The Golden Triangle

My short story "Magic Tricks" was published in the first issue of The Golden Triangle today. Click the poorly-drawn stick figure below to be instantly transported to my story on the Golden Triangle website via magic.

You should also take a look at the other lovely stories and poetry and admire the decadent layout. All of the etchings of gods, swans, and full-breasted mermaids in the background have exponentially inflated my sense of self-importance.

Communicating With Cats

I love you, but I also want to eat you.

I once read that cats have the I.Q. of a two-year-old child. That’s fine with me until they begin acting like a two-year-old child. Like many toddlers, my kitten Olive tends to think that all attention is good attention and all repetitive actions are a game. We’re trying to train Olive not to jump on the table when we are cooking and eating, not to bite, and not to claw the tiny ottoman into to a pile of glistening, red polyester fibers.

Yesterday morning when Dave got out of the shower, Olive latched onto his ankle with the force of a small, furry predator. Innocent, zealous ankle-licking quickly transformed into an impulse to devour Dave’s flesh. Claws and teeth were unleashed and Dave gave her a stern talking-to. For some reason, a freshly-showered Dave really whets her appetite. Perhaps she has the archetypical paradox of loving us, yet wanting to eat us.

Shortly after, we found ourselves huddling around my laptop asking the Google how to train cats. This led to a Wiki-How or Ask.Com page about communicating with cats, complete with a how-to video. (Not that we aren't experts in speaking cat.) Soon we were immersed in the world of translating meows with a phrasebook and deciphering meaningful feline body language.

We learned that a low, deep MRRRRooooowww is a sign of displeasure and a high Rrrrrooooowww! is an expression of terror. Subtle differences in the angles and movements of the tail may reveal anxiety, excitement, and aggression.

The subject of clawing and biting was most important to us, so we scrolled down. The article informed us that “a cat will drive his/her claws in and out of you as a sign of happiness or playfulness.” It continued to say, “Either way your cat knows and loves you.” The phrase “drives his/her claws in and out of you” brings to mind more of a stabbing motion with adamantium claws. I’m actually quite glad that my cat doesn’t know and love me that much. I considered editing the article so that it would be less stupid, but then I realized that ninety people already did.

His body language indicates that he knows and loves you.

As far as disciplining a fighting, biting kitten goes, we were advised to shake cans of pennies at her, squirt her with a spray bottle of water, and pick her up by the scruff of her neck and growl in her face like a bear. I have many spray bottles lying around but they are all full of caustic vinegar. “That’ll show her,” thought I.

The idea behind the penny can and spray bottle is that you sneak up on your criminal kitty, catch her in the act, and assault her with loud noises and a shower. We don’t have any cans to put pennies in, but we do have a huge glass fish full of spare change that is Olive's best friend. We considered turning the fish against her and shaking it in her face when she claws the desk chair.

Since the fish is always in the room, whenever she considers leaping onto the table to knock off a plate of poached eggs, she would look back and think, “I can’t do this now. The fish is watching me. The fish is always watching me…”

Today we dropped her into her cardboard carrier and brought her to the veterinarian. The entire car ride was accompanied by the seething sounds of a screaming kitten. At the office, we scooped her out onto a cold steel table. The veterinarian stuck things in her ears and poked around her eyes. He told us that our kitten has conjunctivitis and that there’s only a 95% chance of recovery. Then he said that some cats get a strain of the virus that never goes away and they walk around for fifteen years with trailing eye mucus behind them like hairy snails.

“Any tips for teaching a kitten not to bite?” I asked.

“You’re not encouraging it, are you?” he asked. “My brother used to play tug-of-war with his cat, and now the cat is insane.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

“I would pick her up by the scruff of her neck,” the vet said, snatching Olive up by the neck-skin. “And I would shake her and say, ‘Good kitties don’t bite' in a sterner voice than I’m speaking in now. Because that’s what a mother cat would do if Olive bit. The mother would pick her up by the neck... and throw her.”

The vet decided that today Olive would get a rabies shot. Olive panicked and looked for an emergency exit as the veterinarian produced an enormous syringe and wiped an alcohol pad across her back. She desperately moved towards the carrier, probably trying to communicate something to us through meows and body language: “Okay guys, I’ll get in the carrier! I love the carrier! Look at me! I want to get inside of the carrier now…”

The vet called in his assistant, who grabbed Olive by the scruff of her neck and, once again, began to shake her.

