Exorcism Cat

THE FERAL CATS ARE GONE! A crew of guys rolled in to the secret garden and chopped… and bagged… and ate lunch… and threw out the cats. GONE are the rotting feline thrones and the tins of Fancy Feast. And the garden is sort of lovely, despite the timeless inelegance of the chain link fence.

I’ve received text messages and emails from neighbors saying thanks for getting the place cleaned up. You got it, neighbors! No problem! (Air five!)

Now when we all come home, walking past the secret garden, we don’t feel our hearts sinking into our stomachs, thinking it’s just another day in Trashutopia.

But the cats put out a memo with a bag of fish-part bounty attached to my head. And one cat has come to claim the prize.

I don’t know what tipped them off it was me. Maybe my clandestine meeting with the Sanitation Superintendent on their sidewalk?

Most likely it was Francesca, the vixenish, ultra-sophisticated tabby belonging to my neighbors. Francesca is always outside in the hallway all up in yo’ biznez. She snuck into our house last Wednesday and spent six hours under the mattress reading New Yorkers and looking at K-Pants’s baby books.

If Francesca were human, she would have been raised in the projects but fought her way out with razor blades, learned to read at McDonald’s, snuck in to classes at Columbia, and then run a crack ring until God found her in an empty Baptist church, and now she’s clean–but a little off.

I’m sure Francesca knows the secret garden thing was me. She prides herself on knowing the neighborhood biz. And although I’m sure she’ll deny this also, she told Exorcism Cat to come over.

Ex-Cat is white with a forehead soul-patch. She has crazy eyes, and I see when I look into her soul, that 1) she knows I destroyed her crib, and b) she’s trying out for a horror flick.

She sits outside my apartment door, mewing a baleful mew, scratching a raging scratch, weeping a pitiful weep. She’s waiting for K-Pants and I to leave so she can go all Laser Cats on our tushies.

I need to do something about this before Halloween hits and she calls in her back-up. I’ve seen the previews for horror movies: I know what happens. So, if you know anyone who wants to adopt a lovely, slightly-possessed feline, please let me know.