Situational awareness
First published in Locale magazine
Jewel was rushing for the bathroom. Working from home means you are stuck in your cramped little work space with a headset glued to your ears for hours.
In her case it was listening to her English as a Second Language student reading from some boring business manual while she marked off the correct and incorrect pronunciations in her copy of the text. Thank goodness she could work in her house clothes, which are so much easier to doff when one needs to rush to the porcelain throne.
She didn’t even bother with the lights. It was her home, after all, and she knew where the damn WC was. Beside the light switch, that’s where it was.
Jewel sighed and closed her eyes at the blessed relief of her emptying bladder when she felt that prickling of skin that told her she was not alone in the dark. She hit the light switch just as a low hissing sound rose up from the floor.
There was her cat Niles, curled up in a defensive ball of upraised white and gray fur, glaring at her with fire in his yellow eyes from the cool tile with his ears flat against his head.
“Get over yourself, cat,” she bitched. “I told you once if I told you a hundred times: The toilet is not your water bowl. You have no call to attempt to give me a heart attack like that.”
She finished her bathroom break and returned to her “workstation” (a cranky old laptop hooked to crappy internet, but, hey, it was the “office”). The lessons continued for another hour until they’d finally finished for the day.
Unbeknownst to her, the cat was communing with the small flatscreen television in that three-foot by four-foot space that was her living room. The boob tube was muted and set to a kiddie channel.
“The human has strange habits,” Niles sent out the thought through the cable box to an image of the cat in the vintage Tom & Gerry cartoon that was staring intently at him. “She pees in her water bowl. The others embedded with humans report the same thing. We must unleash the weapon now. This planet is beyond saving.”
Tom nodded sagely and began to chase Gerry into a mousehole. He turned and issued this brief order before squeezing in after the cartoon mouse: “Signal planetary evacuation. The culling will begin in an hour, your time.”
On the other side of the bookshelves dividing up the living room from Jewel’s work space, the sounds of a PC shutting down and the human calling the cat to his supper pierced the silent little space.
Oh, if she only knew, Niles snickered quietly as he loped to the human. If she only knew.
