Annie Q Syed

No. 3 in the series Tuesday’s Torrent.

Photograph courtesy of Tim Corbeel.

(Highly recommend to view this photograph in its entirety over at his website. Although Tim Corbeel’s photography is a class in its own, this photograph has welcomed much deserved attention).

Cats are particular about where they sit.

These two, named To and Fro by their rather distrait owner, often sat atop a credenza—piece of furniture that became very fashionable during the second half of the 19th century—looking out the window. This credenza had small pieces of variously colored polished wood. The surface felt cool and clean underneath their paws.

Originally in Italian the name credenza meant belief.  This was because in the 16th century the act of credenza was the tasting of food and drinks by a servant for a lord or for another important person. By tasting it they made sure the food was not poisoned. The name passed then to the room where the act took place, then to the furniture.

No one plans on being alone at fifty years old.

“Oh there you go again with that thought!” said To.

“Just let me think what I want to think,” retorted Fro.

“You forget I can hear your thoughts,” To responded.

“You forget I can hear yours too but do you hear me interrupting?”

“Well, frankly, if they are the same ones it gets pretty boring to hear them.  Don’t you get bored of thinking the same thoughts?”

Fro didn’t care to reply.

The cats sat there and saw a young man park his bicycle against the wall to meet a woman who was very much in love with him. He had been visiting her every night for the last month. Sometimes they would take a stroll along the street where she lived and other times he would just sit on her front doorstep and talk with her.

“The boy knows how to flatter her,” said To.

“She is self-conscious about her skin, hair color, posture and weight,” replied Fro.

“She is not obese. You make her sound obese. She is in pretty good shape for her age,” exclaimed To.

“You are obese,” snapped Fro.

“It’s rude to tell a cat if it is fat.”

“Not if you are a cat yourself,” noted Fro.

“Well, no exercise coupled with her thyroid issues and metabolism slowing down with age, I say she is doing well.”

But the boy’s compliments are sincere despite his uncanny ability to decipher what needs to be said.

“Can you be quiet!” To screamed.

“I wasn’t thinking anything! I said that out loud!”

To was certain Fro had said that in his own head but decided not to engage about it.

Most of us are living to die yet are afraid of death.

“Don’t. Just let me be,” Fro said quickly. His thoughts heavy and beyond him.

In between we catch glimpses of whatever we wanted this life to be but deemed it not capable of attaining. How could it really be that simple? To live how you want.

“There they go…off into the thin night to kitten around,” whispered To.

Pansy tossed to the other side from where she could see her cats To and Fro. She scanned her living room from the sofa: pile of plastic bottles that needed to be recycled (she didn’t care to recount how many), unfolded laundry on one brown sofa chair with a small hole in the slipcover, sealed letters blended with opened unsolicited advertising mail from months ago, the lamp that needed a new light bulb which she hadn’t bought in weeks because light came through the street lamp outside.

The man and woman, not quite in their mid-twenties, walked past the window and waved at To and Fro. The girl commented how she loved these two cats that sat there every night, never to be seen during the day. The boy added they made for a perfect window dressing. They couldn’t help but wonder what radiated inside, too young to know that houses never looked the same from inside as they did from the outside.

Pansy dismissed the younger woman, her neighbor, as a wild fauna of society at large that never understood the demands that a real life beckons: bills, skills, social and marital engagements, a long marriage, rearing children, surviving the physical signs and pains of aging.  Essentially, as far as Pansy was concerned, the young woman knew nothing about living.

Armageddon is now, thought Fro.

But so are we, To thought louder, there is a choice.

Upon hearing To’s thought, Fro replied, “There isn’t a choice.”

Pansy thought of the story of the Egyptian goddess of the night known as Nut.  Her father had told her this story when she was little to comfort Pansy when she didn’t want to sleep alone. Tefnut, the goddess of moisture, mated with Shu, the god of air, to gave birth to Sky, known as goddess Nut, the goddess of nighttime sky. Goddess Nut was known as the barrier separating the forces of chaos from the ordered cosmos of the world. He had told her that some people belonged to the night to continue working for Goddess Nut.

Pansy didn’t mind being alone. She just wished she didn’t have to hear her cats’ thoughts when she couldn’t sleep.

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