Tito
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

 

Tito sat on the dining room table. He twitched his tail and then slowly rotated his head as far as he could. The small two paws were already tucked in. One of the big two paws was still working at her keyboard. The other big one was long asleep.

He could have joined that man. His clowder friends was already nestled among that man’s blankets. That huge critter, with whom the other hunters slept, smelled wonderfully of sweat and body functions, wheezed in calming patterns, especially if one of Tito’s gang slept on his face. Additionally, more regularly than not, he used such an abundance of bedclothes that all of the moggies had places to snuggle. Yet, whereas eiderdowns and humans were comforting, they were not worthy of his attention.

Be aware that Tito appreciated his assumed begetter, Regency, and Regency’s alleged sire, Maharaja. He valued that they had been notorious predators whose specialty had been big game. Although Regency had been destroyed by a dog and although Maharaja had been flattened by a car, their notoriety had been passed from one queen to another. When merely a neonate, Tito had suckled not only his mother’s milk but also her stories.

Truth be told, his mother hadn’t been entirely sure that Tito’s father was Regency or entirely sure that Regency’s father was Maharaja, but Tito was able to suspend doubt. After all, eradicators had to have decisiveness and persistence, those qualities had been attached to legends about those other cats, and kitten Tito believed he’d grow into an assassin.

Regardless, the night in question, he heard the lone awake human leave her office for the bathroom and then return. On her way back to her desk, she turned off the hall light. When she’d eventually head to bed, she’d turn off her office light, too, before making her way across the apartment in near dark. Unlike him, she could not detect small movements in any foreground’s shadows nor any passage among backgrounds’ dimness.

So, while she typed, Tito napped and woke, napped and woke. He considered chasing a moth but decided to save himself for his predesignated quarry. The killer drifted once more, though kept his ears tuned to household sounds and his eyes partially open Sometime after the local reed warblers had stopped claiming turf, but before the flycatchers’ music became overpowering, he heard her stop tapping her keyboard.

The tom jumped off of the table and edged toward her office door. On the one hand, she distributed kibble, daily, to his clowder and took turns at changing their litter boxes. As well, sometimes, she’d pause in her activities to amuse members of his clan with rope or feathers.

On the other hand, the house’s other humans were equally capable of actualizing such servitude. She was infinitely replaceable. Tito stretched his forepaws until half of his body lay directly under the woman’s office door’s lintel.

Had she not received a surprise phone call from a family member living in a distant time zone, Tito would have officially become, like his supposed forefathers, a beast of prey. By the time that the human finally went to bed, she noticed neither her cat nor how dejectedly he was grooming himself.

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