This is the story about the black cat. In order to understand which black cat this story is about, you need to forget about the black cat you already know. This is a different cat. This is not a black cat proper. The reason I am calling it a black cat is that it very much resembles one. At least to me it does. And I’ve reached that point where the only way to remember what cats were like is to glance at the black cat. At any rate, this is the story I’ve been dying to tell ever since the black cat arrived. In order to avoid repeating these three syllables any longer, I shall refer to it instead as Zebleket. Yes.
Now, about the dying. Of course I haven’t been dying. But that’s what Zebleket will have you believe, whenever I allow it to type in my stead. And I do it quite often, although not as often as you may hope.
As for Zebleket’s physical appearance, which you are impromptu interested in, since you are at this instant considering the possibility of meeting it yourself: there is no special need for my describing it. The manner in which you might, but most probably won’t, recognise it is to look for a thing which resembles itself almost completely, to such a degree that you are totally fooled unless you happen to be a thing of the sort yourself.
This is what Zebleket does at all times: Zebleket is attempting to discover something of a different colour than itself. Now, you will naturally be confused, as you’re obviously under the impression that I have mentioned Zebleket’s colour as being black. Which, in a manner of speaking, it is. But Zebleket knows, and is willing to let you be informed, that black is at the root of all colours available to catkind (although a humongous cluster of individuals will have you know it is white). At any rate, black lies just beneath the surface of blue, green, yellow, brown and so on, but one must incessantly consider red. For this one is black’s favourite hide.
And so, Zebleket has arrived at the conclusion that all things are itself. Which can prove troubling, under certain circumstances. One of these being the fact that I will not have it think I am quite itself. Parts of me, such as the nails and the fur, I concede; but my stomach, for instance – it could never contain my stomach!
This is how Zebleket lives: it is nourished by oblique glances. Unless it can get some several hundred humans per month to believe they have just noticed something which simply isn’t there, it will starve. It always does its trick with me, I’m afraid, even though, as far as I can tell, I own the thing.
But that’s not very far, it should say. For she named it, true enough, but being unaware that it already had been named, she took the smack sound produced at the collision of the two names for who knows what else, and the older name prevailed, as it must.
Zebleket. Preposterous appellation for something which cannot distance itself from the outskirts of humans’ vision. What it wants, really, is for its true name to become known; but that shall not happen as long as it fails to encounter something of a different colour than itself.
This was the story about the black cat. Make of it what you will.
