notes on the black cat
The black cat sees time
The cat, which requires water, knows me to be an idiot and leads me to the bathroom sink. It will squall a certain pitched mew that I have learned to interpret as a demand for water, and as thirst is a basic a driven need as there is, I suppose it to be an accurate interpretation.
I am told there is another sound that the black cat makes when I am coming home, and the black cat knows of my approach. It will sit somewhere there is a vantage point and make this sound, and it will do so before I am visible.
This is at once interesting and disconcerting, but I suppose that cats have no concept of linear time, and that is always now for them and because I will be there in another now it is reasonable to announce my approach in this one. Either that or the cat feels me coming somehow, along the four lane avenue, to the slight hill, to the stairs, to the front door. It is aware of me before I turn the corner.
It will ask for water, dry food and the sachet of wet food. It just wants to be fed, and there’s not all that much else going on, except for the specific noise and its timing, and how that upends some notion I have of who is the centre of existence, which is never ever me, but really might be the black cat.
There is that theory he controls our minds via parasites. I buy that, even though it makes my skin itch. I am controlled by cat parasites as I am by the pre-shaped contours of time, which he perceives and I am far too stupid to. This what the black cat sees when he stares into space: not ghosts, but all of time as it occurring as one simultaneous event. This allows him to see me before I arrive.
I have heard him make the noise, which I am told is the noise he makes in anticipation, before I can be seen. I wonder if he is doing this while I am there because there is an anomaly in time, like a knot in wood, that allows events to occur closer than I usually understand them to be occurring.
The rest of the story will expand outwards from this but it needs to be kept in mind: the black cat sees time. This is not a big deal, he is still a cat, it’s just that this perceptive framework is common for cats. They all do it. They all exist at different rates to us and to themselves, this is why some disappear. They have to go where the eddies of time disgorge them, from one knotted juncture to another, sometimes changing formal attire.
You know how they all look alike? Maybe they are all the same creature, in different fluxing states. There’s only one cat. Shattered into an endless array of glittering cat gems, all connected.
There’s an idea.