About seven cats drop by, expecting tuna biscuits or, the hands-down favorite, sardines in tomato sauce. All are feral except for the human who, to do her credit, knows the drill well enough.
The food is placed in several containers kept apart to keep the strong away from the weak, the young from the old. Except for a dam and her young sons, all the cats are adult toms, deeply entitled and long in fang and nail.
Each newcomer pauses at the top of the stairs from the street to survey the scene. If the cats eating are social inferiors, the latecomer pads forward, the smaller cats melting like shadows at high noon.
If the toms are still supping, the young ones tuck their paws under, fur balls in waiting. Sometimes, a young fool will creep like a hovering rain cloud, drifting towards unattended bowls.
Sometimes, a yowlfest breaks out, shards of fur from arched backs and distended tails suffusing the air, shrieks eye-sparks fangs puncturing what was a commune, an oasis, a construct of human caprice.
For sometimes the human cannot resist and dispenses what she thinks of as justice, ass-patting away the sated toms and offending their leonine dignity, standing over the old and half-blind, dropping tidbits for the queen, the only dam among toms, the smallest of the lot and the feistiest.
A sociopath that long unlocked the secret codes of the human heart and is scrambling messages for species domination, every cat convinces the humans it has domesticated that the latter order feline existence just because the cats show up for meals.
More accurately, the human is primed to feed and the felines oblige such a needy, suggestible factotum. Once you see a just fed cat play for hours with a creature it has trapped before it pops the poor, crippled thing in its mouth and looks back at you with unblinking mass-murderer eyes framed in heart-shaped furriness, you will have a second of clarity and see your own subaltern self in the pink, skinned tail dangling from that steel trap of a sweet maw before you shake off the disloyal thought and scratch the tummy, behind the ear, under the chin.
Well-done, human (those rolling purrs actually decode into: well-done human).
Cats are true solitaries. Only the self is real; all else are peripheral, instrumental, human.
In between the feeding, the cats walk around the human with her book. What sparks interest is a patch of sun, a bald spot in the scorched lawn that dips from bodies rolling and stretching for a good dust bath.
Pause the button on rest and recreation. Check out the human, abandoning her book, expectant. Old chum, didn’t we just eat?
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 5, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”
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