I would like to be there, were it but to see how the cat jumps.
Sir Walter Scott.
The rain pelted down upon the city, wrapping the people up in
cotton buds for minds, as they tramped along the marbled avenues,
beside the mazed canals into the cloistered coffee shops that ringed the
ancient metropolis as popular battlements against the elements. Here
they sat, huddled next to open charcoal braziers, over bitter cups of
coffee, exchanging witty gossip and different strains of pneumonia, while
watching the rain continue to fall down upon their city with its pernicious
intent. The endless shower of water, tumbling from the hidden sky,
covered the canals with waves of adversity, leaking everywhere, into
every crevice and catchpool about the clothing of those people foolish to
stay out in this open sewer of the heavens. Indeed those still in the rain,
found this irritation of the skies sweat almost intolerable, as it dribbled
and trickled incessantly about their skins; turning sweat into mire and
chills into raging fevers. So that they became sticky, cloying bundles of
humans trundling their way along the many thoroughfares beneath
equally wet, equally dripping villas, or the unfortunates sat aboard long,
black, chic gondolas that cruised the canals and there to spending many a
miserable hour I dripping.
High up above the pneumocolic city in one of many silver,
windowed skyscrapers that poked holes in the sky, was Erwin safely
sleeping in his bed, far away from these terrors of the primitive world,
warmly snuggled up to a book on animal vivisection. At least he dreamt
he was, till his alarm went off.
Erwin woke up with a slight ringing in his head and a cat on his
stomach. He thought at first, the cat was related in some way to the
ringing in his head, however he realized quickly, that cats don't ring and
especially not in one's head.
Erwin had just fallen awake, with one of those terrific jolts that
make you feel like you've just fallen out of a tree or the universe has
collapsed. To find this cat, sitting on his stomach staring up at him,
unblinking, with the sheerest trace of an insolent grin on its bewhiskered
face. He smiled back weakly, obviously the universe was in one of its
funny moods.
Erwin hit the alarm, then lay his head back on the pillow, and tried
to wake up for a second time; having found in the past, that by doing this,
not only would his nightmares go away but any stray cats would as well.
For a while, he seemed to be succeeding after a fashion, till the cat
decided to miaow in a bemused fashion, indicating it was either about to
