The Cat's On The Roof...

Jane was having the worst writing slump of her life, stuck in a perpetual merry-go-round of clichés. Her fingers tapped on the keyboard:

“Boy meets girl.” She shook her head. Oh hell no.

“Boy murders girl.” Too man-power-ish.

“Girl murders boy.” She rolled her eyes and angrily wrote:

“Grandma murders Grandpa.” Come on, think!

She growled and spun her faux leather chair around, staring out the window for inspiration.

Come on, muse… work your magic.

The lights blinked on and off, as if in answer. Maybe it was her muse. Maybe things would be okay after all.

Something on the neighbor’s roof caught her eye. A blur of white. Perhaps a plastic grocery bag caught in the wind. It skittled along the eaves. Yep. A bag, all right.

Except—it meowed. Even from across the street, Jane could hear.

Oh my god. The clichés are coming alive! She rolled her eyes and bowed to the absurd, writing: “The cat’s on the roof and it can’t come down.”

Because that’s what you were supposed to say if you had to tell someone their cat died. Sort of a ‘telling them in stages’ aphorism.

Weirdly, Stanley, the neighbor with the cat, rang, his name displayed on the phone. She answered, “Hey, Stanley. Yes, I’ll mow my lawn, no, my dog didn’t eat your paper, and no, I don’t want to buy insurance.”

The phone was quiet for longer than was comfortable. Guess he wasn’t in a humorous mood. Jane took a sip of her tea. She wasn’t going to cave and apologize. She’d play the “who can stay quiet the longest” game. Because, yes, that is how bored I am, since I can’t seem to write anything.

He finally answered, “I can’t find Mr. Hibbons.”

“Mr. Hibbons?” Not a clue. Jane took another sip of tea and waited.

“My cat.”

She almost spat her tea out, silently laughing. She looked down at her computer and read out loud what she’d literally just written, “The cat’s on the roof and it can’t come down.” Her shoulders shook.

“Are you laughing?”

“No, of course not. Okay, a little, because your cat literally is on your roof. Didn’t you hear him meowing?”

“No,” he said curtly. “Remember, I lost my hearing seven years ago. Same time as I lost my previous house in the fire. That’s why I moved to this neighborhood. And I’ve had nothing but bad luck ever since,” he whined.

“Seven years… of bad luck, you say?” Her fingers clicked as she wrote it down. She was starting to lean into this writer’s block cliché nightmare thing.

“Yes, that’s what I said. Seven years. Anyway, I have a ladder in the garage. I’ll go rescue my cat.”

“Well, don’t step on the crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.”

“What that about my mother?”

“Never mind.” Clickety-clack went her fingers, recording the colloquialisms that seemed to be pouring in from everywhere.

Something ran across the lawn and vanished out of sight. Not Mr. Hibbons—he was still on the roof. But she did see Stanley across the street, walking under his ladder as he set it up. No wonder he was having seven years of bad luck.

She heard a honk. Aha. There was a goose on her lawn waddling back and forth, flapping its wings. Billy, the kid from down the street, was chasing it and looked pretty winded. Jane watched him walk to her front door and ring the bell.

Jane swung the door open.

“I can’t catch my gander.” Billy stood there with a smudged face and dirty overalls. “Do you have any bread I can use to lure him?”

Jane grabbed a crust of bread from the kitchen and handed it to him. “What’s a gander? I thought you were chasing a goose?”

“Well, a gander is a boy, and a goose is a girl. Daddy says if the gander keeps escaping we’re gonna make a stew out of him.”

Jane couldn’t help herself. “Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

The boy frowned, perplexed. “No. The goose is a good girl. She lays eggs for us. We’d never put her in a stew.” Billy ran off, waving the bread and chasing the wayward gander.

“Somebody help me,” Jane muttered, and typed on her computer, “What’s good for the gander is not always good for the goose,” just to break things up a bit.

Jane poured herself a stiff drink, thinking maybe she could damage her brain just enough so it would reboot and she’d stop writing nonsense.

Day after day, week after week, page after infinitely painful page, Jane wrote clichés, because they really did seem to be coming alive. Tortured, fascinated, and disgusted all at the same time, on and on she wrote. For one thing, every single damned cloud in the sky for weeks had been ringed with… yep… a silver lining. And it was really pissing her off.

She looked at the calendar. It had been a month to the day since her clichés had begun. Maybe it was that damned muse, mocking her, torturing her to insanity. There had to be a way to break the pattern.

Maybe if she did something completely unusual, something she’d never done before, to break up her routine, she could confuse her brain—and the universe—into making it stop. She grabbed an old frumpy sweater she hadn’t worn in a decade, the one with elbow patches on it, and stepped outside.

When she crossed the street, there was Stanley, and he bee-lined it to her. Bee-line. Damn it, another cliché!

He shouted (because he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid), “Hey Jane, your elbow patch is coming loose.”

Jane turned her arm to see the patch hanging on by a thread. She tugged it and it came right off in her hand.

“You should have stitched that up in time.”

“In time for what?”

“For it to not come apart.”

“So… what you’re saying is… a stitch in time saves nine?”

He shrugged. “How would I know how many stitches? I’m not a seamstress.”

Jane couldn’t stand it anymore. She went home. She angrily threw the patch and the sweater in the garbage. “Enough with the clichés!” But she still felt compelled to write everything down.

Her world was spiraling out of control. She’d taken to drinking just so she could sleep—otherwise, she’d stay up all night, drowning in rhymes and sayings and pitiful minutia.

She was at her wit’s end and starting to crack like an egg (stop it!). She thought that perhaps if she blocked the whole world, then the world and its clichés couldn’t get in. She grabbed a toolbox and some nails and hammered her front door shut. Nails stuck out left and right like a pincushion, but she didn’t give a… wait. Is that a rat’s… ass? Sure enough, there was a rat in her house. And it was creeping into a little crack in the floorboard, except that it didn’t fit. It got stuck there and all she could see was—yep, the rat’s ass.

“That’s it!” She swore till she was blue in the face (stop it!) and grabbed a baseball bat. She’d send that rat to the moon if it was the last thing she did. (STOP IT!)

She took a swing, but the rat turned around and scuttled straight toward her. Startled, she leaped backward. Unfortunately, she landed hard against a big, protruding nail on the door. And it penetrated her skull.

And there she was, ‘hanging around,’ dead. Dead as a doornail.

Her phone rang—it was her publisher, Jack Sprat. After several rings, he left a message:

“Jane, hi. I know you’ve been in a slump, but—great news—you’ve been asked to write a book of colloquialisms. You know… a collection of little sayings, adages, aphorisms, clichés. Things like ‘Well begun is half done’ or ‘When it rains, it pours.’ You’ll figure it out. The only problem is they want it yesterday. So, throw everything you have against the wall. Put your head into it. I’m sure you’ll nail it. Gotta go. Tell that muse of yours to hit you over the head with clichés, I’m sure you’re dying to come up with some ideas. Knock ‘em dead. And—nail that door shut so no one breaks your train of thought. Clichés. Who knew they’d be your ticket to paradise?”