Excerpt from my cat Kiki's Memoirs!

(I found this excerpt of my cat Kiki's Memoirs. I knew she was working on a novel, but didn't know about her memoirs. - Cecilia)


When I think of my mother,I recall her soft belly which I loved kneading. A memory comes to me of a sunny afternoon and Mother and the six of us in the wicker basket near the kitchen door. The door was partly open and sunlight angled in, warming our basket, warming us. I was kneading the belly of my mother and she was licking me all over so that by the time I was suckling on her teat, I was damp all over. The memory of it sends shivers up my spine. Mother was white, pure white and she always smelled of milk. I don't remember a lot of details about her because we were together for only seven weeks. I know that she had long lashes because they used to tickle when she licked me. Her pink tongue felt raspy as she licked me all over and the feel of that sand-papery tongue against my tender skin was heaven. She was meticulous about keeping the six of us clean. I believe this is where I got my own meticulousness; I can spend hours grooming myself.

Mother was just a year old when she had us. She had a flighty Feeder, a student who forgot to bring her to the vet to have her fixed, and since my mother was a gad-about who enjoyed staying up late in back alleys, she quickly became pregnant. I do not know my father, but I assume he was one of those late-night encounters behind some garbage cans under the moonlight. He was no doubt a tuxedo cat like me and two of my siblings. The other three had white fur, like Mother.

Thinking of that distant past fills me with conflicting feelings of happiness and sadness. While my mother seemed to be the perfect mom - feeding us, grooming us constantly, she had a marshmallow personality. She didn't know how to handle the intense sibling rivalry that went on: the white furred ones against the tuxedo ones. Unprovoked the white ones constantly nudged us away from Mom's teats. The other two males fought back, and got their share of Mother's milk. But not me. This saddens me even now, because Mother could have done something. Certainly a little nip to the ears of those wicked siblings would have done the trick. But no, she lay there, smiling, looking content, as if we were in paradise when in fact hellish fighting went on right under her nose.

I became the runt of the litter. I looked like someone from the third world with kwashiorker, and truly,I could have died, if the student hadn't given me away to another student. I was not yet weaned and this Boy-who-opened-the-cans had to bottle feed me. In fact, he didn't do it; his girlfriend did. Bless her. By the time she was out of the picture, I was fortunately big enough to eat regular cat food, which the Boy-who-opened-the-cans used to leave before he left for school. He would be gone all day and I used to get terribly bored in his apartment, so I took to chewing and ripping apart whatever clothes and papers I could find. And I didn't always use the cat box, just to get a rise from him when he got in at night. Once I peed into his leather boot, and shortly after that, he turned me over to the Woman-who-opens-cans. At that time she had another cat, a white one whose appearance reminded me of my mother, except that this cat absolutely hated me...

(And here the excerpt ends. I'll have to hunt around to find more pages. Kiki hides them in the most unlikely places: under the sink, under the bed in the guest room, etc.)