Pig-Malion
By Mark Budman
A few days ago, Ralph came to my apartment, took a bottle of this stinky drink he calls beer, and instead of feeding Ginger and me, lay on my couch. I jumped on his chest and he scratched behind my ear. I purred in my throat just in case. I knew he would tell me something.
"They just laid me off," he whispered, staring into space. "After ten years of service. I have become a loser, Tommy. Just like my father."
I kept purring in my throat. It sounds like a clichéd response, but what else could I do? Yeah, I could've purred deep in my stomach, flexed my claws, grabbed his finger or rolled over on my back. But had he understood our language, he would have known that the subtle variation in the tone of my purring meant. "Yeah. You look like a loser. And smell like one, too."
I kind of guessed this was coming. He hadn't brought any females home for a long time. I used to like watching him and his females intertwining their ugly furless bodies on the bed, whirling and shouting at the tops of their lungs, "Oh, baby, oh!" or some other nonsense like that. The baby they called would never come out. It couldn't. The human gestation period is nine months. That's what Dennis Miller Live said on TV. They should have known that.
I wouldn't even comment on the single pair of tits. It was always beyond contempt to me.
There was another reason I knew Ralph was a loser. He no longer ate meat. The only meat in the house was the tiny morsels in the cat food Ginger and I ate. Ginger was a reddish half-wit with white paws. He bit his tail and then wondered what attacked him. I called him Moron.
From that day on, Ralph just sprawled all day long on the couch in the living room, a remote control in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, and watched the TV. He had only one bottle a day before. Now he drank many. Once he even threw a bottle against the wall, startling me and Moron. The stain looked like the clothed mouse I saw on TV. They called him Mickey. I wonder if he tastes better than cat food. Probably. Everything tastes better than cat food.
So I purred, surrounded by a loser and a half-wit. What else could I do? Piss on Ralph's clothes? Scratch the couch? Shed? He wouldn't see a difference because I always did those things.
One day, Moron managed to escape outside and got squashed by a Purina truck. As I said, half-wit. Actually, no-wit now.
A few days later, Ralph's mother came to visit, carrying a woven basket. I liked her. She was a warm, tender human being. Especially her big, comfortable lap and tender palms.
"Look what I got for you, Ralphy dear," she said. Like Ralph just a few months earlier, she was full of energy. She took the lid off the basket and a cat came out. He was a beauty. Black, glistening and powerful. Just like I had not a single black hair, he had not a single white one. He was a bit bigger than me, which meant, he would have trouble fitting on my window sills.
"What the hell do I need another cat for?" Ralph said. He didn't even get off the couch to greet his mother. "I can hardly afford cat food anymore."
"Don't talk like your father, Ralph. I brought you this cat to replace Ginger, God rest his soul."
I came closer. She turned to me. "This is Raven," she told me in a poor imitation of a purr. "Raven, say hello to Tommy."
I ignored that. I don't care what people call cats. We have our own names.
"Hi," I meowed. "I'm Snowball. What's your name, dark fellow?"
"Snowball?" the black cat meowed. "Like the pig in the Animal Farm?"
I didn't know what animal farm means, but I wouldn't take that from him. "What's your name, again?"
He meowed something I didn't quite catch. I was too proud to ask him to repeat.
"Look who's talking," I meowed. "Pig-Malion? Why would a cat be named this way?"
"It's a long story." And he went to check out the apartment.
This cat spelled trouble. I would wait and see.
A few days later, when Ralph was away, which doesn't happen often any more, Pig-Malion came to me and meowed, "Ralph is a loser."
"Yeah," I meowed. "And I am a feline."
"I know how to help him. But we must act as a team."
"We? I didn't know we had more than two cats in this apartment," I said, licking my paw.
"Stop being sardonic. Don't you care about eating?"
I don't know what sardonic is. Dennis Miller has never used this word. Could it be another word for moron? But I wouldn't show my ignorance. I wiggled my tail and yawned. One day I would learn how to shrug. Shrugging seemed cool.
"Ralph is going down fast."
"What's in it for me?"
"If he deteriorates further," Pig-Malion insisted, "he will be in the hospital. And then we are out in the streets. Or he will just kick us out. Either way, we will be street cats."
I thought. I saw the street cats through the window. I saw the stray dogs. I saw the trucks. I saw Ralph's condition.
#
First, we hid the remote control.
"Imagine it's a rubber ball that can't roll," Pig-Malion explained. "Yes, yes, push like this."
We pushed together until it ended up under the coach, among a few empty bottles and a woman's bra.
