All The Wrong Topics dot com

“a Cat Well-Armed”

The baby’s arms were fully attached to the cat, exactly where its front legs and paws had been before, and it seemed at least that the surgery was a success even though the creature still was not yet fully recovered. Smitty was busying himself with throwing away, washing, and/or burning any evidence of what had only begun three hours ago. Jane was watching over the animal, she felt very maternal and protective, and had the training to handle the situation. The cat was sedated in an upstairs room inside of a crib with all the appropriate gear hanging around to make the healing process quicken, and Jane stood off to the side monitoring the equipment, occasionally staring off into space trying to grasp what she and Smitty had truly done this night.

The cat slept calmly through the night and into the next morning, Smitty had gone to bed hours ago, and Jane was the only one left awake to care for the creature. The sheets had to be changed periodically, a little more frequently than the bandages, but the mess would become too much too quickly sometimes. Now, as she stared into all those monitors set up to measure the results, she started to recall how it had been so much different for Smitty and herself just a few weeks ago. They started dating and moved in with each other months before anything, and never had the relationship been this intense, never with a specific direction in mind. They were originally together to enjoy each other’s company for as long as it was agreeably decent for both of them to participate. Their agreement had been friendly when both of them were short on friends at all.

They had talked about children on many occasions after the relationship kept getting progressively more intimate, Jane soon understood that Smitty saw this all as a way to make them both intertwined in some way, but the feelings she felt didn’t give her any idea as to what extent they were both going to push the world phenomally though unknowably toward the next conclusion. Surgery was an amateur interest at first for Jane, she had studied for a short while to become a nurse, but Smitty had a strong medical fetish as Jane found out hanging around him a little longer. He had undergone some early childhood traumas, and became fascinated with all aspects of things medical. They had both pursued some classes in taxidermy together, and shared a common delight in knowing more about the art of surgery and anatomy, connecting through their intense love for the material.

Smitty collected scapels as a hobby, and how he enjoyed their sleekness, their slim yet efficient design. Sometimes it was scary to watch Smitty wax taboo over the love of his instruments of choice. Sometimes he sat for hours watching medical shows on television when he got near one, and after Jane moved in with him, they soon acquired a television and cable/satellite transmissions. It was only a few weeks straight, falling asleep in front of the television, before Smitty stopped talking children. Smitty was normally a calm and passive person on the surface, but beneath that there was a masochistic glee that infused every action with a juvenile fearsomeness that seemed almost palpable to the right people, those were the ones that Smitty relished frightening the most. Jane never knew if the cat or the concept was what came first to Smitty.

Before even that, though, they brought a cat into their home. A lonely boy cat that they had found while walking along the boulevard, Smitty had taken to the creature right away, but Jane took her time getting used to its personality. A kind of pastel Calico that had only been in this world a few short weeks itself, Smitty was particularly gentle with it, and took baths with the small animal after he had become so fully attached. Sitting in a rocking chair with the cat in a towel, slowly rocking along to an Elvis Costello tune, and Smitty with the largest smile on his face he was so pleased. Which was why the events afterward were so bizarre in hindsight. Altogether in one night, it had come to a head, and Smitty began telling Jane about his plot to advance science through jittering and emotionally jagged words.

He began watching those medical shows with the cat, the odd glance or two common between man and cat, but ideas for an interesting blueprint were being formulated where people began crossing the edge between those real and fantastic sciences. Smitty was now cold and distant at most periods of the day, and looked down his nose at his own creation, seeming to treat the matter as though he did not even care. His indifference followed to the bedroom, rolling over after a short bout of lovemaking, and when Jane was suitably pleased he would drift on into his other interests with obsessive detail. By the time that the cat was but a few weeks into their care, Smitty’s attention was drawn away to his work, but secretly the stressful situation drove him to reconsider what he had done.

The knife fetish was wearing thin for Jane, who now seemed to be the only one to take the responsiblity for the animal they had recreated together, and Smitty just sulked and went back and forth between his interests like an unhappy child with too much on his mind. Jane just had no idea what to do with him, and all while taking care of their “cat”. The nights began to grow quieter as the distance grew between them, and these lonely nights were spent nursing the cat back to health in the sterile room. Smitty just whiled away the evenings into dawn with late-night medical programs, freebasing cocaine until he would pass out at eight in the morning, and Jane finding him asleep on the couch after she woke up soon afterward. She was beginning to tire of the silent mistreatment and cold, sinister calculations that it appeared Smitty was up to.

She stood there half-dressed behind the couch watching Smitty sleep, and wondering where their relationship had gone, when a cry came out of the nursery that woke them both in a way. They looked at each other then, eyes wide and lit with an unusual fire, and finally raced to get to the room first from where their creation was wailing for attention. Once across the threshold of destiny, there was no going back to whatever normal life might have been, and their lives were now to that next level. There in the crib, peeking through the bars was the face of their cat, but fingers gripped the rails where a curious baby would be. Something profound was tearing open their human minds with two large hands, and firmly pointing at their ‘product’ in all its glory. Their jaws dropped as though it were all timed in some event, pre-planned as if to look like an accident, but nature never moved the mountains to make this thing before them both until now that is.