Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

However common are those greeting cards depicting a quintet of kittens in a basket, gold-fish bowl or some other sentimental environment suitable for framing on kitchen walls, the harsh facts of feline life are that four of those five little sugarpusses will not celebrate their first birthday.

I have not reached my state of ripeness by ignoring odds, even if one is inclined to that sort of idiocy in a city like Las Vegas. And the odds here are that Miss Temple Barr has a lot more on her mind right now than the state of my skin.

One thing my tête-à-trois with Baker and Taylor makes self-evident. Miss Temple Barr is right. The napper of the duo with the withered ears is the perpetrator who edited out the old guy I stumbled over on the ABA convention floor so few days and so many lifetimes ago. I decide to take destiny by the flintlock and spring myself to share my information with a larger world. It is the story of my lives... I know more than is good for me and someone is out to get me.

First I size up the villainous attendant whom it has been my ill luck to encounter. This large-eared personage is slovenly as well as slothful; it occurs that I might use this weakness to my advantage. The plan requires risking my second most prized member, but I have not survived this long without a streak of derring-do in my soul.

When Jug-ears arrives with my evening swill, I manage to insert my glorious extremity, which is large, luxuriant and bushy, if I say so myself, into the frame of the cell door.

It takes all of my not insignificant self-control to avoid expressing outrage at the resulting competition between a rock and a hard place. They do not call it the “slammer” for nothing. Suffice it to say that the cell-door latch is not fully caught.

Once Jug-ears continues on his errands, I bat the cell door ajar, bound down to the floor and accept the catcalls of my amazed peers (whom I would spring were not their cell latches too tightly sprung, and their tails too scrawny to cushion any closing blows).

The pavement is still damp from ablutions of a repellent nature as I commence to wend my way far from this unhappy place. An unguarded gate or carelessly unlocked window always awaits the machinations of a fellow with my aptitude for going places, and a stairway of carelessly placed furniture or boxes usually leads me right to it. Once free, I hunker down outside to await the cover of twilight.