colors of my mind

a blind alley cat

Did I tell you I’m done with cats? Yes, I was. Until about two nights ago when, tired from a week-long work and travel between Lanao and Davao, I could not sleep in my bed because some God-damned kitten was meowing from outside my window. It wasn’t raining, so the wayside culvert should be dry, I said. If the little devil would just keep walking, she should soon find ahead of her the uncemented part that offers for her a way up the road or up to our neighbor’s fence. But she seemed such a darn stupid cat to find her way that I gave up and decided to pick her and throw her to the highway in the hope that some fucktruck ferrying illegal sand and gravel would for once put an end to her whining and wailing.

She was a foot down the culvert. Did not hiss or budge a little as I reached down to pick her. I was a little unsure about putting her inside my room as I know that people in the neighborhood, including my landlady, are getting a little sick of cats that keep on multiplying themselves. Way down the alley some houses even took to poisoning them, feeding them with food laced with Baygon. I could smell that in the air now and then as I pick my way through along our streets, and by and by, I would just notice that the population of cats standing by my doorway had drastically gone down, say from five to two. Maybe food is going scarcer hungry humans are at each other’s throats over it all the time; maybe thieving cats are an aggravation.

This one I salvaged is about three months old. Kind of cute, but for her face. I couldn’t place her family line, if she was cat or dog or hare or mouse. Looks like her face underwent several radical surgeries. I understand, of course, that it’s just the skin disease that she got for eating straight from garbage and rusty food cans. At first I thought she was Chinese I even wanted to name her Xu Xien; but closer to truth is she looks mongoloid. Perhaps I had better call her Loida, or maybe just plain Ugly Cattie.

But first thing is her survival, or she won’t have a chance at her famed nine lives. There was no food in my room, so I had her put down in the yard so that I could go out to buy from the store, but no sooner had I gotten out of the gate than she got to running and meowing after me. She would stop every a couple of yards, turning her head this way and that, like she was trying to trace which way my scent went. I hurried some more. A bit of me was hoping that by the time I came back some jealous owner had already picked her up. But it was almost eleven and the barbecue stands and roadside stores had all closed down. I returned without food and the damn kitten was still there, running to me as soon as she picked my smell.

I put her inside my room. Her eyes wouldn’t glow into my flashlight, and it looked like she was dying from malnutrition. She could hardly open her eyes, like they sunk beneath layers of dried pus, and she kept on jerking and choking on water like the feel of liquid in her mouth hurt. She had nothing but water that night, but as soon as she found a rag, she slept and never woke me until early the next morning.

I still have to find a vet to properly appraise me, if she was born blind or kids in the neighborhood had fun gouging her eyes out. They do that all the time: clip their tails; sew their limbs with wire; throw them into the canal, wrap their heads with cellophanes, prick their eyes with banana cue sticks. They’re so creative, so naturally ingenious in the fun art of torture I am all admiration for them. And I haven’t asked around as yet who could have played with this one so that I can properly thank them.

But it feels nice, annoyingly so, to have some cute thing playing around one’s feet again, at the time when you thought you are through with cute things; at the time when you thought you’re past caring about pets.