By Ken Foster
The neighbour boy has been having a problem with hairballs. He won’t stop licking the cat. They’ve tried asking him to stop. He just says, “The cat doesn’t mind.” One of them’s named Zeke, it might be the cat or the kid, I can’t remember.
I guess I’d heard the talk first, before I’d seen it myself. One day there they were, skating down the sidewalk together, the kid with the cat gripped between his hands. What a balance he has, licking the cat in long strokes from one end to the other while he zips up and down our driveways. Nuisance is what he is.
Lately the cat has been hiding over at my house. I don’t know how he gets in–maybe there’s a hole somewhere. Maybe he’s tunnelling through the air conditioning. Whatever, there he is, his orange hair all dishevelled and sticky from that spit. He has a sort of grape lollipop smell to him. It’s not right. I’m always catching him lurking in the corners of the rooms and when he sees me, he gets that cat look on his face, the one that always seems to be saying, “Shhhhh!”
I know it’s none of my business, but sometimes when I’m done spending an evening consoling that poor cat, I want to say something to the kid’s parents. I mean, isn’t it a little inappropriate? When I was his age, we didn’t lick the cat. We played telephone with it instead, talking into one end, listening from the other.
The Shore Magazine