The Spoiled Cat

A spoiled cat lived in an apartment in downtown Seattle. The woman who owned this cat fed it salmon everyday and let it lick the extra egg yolk off her plate from breakfast.

The cat slept on the woman’s bed. It was a king-sized bed with a white down comforter. From the cat’s resting place it could see the Seattle Public Library out the window. It was like a holy shrine to books. A glass mushroom cloud lit all night.

In the day, the cat would sit on the windowsill and watch the sea gulls or the men in ties working at desks in the high rise a block over. When the window was open, the cat could smell the Puget Sound.

One day, the woman pulled out her sewing kit. A spool of thread tumbled to the ground and rolled in a furious little circle. The cat pounced on it and before the woman could stop it ate the thread right off the spool.

The cat wanted more. It cried and cried until the woman gave it another.

The cat stopped eating its salmon for dinner and breakfast. It would not lick the breakfast plates. The only thing it would eat was thread. Thread every day, twice a day, in any color you can imagine. The woman would not refuse the cat anything, and she had soon fed it all the thread in her sewing kit.

Days later, when the woman was in class, the cat jumped down from the windowsill and started rubbing itself on the corners in the apartment. It rubbed against the wicker chair where the woman did her reading. A piece of fur from the cat’s right haunch caught on the wicker. It proved to be an exceptionally long piece. As the cat moved the fur lengthened from a centimeter to an inch to a foot to a trail from the bedroom to the kitchen.

When the woman returned the cat was gone. And she found her apartment strung with tabby-colored thread.