B L A C K   C A T  

A black cat crossed my path today.

What of this black cat? The witch's friend and confidant, the alley moggie which states itself in a cardboard bed and preys on garbage. To cross a black cat's path is good luck. To have one cross your path is for ill.

How long does the path of a black cat last? A few seconds? If so, maybe I was far away enough to have arrived on the scene after the trail had faded, and escaped my dose of bad luck. Maybe you have to be conscous of the cat's passing, luck bring like a psychosomatic condition, where a black cat with a white paw may still be a bad luck carrier if viewed from the wrong angle.

Maybein the worst case the world is a museum, and all trails and paths last forever. People who lived with black cats as pets would quickly find their houses unnavigatable, or be forced to circumnavigate their property endlessly attempting to cross the path of their inky feline friend and get the best out of the positive side of their relationship. Or would that be exploitive? If there is a law of conservation of luck, then the good luck credited to you would turn up as a bad luck credit on the cat's credit sheet.

What of people who take their pets on cars, twin eyes winking above the catseyes set into the freeway? What of that little cat which was trapped in the baggage hold of a major international airliner for seven months, and survived on condensed water? Perhaps the cat's path is continued, as its body is in motion and the description of that movement is its path. Technology allows us to make cat trails tens of thousands of miles long, wending their way around the world like shipping twine tangled by the wanton toddlers geography and global commerce.

The black cat may be that sole defender of so-called freedom, the destroyer of dictators and mutilator of monopolies. The armies of the Third Reich weren't stopped by the winter. The navy of Nipon was not halted by the atom bomb. Microsoft didn't trip on antitrust. The foot soldiers, ships and freight shipments full of Windows 98 simply slammed into allergenic walls of malaise and misfortune laid down by black cats, zipping around like the lightcycles from teh movie TRON. Conversely, maybe the British Empire had its time in the sun by boldly going where no black cat had gone before. What better way to aviod pestilence and death than to run to virgin llands where the pestilence and death have not yet followed you?

But then the cats came with them and the good luck they had accrued by crossing the paths of so many black cats in their superior ship hulls finally ran out, and the sheer size of the organisation left it wide open to the curse of the black cat, the divider of the great and the leveller of all.


A black cat crossed my path today. And stopped. And looked. And waited.
So I crossed its path, to get even. And we went on our ways.

by Jin Kee