Fauna In Metropolis: An Apology

 Julie Roth   

 

My upstairs neighbor has cats.

The first I heard them was the night after I saw Interview with the Vampire, and I thought they were large rats. Large, sprightly rats, bounding, full of blood, across the floor. I was in bed as I thought this, so it made sense to me at the time.

Well, last night I think she got a new one. This one would have to be some eight feet long (plus tail), I think, because I heard it purring like a rhythmical chain saw through the floor. I consider myself lucky this feline is not sprightly, or the ceiling might have come down on me the ceiling and all my neighbor's furniture and cats.

Again, I was in bed and had no desire to be swarmed over by their furry, shedding, larger-than-rat selves. After all, I am allergic.

Oh, you think these just the delusions of someone drifting off to sleep. Well that's nonsense. This column is set in New York. Anything can happen in it.

Why, a couple of weeks ago, my friend Karen and I were chatting on a street corner, when a gypsy-looking man in polyester and a hat came up and said, "Ladies, if I were a woman, I would fall in love with you." Well, since there was no chance of his turning into a woman on the spot (his mustache and penis clanging on the sidewalk at his feet), we were safe. So we thanked him.

You would too.

I was telling my dad the other day that one of the great things about this city is that wherever you walk you pass people singing or talking to themselves many of them better dressed than yourself. What I didn't tell Dad is the scary flip side of that: that the people talking to themselves sound frighteningly like the voices in your own head, with their, "What I really meant to say..." and their "Sonuvabitch How dare you treat me like..." and their "I can't believe he said that!" (What's worse, so do the songs. I once caught "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree" like a cold from a barefooted guy with black fingernails.)

Anyway, assuming I've made my point that anything can happen in this city, you will now believe me when I say there is an eight-foot happy pussycat living in the apartment above my own.

And so I hope you will understand that I had no choice when I tell you that I gave him your phone number.

 

 © Copyright 2024 Julie C. Roth. All rights reserved.

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