“The kitten might cry a little,” the veterinarian said as he plunged the syringe into her back. Once again, the kitten screamed. I quite nearly screamed myself.

When the vet and assistant released her, Olive stumbled towards Dave. He lifted her carefully into the cardboard carrier. I comforted her with my shrill female voice that cats love all the way to the apartment. “We’re almost home. Far away from that bad, bad man who kept shaking you and sticking needles into your skin. What a bad, mean-spirited person.”

Kitten Sunday

Yesterday was Kitten Sunday, the day that Dave and I designated specifically for adopting a kitten. Our apartment is full, but there is a kitten-shaped void. We picked up two friends and went to a local animal shelter to enjoy some feline company and find our match.

I got the feeling that the volunteers really didn’t want to give us a kitten. We told the receptionist that we wanted to adopt and she tried to talk us out of it.

“Are you sure? What if your landlord doesn’t want you to have pets? What if you break up? Are you just going to bring the cat back here?”

But we are no cat novices and already took these things into consideration. She reluctantly slid a clipboard with a questionnaire reminiscent of match.com, but for cats.  Then she directed us to the cat rooms. In the first room, we played with black kittens and temperamental tiger cats. I was quickly horded by adult cats demanding my attention. The volunteers in the room paid us no mind, ticking the kittens with Salad Fingers gloves.

The second room contained several adult cats that didn’t get along. A white cat got comfortable between my feet and tailless black cat nuzzled my leg, and they proceeded to fight. The other cats wanted looked on with indifference.

The third room contained the cats in cages, pacing and roughhousing and slipping their paws through the bars of the cage. Some of them came to greet us and others didn’t give us the time of day. The volunteer in the third room told us that we could play with individual cats that we liked in another room.

We went into the visiting room and waited for the first kitten that we wanted to get to know better – a fluffy, gray boy-kitten. The volunteer released the kitten onto a chair and quickly shut the door behind her, leaving the kitten in a new environment with four enormous strangers.

The kitten all but wet itself. It leapt off of the chair and darted to the safety of a carpeted cat-cave. The kitten was not amused my attempts to lure it from its hideout with a furry tail on a stick, seductively spiraling just within its reach. Nor was it thrilled when one of our friends attempted to scoop him up. When I tried to pet him, he slinked to the door with a panicked expression.

The prospect of adopting a kitten that was terrified of us was just too sad, even under reasonable circumstances, so we moved onto a gray girl-kitty with huge greenish-blue eyes. She seemed a little frightened when the door closed behind her, but soon she started brushing against my legs. We took turns dangling the furry tail on a stick in front of her and she played along. She found a chair cushion in the back of the room and maniacally kneaded it with her claws. When Dave picked her up, she purred and crawled onto his shoulders and ran down my back.

We were unanimously sold on kitten #2, but I wanted to give an affectionate adult kitty a chance, too. The volunteer brought us a third cat. It turns out he was seven months old but the approximate size of a Shetland pony. He seemed agitated out of his cage and allowed us to pet him for a while, but he mostly appeared annoyed and ready to return to the comfort of his cat cushion and the predictable bars. Before he left, he also maniacally kneaded the cushion. It’s his cushion now and nobody else’s.

After a thorough hand washing, followed by some absentminded kitten petting and some more thorough hand washing, we returned to the front desk. We told the receptionist the kitten we wanted.

“We need to see a copy of your lease before we can give you this cat,” she said.

I wish we had known about this before we spent hours playing with them. So we drove home, grabbed the lease, begged our landlord for a letter of recommendation, and quickly returned. The receptionist and other women who worked there looked it over carefully. They discussed the adoption in doubtful whispers. Then one of them went to the third room.

When she returned, she said, “You’re going to have to choose a different cat.”

In saying this, she ripped my heart from my chest, trailing behind it other important “feeling organs.”

“This cat hasn’t been spayed," she continued.

Well, yes, she was only a baby and cats can’t be spayed until they are six months old and fertile. I don’t know what to make of it. I hoped that we could work out a deal, or put her on layaway, or arrange a betrothal between us and our kitten that would go into effect on her six-month birthday. Fortunately, Dave was able to reason with the receptionist and we needed to provide the information for a veterinarian that has Dave on file. Hopefully that really is all we need to bring this time, and not our birth certificates and records of our whooping cough vaccinations.

The vet was not open on Kitten Sunday, so we must wait. Perhaps today is our day.

