YPRES, BELGIUM, FIFTEENTH CENTURY
H e was a kid. A happy, furry, tail-wiggling, and purring cat, like the others. He had just stopped getting food and milk from his mother a week ago. His dad wasn't fond of his laziness and urged him to go out and start hunting for food. Cheshire wasn't fond of killing animals, but he had to eat.
"Rats, my son," his mother purred. "That's our best food."
"But they are horrible little creatures, Mommy," he said. "I mean, I get so grossed out by their noses and whiskers."
"I hate them too."
"Then why do you eat something you hate?" He always thought it a physiological defect of his kind to eat something they hated. What was wrong with butterflies? They looked lovely, and he loved the way they crunched between his teeth. Sure, they were hard to catch, but that was why he was fond of caterpillars. They were slow and full of vitamins since all a caterpillar did was eat. They were like raw butterflies, something the French would love—there was no room in his memory for remembering how the French ate frogs. Holy paws and purrs, why frogs? The Cheshire loved them when he was a kid.
But the Cheshire ended up hungry, so he began to hunt for himself.
Ypres was a small town by then, known for exporting clothes to England. They had that huge clothes tower where they kept the clothes for months before they were shipped away. Rats loved it and were fond of the tower, so humans encouraged cats from all over town to visit and eat the rats.
In general, many Europeans didn't love cats around the sixteenth century. Cats were associated with witches and were said to be inhabited by demons and devils. But the clothes tower, that was the exception.
The first time the Cheshire went there, he saw a cat rolling a dead rat with its paws and playing with it. He thought it was mean to kill someone and play with their corpse. A dead human was honored by burial or cremation; a rat's corpse should have been eaten right away in that context.
"I am not playing with it," the other cat said to Cheshire. "I'm checking it for diseases. Rats are stinky. They spend their time in sewers and other people's cheeses."
The Cheshire wasn't going to go through that conversation again. Why did they eat them, then?
It only took him a week before he turned into a rat serial killer. It was his first form of serial killing. The rats tasted horrible but gave him the energy to run around and play all day. The townspeople began giving fish spines to the cats as a reward for killing the rats, as long as the cats only went to the clothes tower and not all over town, especially to the Grote Markt, where humans had their groceries.
One day, the Cheshire's father brought his dead uncle's corpse to bury it. He was killed by the townspeople with a pan to his head for padding into the Grote Markt. It was the Cheshire's first epiphany about how humans hated his kind—of course, people now cherish cats and pet them, but that wasn't the case then.
It was rumored there was a man with a pipe and pied clothes who could tempt rats out of any town. He played the devil's music with his flute, and the rats followed him out of town. If he had come, the cats would have been out of food and business.
The Cheshire's father was one of the first to go negotiate with the man whom everyone called the Pied Piper. Cats from all over Belgium and France traveled to meet the Piper. They begged him not to come to Ypres, or they'd be out of food. The Cheshire accompanied his dad that day.
After hours and hours of pondering, the Piper agreed not to come to Ypres. He remarked that his absence would make him lose a lot of money since rat-catching was a hot business at the time. So he made a deal with the cats that some of them had to sell their souls to him. He told them that demons and rogue spirits were lost in the cerebral realms of the world and needed bodies to inhabit. Cats were the perfect hosts due to their agility and smart moves. The Piper promised that it wouldn't change who they were as cats. In fact, it might make them stronger. Reluctantly, several cats agreed and were never seen again. Although the Piper had his eyes on the Cheshire that day, his father rejected the idea furiously, taking his son back to town.
Months later, a series of crimes and unexplained phenomena soared all over Europe. They were mostly connected to witches. In the town of Ypres, everyone believed witches performed their sins through cats.
Suddenly, the clothes tower was shut, and fanatics began catching cats and throwing them from windows to kill them. It had become a new hobby, encouraged by parents and practiced by children.
But the cats were as flexible as yo-yos. No amount of throwing killed them, and only an inexperienced few died. And then, in one of humanity's most absurd incidents, the Flemish townspeople, the raw meat eaters, gathered and decided to rid their town of the cats who had supposedly caused all their misery. Instead of investigating what they'd done wrong as humans, they decided it was the cats.
As punishment, a parade and festival were run for days. The townspeople lured the cats to the clothes tower and caught them. They packed them into sacks and threw them from the highest towers down to the ground. A cat's landing skills and balance were useless when crammed into a sack. It needed space to curl its body in order to land without being hurt. Also, the heights were now unimaginable.
The Cheshire twitched with the broken glass of milk in his hand. The memory was too gory to imagine. Thousands of fluffy creatures, forests of outstretched arms, flying in the air with no parachutes on their backs. The townspeople hailed and clapped while they cussed the devils and demons that they thought inhabited those cats. They smiled while cat blood was spattered on the streets of Ypres. He continued his memory, remembering the day when he and his family were caught.