"He won't turn the TV on manually," Pig-Malion continued. "It won't even occur to him. Humans are spoiled creatures."
Funny. I didn't know the TV could be turned on manually. I mean, you could walk to it and press buttons right on the box itself? What a silly idea!
"Now, we need get rid of his beer," Pig-Malion meowed. His paws had incredible dexterity for a cat. But even he had trouble opening the fridge. When it was finally open, we climbed on the shelves and dropped the bottles to the tiled floor. Opening them was beyond Pig-Malion's majestic skills. You needed fingers for that, not paws.
"Next we do some computer work," he meowed. "Don't you love computers? I saw that cartoon in the New Yorker. One dog says to another: 'On the Net nobody knows you are a dog.'"
This cat talked funny.
He turned on the computer and jumped on the table. This cat was a miracle on four feet. He clicked with his claws, he pressed the keys. I couldn't believe my own green eyes. Where did Ralph's mom get him? Did she steal him from a witch's lair? Was he beamed to her from another galaxy? Did he come on a time machine? I wondered why he needed me on his team. As a manual laborer? Or just to keep me out of his way?
"I touched up Ralph's resume," he meowed to me. I don't remember Dennis Miller using this word either. Was resume the same as penis?
"It had substance but no flare," he continued. "Now it has both. What do you think?"
I jumped on the table, too, ignoring the nasty smell of hot plastic. If I were human, I would blush. "I can't read."
"That's OK," he meowed without taking his eyes off the screen. "I'm getting on line now. Good thing he set up his login for 'save password.' Sending… Next step is to place an ad on an Internet matching agency. I need to touch up Ralph's picture first. His cheeks are a bit puffy and his jaw is a bit weak. I will leave the blue eyes intact. Human tastes are weird, as you know."
I needed to contribute something, too. "Well, when the woman sees she is deceived..." I meowed.
"It's not called deceiving. It's called creating a favorable first impression. By the time she sees that he's not really a stud, she will admire his sensitive soul and his big paycheck."
When Ralph came back, we both pretended we were catching catnaps. Ralph smelled of beer all the way across the room. His jeans were stained and not by me. He searched for the remote. He stumbled. He found a big puddle and the heap of broken glass by the fridge. He said, "What the hell?" He fell asleep on the couch forgetting to feed us. The TV was off. I'd miss Dennis Miller tonight. But the important question was-would it work? If I were a betting cat, I would bet my cat food bowl against the scrawniest bird outside that it wouldn't work. But Pig-Malion looked cool. I tried to shrug. I failed. I fell asleep. I dreamt of a woman who fed me a huge, juicy steak. I purred.
###
A week later, the phone rang.
"Sure," Ralph went. "Sure. I will be there. Thank you."
He was not drunk anymore. Pig-Malion said he ran out of beer money.
Ralph hung up. "An invitation for an interview. What the hell is going on?" he said, scratching the back of his head with his finger.
Big deal, I thought. Try to lick your privates.
"Don't worry. He'll think he sent the resume and just forgot about it," Pig-Malion meowed a bit later. "Human memory is faulty."
I didn't worry. After all, I hadn't made any bets.
A month passed. No, Pig-Malion was a different breed of cat. Ralph had become another man. Why, he was almost one of us. Only uglier. When he stroked Nancy, a woman I would date if I were a man, he purred loudly in his throat. He said his new job paid ten thousand dollars a year more than the old one. I don't know exactly what a dollar is worth but I was impressed. Ten thousand of anything sounded big.
Ralph fed us like the President's cats. He had steaks for dinner every day, watched nothing but news and Dennis Miller Live on the TV, and drank only one bottle of beer a day.
Oh, yes, he repainted the wall. Pity. Mickey looked delicious.
Pig-Malion promised to teach me how to read. We would start with a book of Greek myths in an easy-to-handle paperback. Pig-Malion said myths meant fables, which meant stories. He said reading was more fun than the TV. If anybody else said that, I would scratch his eyes out.
I hope the Greeks had cats. Every civilized society should have a few well-placed felines. The ones that don't are not worth rubbing my head against their leaders' knees.
<The End>
About the author, Mark Budman:
I was born and raised in the former Soviet Union. My fiction and poetry have appeared in Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Web Del Sol, Talebones, Recursive Angel and many other magazines.
I am the publisher of Vestal Review, the Net's only professional flash fiction magazine. Don't flash without it! http://www.vestalreview.net Now a Web Del Sol's "Hot Link"
