"Hello!" I exclaimed, pulling the garden gate shut behind me.
A pair of black ears were sticking out of the long grass. One of them twitched. I stood there motionless for a while. It was twilight. The sun had slipped beneath the trees and I had made my way home through the wooden gate that joins my garden to the park.
This must be what it's like to be a gazelle or a zebra, I thought to myself - transfixed by the danger, but unsure whether or not to run. Fight or flight, the law of the wild, the circle of life.
I stared. A pair of cool yellow eyes reflected back at me through the stalks. They were expressionless eyes: glistening, unblinking, wide and empty of emotion - the eyes of a hunter, fixed on its prey, ready for that perfect moment to pounce, to roar and to devour.
How long, I wondered, have you been living in my garden? Carefully, I began to move, one step, carefully swishing through the grass and finding the concrete of the overgrown path. The yellow eyes followed me. I brushed past the bushes. He glared. I made it to the shed, palms feeling my way across the splintered wood.
The ears twitched again. For the first time I noticed the sleekness and the blackness of his fur - a deep abyss of colour, the darkness of shadows, of unending wells and eternal, empty night - blacker than black in the darkening summer sky - the covering for powerful muscles, rippling beneath that ebony exterior. And those two glaring eyes, ever fixated upon me, burning and bright.
He yawned, lazily. Fangs, sharper than serpents' and brilliant white. A silent roar filled the air, buzzing, echoing, pounding through my head. I ran for home, bumbling through the wooden gate and clanking it shut behind me.
-
So, there's a cat living in my garden. I think I should give him a name - if I can be brave enough to go back in there, that is.
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