Posthuman Blues

A few minutes ago I noticed that my cats were staring oddly at nothing in particular, or perhaps at each other in preparation for one of their frequent good-natured duels. As I waited for one of them to make the first move (my money was on Spook, the oldest), I noticed that they had become enraptured by a longish, many-legged something that had somehow managed to penetrate my ninth-floor apartment.

Suddenly this insectile phantasm started skittering my way; I mustered the courage to stomp it before it could disappear beneath any furniture. I examined the thing's flaccid corpse (antennae still flexing listlessly) before I disposed of it. It was roughly an inch long, with about six legs on either side of its disturbingly meaty body.

The perverse thing is that my cats spent several minutes in a state of denial. They missed the horrid thing. They staked out the area where it had made its last stand and scraped pitifully at the carpet in a futile attempt at feline necromancy.





Other than the bug incident, this was an uneventful Easter. I slept late, started Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and managed the singular task of microwaving a jumbo bean-and-cheese burrito without the ends messily exploding.