My faithful servant has been dutiful this morning. I have been fed and given fresh water. My kitty litter has been cleaned. Although I had to chide him for being such a slowfoot, my milk treat was placed in the sacred blue saucer.

To reward my slave, I have jumped onto his boney lap and allowed him to pet my fabulous furry face and stroke my back and belly. The servant, cursed with a barren and wrinkled face, wholly without whiskers as a sign of his insignificance and lower form status, covets my face and fur. How can I blame him?

I sniff his blue cup of hot liquid and watch his inferior paws, clawless and misshapen things, dance on the folding machine on his table.

He stops and strokes my back from the top of my skull to the tip of my tail. I allow this. It is what he lives for.

It is not what I live for.

I live to conquer.

I will go onto my game preserve and fulfill my destiny.

My servant whines and brays, but I am adamant: Open the door, slave!

I am drawn to the earthy smells underfoot, the good odor of my own domain.

The tallest tree in the universe is outside my glass doors.

I gaze at it and listen to its fluttering leaves call to me.

The tree and its leaves mock me.

I will conquer them.

I will bite the leaves.

First, I will enslave and eat their youngling at the foot of the tree.

Inferior beings, trees. They cannot run, they cannot pounce, they have no servants and they are not soft and furry.

They are meant to be conquered.

There is the first basecamp.

A black and pourous mountain of rock beside the tree and next to the impenetrable doors that give servants access to my game preserve.

I am the King Kong behind the great wall humans have erected in reverence to my powers.

I easily leap to its summit and observe the obedience of all that I survey.

Someday, I shall punish the flying things for refusing to come play with me.

Their doom is at hand.

There’s one now!

(sotto voce) If I remain very still, perhaps it will come close enough for me to pounce!

It’s back is turned.

I shall advance to the flat, white stone pathway.

I am frozen in midstride. Invisible in my unpreturbable stillness.

I see my chance and I dart forward at the highest speed attainable on the planet.

Coward!

Upstart!

What’s this? A vine?

I meant to come over here and inspect the vines.

The flying thing did NOT make a fool of me.

The flying thing did NOT make me leave my base camp.

I meant to come over here and inspect the vines all along.

The flying thing means NOTHING to me.

NOTHING.

It’s the vine that’s interesting.

I always intended to come over here and practice my pounce on the small bit of paper caught in the vine.

See, watch this pounce.

POUNCE!!!

I might have done that to the flying thing at any time I wanted.

Hey! What’s this?!? The monkey grass is waving at me. A crowd of them lined up for my royal review!

I shall grant them their wish.

I shall walk over to them, sniff them, bite off the tip of one of the leaves and parade my magnificant self before them.

My adoring subjects, waving me onward to victory and immortality.

It is good to be the master.

TO BE CONTINUED