Friday, May 25, 2012

A Novelist's Cat


Possibly Naomi's least-favorite thing about her seemingly endless fans was their undying determination to know where she got her ideas. What did people think was in her head, jell-o?
Naomi's reason for suggesting others' assumption that her skull was full of jell-o did not come from her immense, and indeed nonexistent, dislike of jell-o, but that she was in the middle of mixing up a panful for her cat, who loved jell-o more than anything. Except, perhaps, Naomi's laptop, which was the cat's favorite place to sleep.
Her promotors tended to get angry whenever Naomi answered these questions with a sarcastic remark such as, "You wouldn't be accusing me of plagiarism, would you?", because the poor people were often so shocked and thereafter intimidated by their favorite author, which, according to her promotors, brought the sale of her books down by ten percent. Naomi doubted this, because she told half a dozen people off for asking her such questions a day, and she was still a multimillionaire.
Hades, Naomi's fluffy black cat who was often mistaken as a demon, meowed up at her from the mosaic kitchen floor. Naomi flicked her short, curly blonde hair out of her eyes and replied to her cat, "Shut up, Hades. It has to set."
Naomi was one of the few people in the world who could tell the god of the underworld to shut up and not be immediately zapped across the river Styx. Not that her cat was actually a god. More of a Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
"Meow," Hades meowed again. He rarely said anything else to Naomi, though 'Hiss' was a common greeting to whoever rang the doorbell.
There were currently seven people writing Naomi's biography, and they were constantly arguing over the origin of Hades. Some said that Naomi had found a poor black kitten in the gutter and taken it home to find that it held immense power in its paws, but these few were currently seeing psychologists five days a week so nobody really cared about their opinion. The others said that Naomi had either found the cat in her local animal shelter and had mercy on it despite its unlucky color and abnormally fluffy fur, or she had misread the label at the pet shop for 'harmless kitty-cat' due to her dyslexia.
In reality, one of Naomi's adoring fans had dropped the kitten on Naomi's balcony at midnight with a note saying that he was a late birthday gift. Naomi had accepted the cat from the anonymous giver and named him Hades after he ripped the stuffing unceremoniously out of Naomi's designer chairs, therefore killing the chairs.

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