Consiliul
Județean Cluj

România
100

Director fondator: Mircea Arman, 2015

Director fondator revista pe suport material: Ioan Slavici, 1884

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The Fat Cat Which Stole The Cheese

 

There was once a fat, delusional cat, which broke into any house, if the door was open, to commandeer the cheese. The cat wasn’t just any cat, it was a special agent hired by the Society of Kind Nescient Animals, an organism recently registered with the Ruminant Society of the Quadruped Philosophers. Named the Cat-Tack, this agent could easily change its form, fly, swim and keep its breath for an hour, balley dance in the air, with its head turned against its own volition. It was a cat hero, a rebel, a Robin Hood of all the felines. The demand for cheese increased so much that the tranquilled, browned off, high order of the animals – distinguished cows, devoted sheep and meritorious goats – couldn’t keep up with it. The animals felt amazed, taken aback and considerably subjugated. They went on strike, opposing the sight in front of them, on a daily basis, ceaselessly.

They refused to number the days forward, pretending to count them contrarily to the situation, against the clockwise. At the same time, the respected members of the sinuous, immaculate milk producers’ confraternity, stopped grazing green grass, petitioning a totally different colour, to suit their bucolic fantasies. Rosy pinkish, round and bouncy leaves of grass, pointy, spherical, square or triangular, blue and purple dotted, porcelained blades of grass were required to decorate the pastures. The farmers tried to force them accept the initial situation and give milk without questioning the authority, but the animals invoked their rights and stressed that, lately, scientists classified them as almost human.

There was nothing else to be done about it. Soon, all the cheese in the country disappeared, and nobody really gave it the obligatory attention. “Where is the cheese?” was the capital question deployed in every book, broadcast or magazine. To recall the former, harmonious circumstances, the officials decided to sell artificial cheese, moulded in conspicuous machineries, confident the buyers won’t comprehend. “They can’t afford to give the slightest caution”, the authorities decreed. The idea passed by the collection of the total number of ears contained by the gracious ladies of the Society of the Nescient Animals, crashing into a high stone wall, at the margin of the estate. The cunning turkey gave a completely useless speech on the role of waiting without hope, on the verge of the nearest void.

Everybody went shopping and noticed the cheese is back on the shelves. Cheese was once again to be found in the quotidian sandwiches, pizzas, pastas and other meals. Children could masticate their sandwiches again at school, workers could gobble up their pizzas in various labour environments. Everybody felt the things seemed to get back to normal again, whatever that might be, or was intended, for an inadvertent course of time. One woman saw that, after a few days, the cheese changed its colour and squeezed like a rubber glove, huddling and hissing in a multitude of ways. Some varieties of cheese were slightly orange and grew mould spots on it. Others acquired a greenish crust, powdered with white traces, a few got pinkish. If melted in the oven, the cheese would arrange in geometrical shapes, lines, squares, triangles, circles, trapezoids, rhombuses, cuboids. It was, indeed, some kind of wonderful, added a spoonful of bewilderment and a dazzling quantity of abruptness.

The observant woman, suspiciously wasting her time with unimportant analysis, called the Cheese Inspectors of the Curdled Milk, presenting them the strange phenomenon. A small, fat, old and bold headed man, with a red, round, tomato nose and a tall, skinny, owlish lady with a muzzle like a peg and thread thin lips arrived, arrogant, bored and annoyed to be bothered with such trifles. The lady was, particularly, deranged by the unsuitability of the complaint, way under her own capability and vast intelligence to unfold and become operational. Madam Supinsky kept her sharp, long nose up towards the ceiling, with the resilience and the muscular strength of a rugby player. Mounted on that monumental, spikey nose, the claimant could see a pair of round, huge glasses, filled with thick lenses, a weird combination of spectacles, bicycle, portholes and microscopes. Out of the blue, the glasses slid down her nose, growing bigger and bigger, refocusing the lentils to the necessary position, rolling the wheels in the air. The old lady jumped on the peculiar mechanism, together with her colleague, and pedalled through the room, rising towards the ceiling.

Madam Supinsky bowed her head down to stare through the lens, losing the hat. The claimant picked it up and threw it back again, when it turned into a white rabbit, crunching a carrot. Madam Supinsky muttered a spell and the carrot transformed into a red notebook, to record Madam’s findings. “DSK three centimetres to the right, BCA three centimetres to the left and vice versa. Twelve fingers from the ceiling, five molecules of grumpy goat cheese remains on the wings of a dead fly. Vicious Cat’s hair on the window sill and atomic traces of blunderhead mice in the atmosphere”. The claimant was sent after a cup of fresh, unquestionable water. When she came back, they all disappeared in the obscure. She thought she heard a cat mewing conceitedly, narcissistically in the distance. The lady was so astound by the scrutiny that she forgot to close the window, leaving it almost imperceptibly closed or indistinguishably opened.

That night, the Cat-Tack squeezed in through the elusive aperture, landing perpendicularly on the left side wall, with its hands curbed, the right one imitating a question mark. The left hand was still a quarter of a sentence, waiting for the full stop to appear. “Cheesy or not cheesy”, it uttered, stamping its second foot, revolving around itself. It stopped in an oblique pose, singing a tune backwards, holding a handkerchief between its teeth. The purple handkerchief turned into a bed sheet, waving its texture like a pond in the sunset, mirrored reversed. Waves of blood invaded its waters, whirling in the middle of its surface, hurricane. Then it all calmed down, without asking a single question. Cat-Tack disappeared into its own mind, deep as an ocean, muddy as a pond. Period.

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