The Cat Strangler (book)

[Pandafish 60]

It starts with the usual growls: the feline handled roughly by the

scruff. The Cat Strangler is at it again.

 

A slight struggle, a practice squeeze and others methods of

impersonal handling, and off he goes. The neighborhood collectively

shrugs its shoulders in hope of shutting out the yeowls and the hisses

stretched into high pitch by the Cat Strangler's strong, trained hands.

 

Parents turn up their televisions; children pull pillows over their

heads to the point of suffocation. Neighborhood pets break into

instinctual runs and flee into unfamiliar territory, their nametags and

phone numbers their only hope of return.

 

The Cat Strangler continues his performance. The neighbors call the

authorities, but the authorities stammer helplessly---they've been over

all this before (the pulling up, the getting out, the knocking on the

door, the being met with the Cat Strangler's cat-strangling credentials,

backed with University patronage).

 

For what few seem to hear under the barrage of kitty torture is the

Cat Strangler's wife, Jill, in accompaniment (tonight: Heinrich Ignaz

Franz Von Biber, Sonata for Violin and Basso Continuo in C Minor). No

one bothers appreciating how a firm grip on the neck and harsh pull of

the tail make a perfect B flat, how a good squeeze produces a high E.

 

Instead, psychiatrists will be consulted---tears will be shed. Parents

will explain to the children the wrongdoings of the Cat Strangler's art

form; they will recite scripture; they will make moral imperatives.

Animal activists will lick bloodlust from their lips and draw up plans of

attack. Far off in distant, political lands, untouched by the screams of

dying cats but active just the same, government agencies will do the

voodoo they do. Nothing will remain the same.

 

But for now, the recital ends---to no applause.

 

Jill, the Cat Strangler's wife, critiques the performance. Siamese,

she believes, have too harsh an overall tone for something as technically

precise as Biber. For the Russians, fine (for Schnittke, for

Shostakovich, even Tchaikovsky), but for the Germans she is more inclined

towards the longhairs.

 

The Cat Strangler makes hurried notes---such a landmark work will his

be! His professors had little hope for Musica Zoocidia beyond classroom

experimentation, and they certainly never dreamed of using animals wilder

than your typical laboratory rat. The Cat Strangler's treatise will

break all confines! He sees a future in pig concertos---nay, even a day

for the Echo Sonata for Himalayan, Chihuahua and Ostrich.

 

He transports the spent instrument in a brown paper bag in

unceremonious fashion. He takes it to a deep wood, as far as his car

will allow, and empties the bag onto a pile of expired brethren, cats

piled upon cats piled upon cats piled upon cats, tongues stuck out in

strangulation horror. The pile writhes in minute, maggot-infested

rhythm. When the Cat Stranlger departs, waiting minions of sporting

equipment manufacturers raid the pile of former felines for the making of

tennis rackets. These rackets are placed into the able hands of

strong-bodied, gleaming white tennis players, who swing into furious

volleys for game.

 

[boneboys 7988]

My, that is a strange if not the strangest of Suggestions I have yet seen.

[Pandafish 60]

the strangler demands it