Part 3: The other voice

Once upon a time, while I was sleeping, a black cat fell onto my chest. 

I woke up screaming. You would have too, I believe. No one expects a black cat to fall onto their chest while they’re sleeping. At least not the first time it happens. After that first time, of course, it’s different. It is less of a shock and in time, can even become a matter of routine.

The human sternum can break under thirty pounds of pressure. The cat weighed twenty-eight pounds.

While it was happening, I did not know it was a black cat and I did not know it weighed twenty-eight pounds. I did not know my sternum might almost have been broken. Something big had slugged me in my chest while I slept was all I knew. That was enough.

Screaming and flailing and maybe – just maybe – crying out “Help!”, I leapt from the mattress, tripped over something, and fell into a pile of junk on the floor.

And now, finding the light switch, well, that was an adventure, for I did not know where it was I was and I suspected my attacker to be close by still.

I slapped at walls.

The light switch was sticky and that could only mean I was in Jamie’s bedroom. Everything in Jamie’s apartment was sticky and if you were to touch anything – anything at all, really – you’d come away with your palm encrusted with carpet fuzz, cat hairs and rabbit hairs, human hairs and cigarette ashes and some plastic beads.

O, it was a nightmarish place!

The light revealed a giant black cat rearing up to hiss at me but no Jamie, and I struggled with the mattress to pull it out from beneath the shelf from which Zeke had dead-dropped onto my chest.

Voices came in through an open window and one of them was Jamie’s, drunken and flirting. The other voice I did not know, though I am good with voices. They were out on the balcony, talking of the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet but I knew Jamie’s flirting voice, and this was the one.

Then Zeke attacked my leg. It was inevitable.

Couldn’t Jamie hear me screaming?

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Part 1 is HERE.

Part 2 is HERE.

References from older blogs:

- Zeke was known as Stagger Lee in a Fascist Dyke Motors post called “The Disappearance of Stagger Lee” back in December 2011, when he ran away from home. He was never found.

- Zeke was the “fat male housecat” in an Adri’s Sanitarium post called “Four-Legged Foes” in June 2008. I never shot Zeke, though – that is something only Adri would have done. Most of the rest of this one, although too wordy, is true.