The Weekly LitWit Challenge 8.8: Talk to him
From IWDRM, Clive Owen and cat in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men.
See the guy on the couch with the cat? Write a story about him in 1,000 words or less. Post it in Comments on or before 11.59pm on Friday, 4 May 2012. The author of the best story will receive Neonomicon, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows.
Begin conversation.
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April 28th, 2012 at 23:24
He wasn’t exactly sure how to deal with the creature, not after his erstwhile wife packed her bags and went off out of his life. He bought the cat for her, knowing she has been an avid cat-lover since her childhood. Buying this breed of cat, he remembered, was not that easy. He doesn’t even remember it now, despite her lecturing him countless of times about the different breeds of cats. He, technically, only had a role in the cat’s care when she tasked him to buy Whiskas in the nearby Rustan’s.
Taking care of animals was never his good suit. In a way, he wasn’t even capable of taking care of anything. The closest living being he had taken care of was a narra sapling he was supposed to bring in a scouting jamboree in a childhood long past… and he doesn’t even remember if it actually made it or wilted under his obviously-not-green thumbs. In the darkest corners of his mind, a voice tells him this was the reason his marriages never lasted beyond 2 years. She was his tenth.
He’s at a loss with the fact that she actually left the cat with him. In a sense, the cat is the closest thing they actually had to having a child of their own: it was the only living thing in their place that warranted their mutual attention and care. They weren’t asexual pods: in fact, they’ve had their fair share of each other’s bodies before they were even engaged. Not having a children after 2 years, it would seem, was an oddity. Or perhaps it was the fact that they have had enough of human flesh that the experience was already boring for them.
Touch. He was an electronics engineer. He’s been dealing with dozens of gadgets: their schematics, their itty bitty pieces where precision spells the difference between a defective chip and a working machine. He’s been trained to deal with the most minute of pieces, so much that thinking in broad strokes and surfaces was only possible for him if he’s talking about metal behemoths.
And today he was too tired working with those that he just wanted to sleep.
But today, as soon as he opened the door of his now-singularly-owned house, the cat jumped to him. He almost forgot that he actually had the cat. Like many fathers who have been too engrossed in their work and actually forget their children. His first reaction was to brush it off even as it screeches.
But the cat would not budge. It jumped him even as he plopped himself up to the sofa. He’s had enough: he’s tired and nothing will stop him from sleeping. He grabbed the cat and stared at it fiercely.
But the snarl immediately melted from his face. The cat’s glowing brown eyes stared at him so soulfully, so… inexplicably calibrated to engender feelings of paternal affection, adoration.
It’s actually freaking cute.
He dropped the cat to his lap. The cat purred lazily while it made itself comfortable, as if about to nap. His hands, having recently touched its fluffy fur, cannot but be denied. He caressed the fur as slowly as he can, taking in the sensations he has denied himself for quite a while. He was losing words for the exquisite softness of its fur, while the cat purred as if it was falling into a most delicious slumber. Yes, rubbing the pussy is a mutually-pleasing experience.
He was quite sure the cat was already sleeping 20 minutes into it. He thought he was about to sleep himself, so he picked up the cat and placed it beside him. He closed his eyes…
He was in a very dark room… but he thinks it’s an exhibition. Staring straight into him was a painting of a disheveled, crazed man, munching over what appears to be the left arm of a decapitated baby. He cannot remember where he saw it, though he remembers his now-ex-wife telling him it was a painting by someone who sounds like a candy brand.
The crazed being stares at him… as if enticing in its despair, as if saying to him… come here, get up, look at thy famished stature, come, partake of the feast! He then smells the fusion of the aroma of countless dishes he ate that day… all of them strangely appetizing right now… and he saw that he was immediately surrounded by different shapes and sizes of pastries. He was overwhelmed. He did not know why he was seeing all this, but it sure was making his stomach rumble.
And so he picked up an unassuming-yet-plump piece of French bread. He placed it on his mouth and munched into it hungrily. And the last thing he felt in his tongue before he opened his eyes was a big, damp furball he cannot swallow.
