYBE she too once stood at a window, laughing into an oblivious dawn, when a tail-less cat sucked in her soul through its lusty old-gold eyes...

Probably not, if you’re honest. Soul-sucking cats? You really are mad.

A girl stands in a sash window facing yours away in the distance across the clipped hedgerows, like a far-fetched valentine. You think you see her smile as she stands there in a grey vest and dark shorts. She is too far away to make out a smile, but you are too far away to have any shame. You wave a modest, from-the-elbow sort of wave. She waves back and then, instantly regretting it, draws the blind. You laugh again. Pull on a t-shirt.

Bare soles seek out carpeted stairs as intrepid morning feet pad towards the cold-floored kitchen. A yawning fridge bears little of breakfastly consequence. Toast? Fucking toast. Surprised at your animosity towards toast, you rescue an apologetic-looking apple from a bowl of suicidal fruit and turn the kettle on, before remembering why you don’t like tea and heading back upstairs. It’s upstairs that things happen, you remember. Trousers, socks, underwear (chequered, today). Teeth brushed first to avoid gobbing on freshly-ironed shirt. A shirt which clashes with all your ties. Open-collared today, you think!

The cat is still looking at you, weirding you out a little. “Open-collared!?”, thinks the cat, disgusted. You slowly mouth ‘fuck - off’ to the cat, who does. You laugh. Again. What does a cat know about ties, anyway? She doesn’t even have a tail. Sartorial feline nonsense, you think - quite rightly.

You are now clothed. Most of the curtains remain closed, bathing the flat in a foreboding blue-rinse glow.

“Don’t go outside!!”, the curtains cry. “We can see out, trust us, there’s nothing for you out there! Mayhem and madness, only! Flocks and herds and prides and murders of the slack-jawed and foolhardy!”

You ignore the curtains (for what do they know?) and unbolt the door. The tail-less cat, anticipating your every move, waits on the front path. It seems to mouth ‘fuck you too’ before trotting proudly up the pavement with its arse.

The world appears to stretch yawningly away from your front door. The journey ahead seems like an odyssey through a nonsense world where no-one can tell what matters from what is plainly bollocks. Plainly. Bollocks. Starting with that smug bastard cat and including all and everything else. Including you, most probably. You can’t even tell if you should care. It really is far too early in the morning.

You nod goodbye to the curtains, who look sorrowfully out at you, a little bitter. The Edgar Allan Poe-faced cat has made her way in the opposite direction, where she sits with a totemic I-can-lick-my-bum sort of smirk. Your mismatching socks are safely tucked away in sole-worn shoes which carry you out into that laughable sunrise, now well and truly sunrisen and on its way to mid-morning, by which time you should really be wherever it is you’re going before whoever it is you work for berates you for not doing whatever it is you do.

“Cheerio curtains and cat. Until we meet again. Later, probably.”

You expect they’ll still be there later. The curtains, at any rate.
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London, 2008, towards winter, a bit to the east.

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I'll have a Missouri please, Bob...

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Remember Blockbusters, with dear old Bob Holness? Where two people ganged up on one in a letter-based quiz-battle to get from one edge of the board to the other before your opponent could cut off your route and beat you to it?

Well, following the belated announcement that the US state of Missouri finally declared John McCain the winner in the state's presidential ballot, it seems that Blockbusters may be the only chance the late Mr McCain (in political terms) has to retrospectively claim victory.

No crying foul over miscounts or iffy voting machines this time, I'm afraid. Only the dubious moral victory of having joined the Canadian and Mexican borders in a Blockbusters-esque move down the spine of the USA.


Sure, Obama took the whole east coast, but he was clearly the favourite (the equivalent of the two-man Blockbusters team) and so had to go laterally across to win. And Alaska is on the east coast anyway, so there.

Here ends my ground-breaking political insight.
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