Nice Kitty

To the average little boy or girl, Penny Marston’s cat was nothing more than an average pet. He was an average size, not too thin and certainly not too fat. He was an average orange, not the brilliant fiery color of autumn leaves, nor the dull shade that they turn just before falling off the trees. He licked his paws and washed his face in much the same way as any other tabby that washed its face with its paw and he liked to have that spot behind his left ear scratched by a human whenever he was not too busy eating or searching for a comfortable place to take a nap. Just like any other cat, he ate kibbles from a bowl, meowed for milk and hated to be wet.

To most everyone, there was not a single special thing about the cat that that had been abandoned in the cabbage farmer’s garbage can, but Penny Marston knew differently. Penny Marston knew that Cabbagehead Tigerpaw, her bestest friend in the whole wide world, was indeed special. Cabbage, as she lovingly called him when she was simply too tired to call him by his full name, had a birthmark. There was a perfect five-point star on the skin of his left front armpit.

Penny also knew that Cabbage’s front paws had six fingers with six claws. He purred in two tones and it reminded her of the doorbell’s ding-dong sound whenever Cabbage snuggled his face in the small of her throat and purr-purred his quiet growling noise. She knew that Cabbage often roamed her parent’s one hundred and sixty acres of farmland and always returned by 5:47pm, but none of those things made the little eight-year-old girl think that her orange tiger cat was extraordinary. Those things were only slightly out of the normal and she was quite certain that some other cat, either nearby or far away, might have similar qualities. Penny Marston knew that what made her little adopted friend special was something far more interesting and wonderful. Penny Marston knew that Cabbagehead Tigerpaw, the same bundle of fur that slept on her pillow every evening from the moment that they brought him home, was in fact, the most ruthless feline bounty hunter in Habardash County.

Moo

Although he had considered it many times in his scant twenty-four years, Karl refrained from using the word to describe the slovenly women gathered at Holliday’s Ye Olde Authentic Saloon. It never crossed his mind that a man could be depicted in such a light, but when Harvey appeared, sitting in the shade of the lace curtains, grinding his soybean curd and tofu salad with all of the precision of a dentist who lived by the motto ‘chew your food thoroughly,’ Karl reconsidered. The vacant, docile and hauntingly intelligent look residing in those oversized eyes drew him closer to the edge. Their position, almost so far away from each other that they appeared to be at his temples, invoked the illusion that the man’s large nostrils had also grown disproportionately far away from each other and he could swear that Harvey’s incessant humming was nothing less than a subconscious lowing. Karl could not help but stare as the monster gingerly inserted more of the salad into his gaping maw and patiently gnashed his teeth in a left to right motion instead of vertically as most of the diners in this fine establishment were want to do. “Yes,” Karl finally surrendered, placing his napkin over the soup bowl before him, “that man there is most certainly bovine.”