Cats Behind the Wheel

Cat with black felt top hat covering the left ear.

Name’s Blue Jazzy Nights.

Lemon-yellow paws with soot black fur all around.

Talks in the car in the passenger seat.

Owner drives, not involved in any way.

Half-eaten bags of chips and a half-drunk bottle of soda

sits in the cup holder.

What a lunch.

My owner's not keen to eat healthy.

I nudge a piece of broccoli.

But she instantly tosses it back in the refrigerator.

Entire ride focuses on me narrating my life.

Starts with my backstory.

I was rejected by Mother and then Father and then sent away to be adopted at adoption agency.

Decided to run away.

Telling of adventures and its coming of age;

learned to be kind, love and has times of serving others—

served food at homeless shelter for dogs and cats,

gave only piece of bread to starving rat family,

saved a mouse from a fat cat.

Did a lot of good in my life.

But something is bothering me.

I feel—

No, I need to tell my story!

I need to let everyone know.

Know who I am right now.

Whenever I write it down, I’m in the car.

In a car driven by my owner.

Every time I want to show the story to my owner,

She’s busy.

Too busy to see I’m not the same cat!

*Shakes head*

Anyway, I’ll show her.

She’ll see.

She’ll understand.

Here—

*pulls out a sheet of paper from the dashboard’s cupboard*

Here, let me explain.

See, someone’s gotta understand.

So I’ll start—

“Hold on, Blue!”

A car almost hit us!

I froze for a second.

You don’t understand how scary that was.

A scary plight.

But we’re safe now.

Phew!

I wipe my paw across my forehead and I—

No! My story.

It flew out of my other paw and out the window my owner rolled down.

No, no!

I don’t look at my owner. I glower, if I do, and hiss.

I don’t like it. Not one bit.

I shake my head.

I yank out a sheet of paper.

I start over. Then my owner says that I need to prepare for an oncoming truck!

I scramble up and calmly close my eyes.

Death is approaching—

I open them.

I don’t see anything but livelihood.

I see trees, cars and my owner. She’s still driving.

Phew! I can get back to my freaking story.

So I grab another piece of paper

And write it all out

Because I need to tell my owner and all the other cats in their owners’ cars’ passenger seats who I see right now—

Hey, there’s Toby! He’s my best friend.

We do everything together—

Oh, and the other people in the neighborhood and other cats who I am right now. I’ve learned a lot. I’m not selfish or frustrating or annoying or—

Oh, there’s Hailey, the Cheshire who lives four blocks down from Toby. We’re neighbors.

Anyway, all the alley cats—

There’s Yoyo, the Yorkie. And Blackeye the Bichon Frise. And White-out the Black Lab. They’re all saying hey!

I said hey, and then plastered my story and yelled through the glass window that I’m writing a story.

Some of them put a paw to an ear. What? One mouthed.

I rolled down the window. Toby rolled it down, too. “What?” He asked.

“I said, ‘I’m writing a real cool story’.”

“Yeah.”

“Just…’yeah’?”

“Yeah.”

Window goes up.

I sigh. Scroll the window up. I look over at owner. She’s ignoring me.

I blink. Somehow, no one’s interested. It’s my story!

I learned so much.

I begin to write.

And I wrote and wrote and wrote

About all the fantastic things.

I wrote about how I learned to do this, and that,

That and this.

Oh! Maybe I can even go on TV and run my show.

I grinned madly as I raced time, it seemed.

I raced time to see who would win.

Win this game of winning.

As I scribbled, I finally stopped and grabbed the sheet with one of my lemon paws.

I read.

And then I learned to do this and that,

Frolic and chase and play and whatnot.

I blinked.

What am I writing?

I shook my head and then thought about what I was doing.

I looked down. Scratch that!

I literally took a paw, unleashed my claws and swiped at the piece of paper.

I shook my head. No. Not again. I’m not going back there. That world can stay where it is.

Blue Jazzy Nights who wants others to learn something about him—and if they don’t he won’t be happy until they do—can sit in this passenger seat until they do. Time has lost. I have all the time in the world.

Blue Jazzy Nights will write jazz music and fantasy novels.

One in which a character swipes his own card to enter a cat domain, in which he becomes a cat.

A cat who heads up the organization to…

I tap my pen to my chin and look away, thinking.

Please, what could make this character funny? Or creative?

Aha!

I write it all down, it being boring or whatnot unimportant.

I look at my owner.

She’s not interrupting.

I look around.

My friends are gone.

Oh well, I think, smiling a little. Then I smiled for real. Nodding, I wrote and wrote.

Wrote some more.

And wrote until my paw cramped up and the words stopped flowing.

Flowing like water off of a rock into the rest of the stream it obviously flooded.

Flooded with itself.

Well, I said, sitting back and admiring my work, I’ve done it.

I read what I wrote.

And smiled.

I hoped my owner enjoyed it.

Enjoyed my fantasy novel.

I quietly wrote the first draft.

I started pursing my lips, wondering how I was going to get this thing published.

But I kept writing.

And writing.

Writing.

Words poured, and my imagination worked itself into a frenzy.

Finally, I was panting. Phew! What a race.

A race against no one.

No one but me.

And me.

And me.

I put down my pen.

And was proud.

For once.

In my life.