Too Few for Noodles

Leopold licks at ice cream, walking down a street. He sees a cat, which runs scared from him. Leopold steps one more block and sees another cat that is identical to the first one but can’t be the same cat because it appears in a different direction from where the other cat just ran—he can be sure of at least that much, that is certain.

This cat studies him and follows Leopold closely. When he guesses that the cat would like a lap of the ice cream, he holds the ice cream cone down to shin-level for the cat to sniff and lick. The cat judges it and instead weaves in and out of the space between his legs—coquettish—in a repeating figure eight. Leopold takes another lick of the ice cream and again holds the cone down for the cat to try. The cat’s tail goes straight up and his ears slick back, ready to attack or flee. The cat—Leopold names it “Poncho” in his head—stands stalk-still and positively charged. Leopold says —to himself and to Poncho—that Poncho is shy and holds the white bulb millimeters from the cat’s snout, its whiskers stabbing the white surface. Poncho juts a bumpy tongue in & out of the ice cream like a spring-loaded stiletto knife. Poncho’s tail lowers and it licks one broad swath across the surface of the cone, the rough tongue leaving a deep groove where it dragged across the cone’s smoothness. The cat lets out a low growl like gravel between sliding panes of glass, ears again swept back and tail aloft. It makes one figure eight pass darting between Leopold’s legs and then expires, its head resting finally on Leopold’s left foot.

Leopold croaks surprise and is too stirred to move. He lifts the cone and studies it, eyes the deep groove that telegraphed the cat’s end. He takes a taste to see if it’s poison that did the cat in—that evil grocer is always trying to poison Leopold; he made a mental note never to patronize that corner grocer again for fear of poison dairy.

Leopold lives after the lick, but he starts to cry. He drops the cone and the white muck goes plop on pavement and Leopold bends from the waist to pick up the cat and he sobs into the cat’s fur. It is—or, was—a street cat so the smells locked into the fur do not please Leopold and this makes him cry more. “I don’t understand,” says Leopold in between tears. “I’m yellow and he was just black like oak knolls,” and, after a few more breaths punctuated with staccato blurting, “we should have made bumble bees together in the shade of that sycamore against the back fence. Why do the ones I love get poisoned by that mean old grocery clerk?”

The other cat—the one to run away—is eyeing the scene from a spot of darkness where two brick walls come together to form a grooved edge. Leopold opens his eyes and sees the first cat through Poncho’s tear- and grime-matted fur and he drops the cat unceremoniously like mutton bones onto the pavement at his feet—there is a muffled thump of something tearing, giving way—its limp forepaws sopping into the drooling puddle of white cream. “You did this!” Leopold says to the recent arrival, which looks more domesticated than Poncho, entitled. The other cat—Leopold decides is “Drake”—is wiping his eyes with the top of his right forepaw, the way a human wipes tears.

Drake does this for at least six seconds, while Leopold seethes with rage. And Leopold decides to hurt, but not like the hurt he himself feels right now but he wants to make Drake hurt for abandoning Poncho, because Poncho would not have died if Drake wouldn’t have turned his back on Poncho when friendship was needed most. Leopold is making plans to bludgeon Drake and then he thinks of drowning him in a pot of water that he keeps for boiling many packages of noodles when he has guests to dinner. It isn’t clean right now; he would have to scrub the pot first to get out the leftover noodles and then he could fill it with water and push Drake in it—he would claw at first, but Leopold was prepared for difficulties—but Drake sees Leopold’s unkind plans through his eyeballs and makes various evacuation plans from his current coordinates to less-hostile territory.

But neither creature does anything premeditated because a Peugeot with all four hubcaps sputters down the street and splashes a puddle that startles them both and when Leopold regains concentration Drake is gone.

And Leopold’s rage at Drake makes the blankness come, and once again Leopold is with Poncho—looking at smooth-backed cockroaches skittering into the deep pits in his porch—dreaming of yellow and black and flowers thick with bumble bees. The cockroaches open and pour, the patterned divots and humps of their shiny brown backs catch light and pass it on, catch light and pass it on. Silent, except for the thump of wing beats pushing against the sky.