Green Cat – 01/17/2025

It will have been yesterday, maybe of the previous week. The final draft was eight days later. It started with a challenge, no, let’s say an experiment, suggested by Adam Nathan. It seemed like the twenty-fifth minute though he couldn’t be certain as he was staring at the painting, never looking away to check the time displayed on the devise that was in another room anyway. The cloud escaping the right edge of the subject turned to smoke wafting from Green Cat’s ear. It seemed an appropriate point of entry despite the dangling participle refusing to ripen and drop. Our man heeds McCann’s Invitation, being most captivated by Lateef’s oboe, though he fails to hear the woodwind next time around. As he approaches the opening, the landscape transitions to a smooth snow, compacted, warmed by the sun, evaporating but not melting for several days. The ambient temperature not contributing to the energy, compressing past adventures into this brief gallery. He must be getting old, he mused, adjusting his route to the clean, dry trails, joints aching with the impact of strides on the unforgiving surface, though our lunar neighbor, casting shadows across evening and morning twilight, makes walking safer. It must have been full on one of his outings. Upon entering the passageway, many of the stimuli from the past week return at once. He hears the wings’ rusty cartilage though no ducks are seen on the lake. The landings were aborted due to icy conditions. Air traffic controllers ignored concerns for near misses. The union will not be notified. On the night of a major event, Sir Moon is accompanied by Lady Venus as they negotiate paparazzi crowding the entrance to the exclusive venue. Early the next morning, our man sees Sir Moon accompanied by Mars, the young esquire, though Mars fades into the ether at 6:57, despite the cloudless sky. Must have been quite a party. Methane gurgles from fissures in the ice. It feeds a chamber now revealed to him at the end of a deserted high school hallway late at night. He makes a valiant effort to pull himself from the distraction of the rabbits that refuse to scatter as they have not found exposed earth or its attending flora for many days. He contemplates a rabbit stampede. Then he notices a veiled figure, sporting the posture of Muhammad Ali in the ring, guarding a hitherto unseen gate. The sentry is the size of Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein. Our protagonist could not see whether the monster’s schwanzstucker was enormous. The guard indicates that there is one question that must be answered in order to gain admittance.

The Guard: When was the first time humans decided to eat only the meat?

Our Man: I am not an anthropologist.

The Guard: Very well.

The gate opens. He enters a world where the stories have moved to another house, no walls roof floor. A server farm the size of the largest terrestrial planet orbits the black hole at the core of the expanding chamber on this last day without dangerous temperatures. And the data grows exponentially, all of the knowledge in books abandoned forty-four years ago.

Peas and Hominy