May 2nd, 2012 at 14:35
Title: LARRY
Larry is a Neanderthal and damn proud of it. He doesn’t hide his manly urges. He doesn’t shy away from asserting himself. He feels he is a god’s gift to women. He is single and a successful doctor in London. He knows what he want and when he wants it. And what he want most is sex. Lots of it! He met his match when he was introduced to his current girlfriend, Rose. It has been almost six months since that cocktail party late last year where they made eye contact. She is a practicing lawyer from a somewhat successful private solicitor firm from downtown London. That was late 2003. Its now 2004. Jamie Fox was just as amazing playing Ray Charles as Cate Blanchett was great summoning the legendary Katherin Hepburn in the film, The Aviator. Larry loves his movies. Other than sex, of course. Larry and Rose have seen both Jamie and Cate during their early dating period.
They now know each other pretty well. Rose is just as insatiable as Larry during their many raucous love making, and Larry is not one to complain. Maybe he love her? After a string of girlfriends, that would be a first. At the very least, the lust meter is still way up: in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the living room floor, on the couch, and of course, in their bed. On this flat they now share. A spacious and expensive one, I believe. Right in the heart of London. They even had the bathroom/shower renovated into a white one that Larry always joke about as being cleaner than him.
The only one that gets in the middle of Larry and Rose is me. My name is Dan. A big, golden brown, lazy English cat. I rule this entire household. It was mine before Larry and Rose’s, you see. My former humans forgot about me when they moved to their country house outside London. I was young then, out on my prowl that day and returned with an empty flat. To my delight! I don’t like my former humans all that much. But I decided to give Larry and Rose a try. Afterall, I can get what I wanted out of them whenever I want it. Much like Larry. I love sex, I have many feline beauties lining outside waiting for me. But what I love most is when Larry and Rose bring me out to the Aquarium. Oh the many fishes I imagine I could get my paws to! Just the thought of it is enough to drive me wild with excitement. I enjoy it every time.
It is raining today. No wonder Larry and Rose are still milling around the flat. I can tell Larry, in particular, is not in a hurry to go to his work. I don’t really like it when my humans stay longer than they should in my flat after they are done feeding me. I am trying to take a power nap and Larry just won’t quit playing with my ears! I know what Larry is up to. I can sense it. Just like me when I am out on a prowl. He got his eyes on Rose. His sight is like a beam following Rose around. I know what Larry is up to. Larry is doing that thing with his eyebrows again. I can tell, if Rose don’t leave soon, I will..
Humans. Get a room!
May 4th, 2012 at 00:40
The service door has been left open, Dan’s quite sure of it. He thinks it’s part neglect, part intent on the part of the caretaker. It’s almost an invitation. It’s still snack time for the tiger, come be a part of it, this way please. Dan feels very tempted.
* * *
It’s still 1994 as far as Dan is concerned.
He knows he could have picked a more innocent, carefree year, but what the hell, 1994 will do. It is actually a refreshing year, he reasons. No super-talented kids yet, making videos of themselves while breakdancing, or doing push-ups atop bottles, unstoppably ahead of their time. No windswept mother goose and goslings making the news alongside kids wedged in crevices. No cartoon cat leaving rainbows in its wake. No people staring at the screen for hours, slashing dragons and serpents. For that matter, no Facebook or Planet Romeo either, or unlimited porn, or chatting with headless people, meeting up with them in two hours max.
Just the TV with thirteen channels and their interchangeable programs and everyone generally minding their own business.
Actually, he doesn’t think about these things anymore. He doesn’t have to, they don’t exist yet.
Mike still visits him in his apartment. He’d bring his iPod, play all sorts of music, songs Dan had efficiently willed out of existence. Mike’s way of coaxing Dan out of the terrible 90’s, and Mike’s way of easing his own guilt for having left him three months ago.
“Look, this is Special by Lucky Me! We didn’t have this eighteen years ago!” Mike almost slapped Dan’s face once.
