Blue Saskia

Why she is blue I do not know.

Her face glows bone white in the moonlight. She turns her face toward the moon and closes her eyes slowly to bask in the lunar glow. When she opens her eyes again they become portals swelling open across her face. The iris’ glow solar orange and spin like Saturn’s rings around the dense black holes of her pupils. Whereupon the moon is reflected, pock filled and cratered, in near perfect accuracy. There is nothing in those vast eyes that can give me a clue as to why she is blue, save the imagery of everything she observes with wistful intent. It is these times I feel alien to her, the void unreachable even though she is here by my side.

When she walks she carefully places one limb in front of the other as though she is engaged in an elegant ballet. Each footfall is deliberate, slow and graceful. Each digit flexed and relaxed at precisely the right moments. Her cadence has a haughty sissone nature, she leaps from worktop to floor with a sense of direct purpose yet possesses an air of getting to her destination in her own good time.  She begins to perform a slow ballroom waltz across the kitchen floor with the air of a young spoiled debutante who is quite bored by this whole show.

 The disdainful muse is walking the kitchen

I declare to her words she hardly hears or recognizes. I am the tall cumbersome thing in her house that sometimes gets in her way, sometimes makes strange noises. I don’t know why she is so blue, but I have a small suspicion it could be down to her attitude.

She is somehow here but absent, the shadow that sometimes flits by the corner of my eye. As I move about the kitchen she is entangled in my feet. I curse at her in frustration. She is gone. Seconds later she has squeezed herself between the microwave and the old cookery books. She eyes me intently and I become nervous. Between her and I, a pot of tomato soup bubbles. The smell creeps across the kitchen as it heats, hits her nostrils and her ears flatten in preparation of the hunt. I look up and she is closer still, stalking the source of the smell.

Her eyelids turn down at the corners of her squat nose. She appears maddened by something so I break of a small piece of crusty bread and drop it at her feet. For eyes so large they seem to encompass the entire universe she cannot locate the small crumb when it is dropped in front of her. So the pot bubbles cauldron like whilst I continue to point to the chunk, each of us becoming more exasperated by the situation as the bubbles gurgle and spit out of the pot. The soup forms a thick inedible crust around the edge of the pan. Her nose wrinkles and sniffs at the cold tile floor, unable to pick up anything but the faint smell of disinfectant and ceramic. Perhaps this is why she is blue. In a world full of smells, she can never distinguish what is food.

She sniffs at the bread twice and turns her head away. The small morsel will not be entertained again. She is not hungry I suspect, but always ravenous. They are natural scavengers, my friends explained when Saskia appeared one day and then decided to stay. They are an open stomach, they don’t have an off switch, they don’t recognize hunger like us. It’s not part of their genetic makeup to walk away from a good meal, especially when it comes with free board and all the cat toys they could ever want thrown into the bargain. My friends have all reminded me every time they see her paw at my elbow. She is a wandering hunter, driven by her food insecurity. I sometimes wonder that if I once fed her five minutes too late, or a food she didn’t care for that the next time the front door is left open and unattended she would abscond into the night. Back to where she came from. I sometimes wonder if she thinks of that before me place and It might be why she is blue.

But now she is my querulous mistress. The heavy footsteps on my chest at three am in the morning, or at that beautiful moment when sleep is about to take over. She is the spectral footfall on the hall steps when the house has fallen into shadow and silence. She appears to be always on the prowl. She is the spook that startles me awake at six am with her banshee shrieks. An ear piercing cry that suggests she has never obtained sustenance from me in her entire life, and usually emitted when I am mood heavy and bleary eyed. She is my ghost among the living. Only ever able to communicate in the language of the poltergeist. It could possibly be why Saskia is blue.

I will eat a simple meal of bread and soup tonight with Saskia by my side. I will be interrupted by an insistent pawing at my elbow until I cave in and let her lick the butter from my bread. Saskia will be mildly sated by the acknowledgement that whatever I consume must be shared with her. It is the eternal unwritten, unspoken rule in our relationship. I will never understand why she appears to be blue. It is a secret she will no doubt keep to herself.

There are times when we are together, particularly mealtimes such as this, when she inveigles herself into my space by wheedling her soft head into the nook of my elbow, that she does not appear to be blue at all. We will sit in the quiet and eat she will lick the buttery grease from her whiskers, and for a short time we are evens in a world that is at odds.