Thirteen Little Gods
In each kingdom of concrete apartment complexes, there are thirteen lazy cat gods among the locks and lifts. With them comes their faithful disciple and sworn protector, the crazy cat lady. No mortal landlord could bear the atlasian task of watching over them. And, like Atlas passing his eternal burden, there is no precedent for a crack in the rock or a falter in the divine madness of caring for thirteen whiskered and apathetic gods. --------- When Mrs. Morrison, local crazy cat lady, died, her cats began the search for their next host. I knew that I was chosen when I began hearing their damning scrit-scratches against my apartment door. It took them eight days to wear me down, but once the edges of my reality began to wither like the leaves of an autumn tree caught on the edge of boundless summer and the heat death of the universe, I knew that I had to fill the fracture. --------- When I opened the door and grasped the knitting needle and scepter of yarn to save this little patch of fluorescent decay, the gods hardly blinked. With the opening of the floodgates came a trickle of infinitely powerful furballs into my studio apartment from where they would now rule with what was a soft but firm fist. Their authority was felt, not heard, so I could not name them. I knew them only by the order the first through thirteenth cat had entered into my then undirected and meaningless life. --------- Being a twenty-something who just moved across the country from the suburbs of Cincinnati, the cats didn’t think I quite fit the intended description. My hair went first. The more I washed it, the more matted and gray it became until the sixth cat might as well have been nesting in it all. Then went my vision. 20/20 vision makes a woman trustingly blind, I thought I heard one of the cats meow one day. I found a pair of glasses a few mornings later That rounded my eyes like saucers And skirted at the very edges of my temples. --------- When the edges began to wither like leaves once more they did not brown for me. The twelfth cat was the quietest of the bunch. He was content to sit from afar and listen and absorb through his droopy jowels. But suddenly, his orange lightbulb eyes implored me, his devout and blind follower. For many days without respite he would not leave my side. He sat in whatever it was I was knitting and knudged the needles from my hands; he laid his paw upon my mine as if to thank me. --------- I woke one morning to scrit-scratches on my hairy legs leading me to the twelfth cat’s favorite patch of light near the radiator where he lay still. The twelve other cats draped themselves around him and purred with an earthquake of woe that cracked the atoms in my floorboards and shook the gravity from my ceiling. For three days I watched over them as my apartment began to disintegrate. The TV played static while my lights flickered, spat, and lost their spark. ----- On the third day, the apartment lost all power and even my thick as cat fat glasses could not sift through the fuzzy waning light of the day. I’d never been as cold as I was that night knowing I had failed to hold the gods on the knit wool of my shoulders. But as the sun came over the sill of my windows and struck upon the mass of divine fur and whiskers on my wood apartment floor, thirteen cats rose mewing with the coming day to face their kingdom of concrete.