But Dan just sat there on the matted couch, petting his cat, absentmindedly, noncommittally, a sliver of grin on his face that could mean anything. The cat didn’t care one way or another.
“We went to Manila Zoo yesterday, by the way,” Mike says, and for a while there, he thinks he saw Dan’s eyes glint. “My students were unimpressed, you should know. They kept complaining about the giraffe’s absence, about the elephant who mooned us. I wanted to impart to them the injustice of incarcerating our animal friends, but they mostly wanted a good show out of them.”
“Good thing you went there Monday. Ernie Baron said we’re expecting heavy rains tomorrow,“ Dan says, his voice vacant. He might as well have been talking to the sweaty baker downstairs.
It didn’t take long for Mike to figure out the year. Dan had thrown out everything that had to do with the both of them: the gray T-shirt, the hastily-scrawled notes, restaurant napkins, the fading grocery receipts, movie tickets, photographs, the numerous CDs, empty foil packs, a lone pili nut that wouldn’t crack open no matter what, its pointed ends sharp as a dagger, among other things.
But then the erasure went a step further, and Dan seemed to have stopped only when he was quite satisfied with the year, by which time the apartment had been emptied out, as if sucked by a benevolent whirlwind.
1994, said the dates on the man’s journal, and thereafter, that’s what Dan put every time he wrote anew. And each day, he was getting better in his charade.
* * *
The day they broke up, someone was spray-painting the wall across the street. So this is how vandals look like, Mike had thought to himself; he’s never caught a live one before. It was 5:45 PM; the park swarmed with kids, apparently with no adults accompanying them. Dan could make out F-O-R-G-E on the wall, in blue block letters. That got him thinking about things that could be forged: metals and friendship. Money, too.
“Any moment now they’ll turn on the lights. Just you wait and see,” Dan said.
It has been only three days since they discovered each other’s unfaithfulness. More specifically, Mike discovered the messages on Dan’s phone, from a place called Fahrenheit, announcing tonight’s early bird promo, and no time limit for members. It was a bath house, of course. Countless times Mike imagined Dan wrapped in a much-too-thin towel, ready to sweat it out for whoever would gladly drop theirs.
Mike, for his part, felt obligated to confess about his own infidelity, just to even out the score, to keep Dan from suffering the full brunt of guilt. But it was just a married guy from Marikina, with a paunch, who made bad coffee, a really lousy lay. It was a daft case of quantity versus quality: Dan had scores of men to choose from, though Dan swears it was just one guy, while Mike, on the other hand, was stuck with one guy, yes, but at least got to talk with him heart to heart.
Now things were generally calm, though both of them knew they had arrived at an impasse. They were trapped in a crevice. The shawarma’s just for old time’s sake.
Then the park slowly lit up. The dozens of totem poles of multi-colored light bulbs scattered everywhere hesitantly flickered into existence, ushering in a cartoonish kind of daylight.
“There,” Dan proudly said, as if he had engineered the whole thing. It took exactly fifteen seconds for all the lampposts to light up. “Magical, isn’t it? All the taxpayers’ money spent on flooding this place in light bulb moments.”
Then they parted ways just as the spray-paint guy put the “T” in FORGET.
* * *
Today Dan is visiting Manila Zoo on a whim. The elephant is languid as ever, the gorilla grumpy in its cage strewn with empty plastic bottles lovingly handed by visitors, the zebras indelibly black and white.
On the way here he passed by Mercury Drug’s giant electronic billboard, hovering above Plaza Miranda. A few dead pixels here and there, but that can’t be, there shouldn’t be a billboard there at all, Dan thinks, because it’s 1994, though in his heart of hearts, he’s not sure either what was in there originally. An empty wall, he decides.
Rain starts falling, in big, fat drops. As Dan enters the cage, he remembers the dead pixels, then simply blinks the thought away.
May 4th, 2012 at 17:03
Johnny wasn’t the smartest of men. For our anniversary he got me a pet. I was hoping for something else, something that would make things official. Instead he got me a gray plaything. It had been taking forever for Johnny to end it with that girl. I knew that I had to help speed things along.
