Homage to E.H.

It is night.  The cat makes its rounds through the stillness of the night.  It pads across the deck on its white paws, not caring what anyone thinks of its leaving paw marks on the clean, not-well-lighted wood of the deck.

The cat scratches the glass of the window.  It seeks the food it needs to sustain its nocturnal rounds, as it does very day.  It has come for the food in good times and in bad.  These are good times.  Later it will be bad.

The cat finds its food in the dish set outside the door.  It eats hungrily, for it has had nothing to eat since the previous night.  It is a medium size cat.  Its calico pelt hides it well in the places where it spends the nighttime hours.  There are enemies out there in the dark.

It eats its fill, and then leaves.  No one knows where it goes.  Night after night it comes, eats, and leaves.  Not shoots and leaves, señor.  It eats proper cat food.  Sometimes the food comes in cans.  Other times it comes in large paper bags with the picture of a happy kitten printed on the outside.

The cat has not eaten all of the food.  Its stomach is filled, and it leaves, and leaves part of the leavings as leftovers in the dish which has been set out to feed it.

The stillness of the night is wounded by sounds of quarreling animals.  Perhaps the animals are mating, for it is spring, and animals in the wild often mate in the spring.  As they also drink from it.

In the darkness, a family of beasts arrives.  They have snarling faces with white burglar masks over their dark eyes.  There are three of them, two large, one small.  They eat the leftover cat food in the dish.  They drink the water.  Their tails are bushy and have stripes.  They have very long claws that can tear a can open.  One does not confront beasts such as these.  Not in the night.  Not unless one has a firearm.

The cat does not appear the next night.  Or the next. Or the one after that.

The food that has been set out night after night for the cat is eaten.  It is eaten by the family of bandit beasts, who leave their paw marks and spilled food across the formerly clean, not-well-lighted deck.  No more food is put out for the missing cat.

One wonders about the cat.  Has it, too, become cat food?