This story is dedicated to my ex-brother-in-law angelos’ step-father (called by his family JOE-DE-RAT) who weighs 300 lbs. and has a disability and stays home and whose wife and angelo’s mother annie continues to live with him and make spaghetti for him for love of the catholic church and other dark reasons of her own.
So sometime in the not-too-far-past this neighborhood has been taken over by a certain line of outside cats big as raccoons. I see two out my window one time loping out across the vacant lot on the other side of the street like they are bringing antelopes down. And there are these cats everywhere — they don’t seem to have particular houses, they just have the neighborhood, and some of them take over whole backyards. There is one backyard just a few doors down with a bathtub on the front lawn full of flowers and a back yard where there must be forty cats, and every one of them black, so that it must be some black cat staked the territory out years ago and now all his progenitors are still there, holding that territory. There are black mothers lolling under the bushes nursing black babies, and black cats big as boxers sitting on their hind legs watching out for suspicious street traffic, like me being watched when I walk along by a yardful of yellow eyes, although they aren’t at all like dogs, as you probably know, because they could care less who comes walking along just so long as it’s nothing good to eat and displays no danger signs, because they’re enjoying so much just lying around in their cat herd.