That night Johnny and that woman had another fight. Something about he being insensitive, and could he please stop being so self-righteous, and she had had enough of this drama, and she just wanted to take a break. She stormed out of his apartment and proceeded to wail in the hall so we neighbors could hear and take her side, or at least sympathize with her.
Johnny followed her into the hall. He asked her to go back in so they could talk. “There’s nothing to talk about!” she screamed as she walked away from him and through the doors of the apartment building. As she was going down the stairs, she tripped and rolled all the way down to the sidewalk. It was like one of those scenes from the evening soaps, where a struggle is played on top of the staircase, and someone has a misstep, and the other party is either horrified or pleased at what has happened, depending on whether that other party is a villain or not—except that woman’s fall did not directly result from the struggle. Johnny rushed out the door into the cold December air.
“How are you? Can you walk?” he asked.
“I think I broke my foot,” she managed to utter between sobs. “And I’m still mad at you!”
She couldn’t walk properly, especially not in those heels. He helped her get up and sit on the bottom of the staircase as he hailed a cab.
Several times Johnny had told me that he would leave her. The first time was when he first talked to me. She came into his apartment with food for lunch. He wouldn’t let her in, and said that he knew who she was with the previous night. She said that it was nothing, and the food was getting cold, and he knew how she felt about microwave food, and could they at least talk about it inside. She stayed at his door for about an hour, crying. I never knew someone could cry for an hour until I saw her do it. Finally he let her in, and they had a bigger fight. She stormed out but no Johnny followed her. Seeing that his door was open, I boldly went inside.
He was sitting on his corner of the couch. I called out his name several times until he looked at me. Our eyes met, and I saw the betrayed expression on his face melt away. He bid me sit next to him. He began to vent his frustrations, and I listened. Soon he found himself caressing me. I didn’t resist. Then he said it. “I think I should end it with her. What do you think?” I didn’t know how to respond. All I thought of was how I could have Johnny for myself, when that girl finally got out of our lives.
That was a year ago, when I decided, for the first time in my life, to share a man with somebody else. I wanted him all for myself, of course, but until he finally got rid of that girl for good, I would wait.
As I was waiting for Johnny’s arrival that night, a thought struck me: Johnny left me here to be with her in a taxi heading someplace. I was the one he left behind. Maybe he would never leave her for me. Maybe he was just stringing me along.
But I couldn’t accept defeat, not I.
I waited patiently in the hall for Johnny. I brought his gift so it wouldn’t look like I was doing nothing. I caressed it for a little while. The smelly little thing just lay there, unresponsive. I really didn’t want a pet for a gift. Finally Johnny came, and he was with the woman. She had her right arm on his shoulders, and on her left hand she was holding the heels she had worn earlier. She was wearing flip-flops.
I saw them approach, and they saw me by the door of his apartment. That was my chance. I would get her while she was incapacitated, while she could not repel my attack. She looked at me and bared her teeth. Then she called me cute. She was talking down to me, but I could see through her. I knew she was frightened of losing Johnny to me, but I also knew that it was inevitable. Johnny and I would be together, and she would stand in my way no longer. She eyed Johnny’s gift to me on the floor and expressed her disgust. Johnny didn’t seem to notice.
While Johnny was fumbling through his keys I wrapped myself around his legs. He is all mine, I wanted to show her. But the woman did not back off. She bent down to grab me. Cute, ha! I’ll show you cute. I pounced on her bandaged foot and grabbed it with my claws. Then I heard her scream as I sank my teeth on her swollen foot. In a cry of pain she kicked me off. I landed on my feet, and saw horror on Johnny’s face as he realized what had happened. I sprinted into the hallway upstairs.
When I went back down my human was there, talking to Johnny about how she would pay that woman for her shots (like a whore, I thought) and replace Johnny’s gift for me, the one he left in his room for me to discover. My human picked me up, and apologized to Johnny and that woman as they exited the apartment building one more time that night. This isn’t over, I thought.