Cat and Dragon

Cat and Dragon; responses to two prompts

As to a prompt about what animal I identify with, I must have been a cat in an earlier incarnation. I dislike getting wet, especially in the rain, but also in a swimming pool. I can tolerate a bath for hygiene’s sake, as long as it includes floral-scented bubbles.

I luxuriate in textures like my cat does. She will lie on, knead, or choose to vomit on the softest surface she can find. I love to pet her wonderfully soft fur, and seek to wear my own fur coat in the form of corduroy, flannel, and suede. I’d wear cashmere every day if I could afford it.

My cat finds the warmest surfaces for sleep, including the cable box and my lap, and follows the sunshine. My emotions are solar-powered—I get gloomy when it’s dark and days are short, and I smile when I finally step out into sunshine.

Cats love to be on elevated surfaces, to look down on the world from a high perspective. My cat likes window sills and the back of the couch, but will also perch on the platform of my balance-beam scale, which is all of three inches above the floor. At less than five feet tall, I used to climb ladders to reach high places. Nowadays, I use a reaching tool a lot, and look other people in the eye only if they sit while I stand, or I stand a step higher than them.

Like my cat weaving between my legs or climbing up my chest, I enjoy contact with people I like, such as a touch to the shoulder or a good long hug.

My cat is a maniac for climbing into cardboard boxes and paper bags. When I was younger, I took pride in fitting myself into very small places like a skeleton cabinet or a clothesdrier. More recently, I settle for being enclosed in my home, what with my gently increasing levels of agoraphobia.

My cat can be emotionally effusive, in her own imperious way. She showers me with gifts of rats and mice. Sometimes she greets me by flopping on her side, showing her belly. But when I’ve disturbed her by moving too much in bed, she’ll stalk to the farthest corner and plump herself down, giving me her back.

Cats are known for elegance, independence, and curiosity. I identify with the independence and curiosity; two out of three ain’t bad.

Another prompt had me writing something with the following ten words: dragon, delicious, dangerous, dearly, driver, downright, depth, deliver, drown, and decision. So I made this foray into fiction:

A little brown dragon lived in a cave on the side of a hill. A vegetarian, she ate mostly delicious tender fronds of the fennel bushes that filled her territory.

She was a homebody. She felt it would be dangerous to roam far from her cave, where she could be attacked by bigger dragons or targeted by trophy hunters.

She dearly loved her little dell, which had a happy gurgling stream and all the plants she would ever need to eat. She would nap in the warm sun, and curl up in her cave when it rained.

One day her eye was caught by a bright gleam of light bouncing off something in the depths of the stream. She was a strong swimmer, so she did not worry that she might drown if she dove into the stream to retrieve the object.

Her decision made, she took a deep breath, plunged underwater, and picked up … something. She was downright baffled by the object in her claw.

It was metal, sure enough. Its surface was very hard and smooth. She struggled to find a way to describe its shape.

It had an inside and an outside, and seemed solid enough to hold water. She rinsed it clean in the stream and found that it did indeed hold water. She used it to deliver water to some fennel seedlings she was growing to replace what she had eaten. She had seen how the plants in her dell prospered after the rains, deducing that the water was a driver of growth.

She still didn’t know who had made the shiny thing or how they had used it, but she was happy with her new watering can.