UPDATE: The next day we went to the shelter again and they gave us cardboard carrier full of kitten. "Is this for real?" we wondered. The sound of screaming kitten confirmed it. Olive is all ours, our squeaking and crotch-nuzzling bundle of joy.

Cell Phone Pictures

My mother is having a difficult time with her new cell phone. The keyboard makes too much noise, texting quickly is complicated with the buttons in different places, and the icons have moved around only to spite her. She covets my antiquated phone of yore in all of its low-battery glory. She wants to trade her sparkling new phone for my elderly one.

Will lose all my pictures in the process of switching? Just in case, here are a few masterpieces worth preserving, save some snapshots of pointy men’s shoes and expensive upholstery fabrics. I’ll also spare you the site of me waking up from my wisdom teeth surgery, still high on laughing gas with gauze bulging from my tingling lips.

The Lunchables of the Jewish community, now available at your local Italian grocer. I will eat it in a box and I will eat it with a fox.

Inspiration for a fan fiction I would like to write.

This is the commemorative cookie cake of my senior year of college. It tasted like yellow dye and accomplishment.

Speaking of hairy dogs, Rene Magritte and I have the same taste. (Pomeranians are delicious.)

A frisky Native American in front of my grandfather's grave. Perhaps someday I, too, will be inhumed behind his enormous erection.

One day in the land of my ancestors (Whitehall) I found the grave of my great great great great great great great great grandfather, a general in the Revolutionary War, on a secluded hill. It was sort of obscured by a bush.

Perhaps my great great great great great great great great grandfather would look like this debonair actor from the Last of the Mohicans in casual attire.

This assesses the damage done to my bike after I ran over a bottle of Gatorade, fell onto the blacktop, and nearly got flattened by a car full of old people.

Golf outfits are just as silly now as they were one hundred years ago.

Post-Graduate Goals

Learn to drive an automobile
Find tolerable job
Ascend to Gandhi-like lifestyle in order to pay off loans
Finish novel and screenplay
Write autobiography of John Smith
Become herbalist
Become fluent in French
Become sort of okay at speaking Czech, but with admirable pronunciation
Learn to play accordion
Learn to upholster sofas
Learn to design cubist furniture
Finally read everything by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet
Read something relatively complicated in French
Become talented vegetable gardener
Successfully cultivate carnivorous plant
Pickle something
Become successful Indian Food chef
Make new purse
Learn to alter hideous clothing into aesthetically pleasing clothing
Become temporary hermit
Go to grad school for Something
Travel to Quebec
Revisit Czech Republic
Go on adventures in Finland, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and any country once part of the former Yugoslavia

Occupational Fantasy, Part Three

I am employed as an adjunct literature professor at a community college that specializes in the culinary arts. The administration provides me with an office in a former men’s restroom and I move all of my material possessions into the office, including a twin bed. I teach introductory classes with vague titles and the few students who take literature classes to become rounded and critically thinking chefs frequently spend the lectures compulsively sautéing mushrooms or garnishing salmon. The administration considers liquidating the School of Humanities to fund the lucrative new hibachi track, but instead requests new classes with a culinary angle, such as Food for Thought. I am pressured into lecturing a seminar on food writing. For lack of a better plan, I bring in doggie bags from various dining establishments and assign articles on their contents. In my office the peace is occasionally disturbed by an aspiring hibachi chef looking for the men’s restroom, but in my free time I write stories and build cubist furniture.

Occupational Fantasy, Part Two

I am standing in a quiet, empty metro station when I feel a stranger’s hand on my shoulder. I turn and see a man in a long trench coat with wild snakes of hair and suppose that he is either homeless or a wizard. He says that he is a cubist furniture designer and that I will be his apprentice. He will teach me to upholster cubist furniture and restore antique cubist furniture to its former condition, and when he has taught me all that there is to know about cubist furniture I will be the greatest maker of cubist furniture in the world. I say okay. The metro appears and he pulls me inside with great haste. We go to his cubist furniture studio where I choose appropriately coordinating fabrics for each grain of wood. The cubist furniture master tells me that we will have to work quickly through the cubist furniture curriculum because of those who would have me fail. His rival cubist furniture designers have spies everywhere, behind the cubist wardrobe and under the cubist bed. In just a couple of weeks I learn the appropriate skills of a cubist furniture designer and open my own shop where my cubist chaise lounges are purchased by wealthy collectors from all over the world. After a long day of upholstering, I have time to write stories.