Nighttime always fascinated Bridget – so much so that she often napped during the afternoon, assuring her plenty of time to explore the darkness.
It was as if the world itself changed when the sun took to its rest, mutating from something that made perfect sense to one’s eyes, ears, and nose – an environment of majesty, seeped in His beauty – to become an all-surrounding mystery, dampening all perceptions, encroaching upon rationality, where even the truths before you became uncertain.
Nothing could better suit a creature driven by curiosity.
Bridget didn’t give in to it at once, of course. She started each night with John and Jessica, watching them cuddle on their big padded board, listening to their pitter patter. While that itself could be fun, it was but the opening act. When all was said and done, Jessica would often end up curled into a ball, her head nestled against her pillow or John’s strong left arm, her knees rolled beneath her chin, her lips ever smiling. Often that’s how she would awaken with the dawn.
John, on the other hand, was much more mobile. Starting with his arms about his wife, the bull would soon roll onto his back. His nose would wiggle as if to dislodge a mosquito. He’d snort, and then his hips would shudder. With sluggish twists he’d adjust his back and legs so that they’d churn like the waves on Bridget’s water dish, his nose honking all the while in short, hoggish snorts. His head would shake, bobbing against the pillows as his spine relaxed. And then, when he was at peace in his dreams, would come the snoring.
The first time she’d heard that low, vibrating crescendo, not unlike a foghorn being dragged over a washboard, Bridget had almost fallen off the refrigerator in complete and utter shock. She’d never imagined such an ominous combination of shattering and shrieking sensations – and yet she didn’t fear it. It seemed like part of the darkness, at home in the mystery. So, once she’d calmed herself, she’d released the cricket and came running to see what this new element was, or if something was dying. Thus it saddened her to discover this noise was only the bumbling breathing of the humorless giant. Still, it was such a quirky sound, a mischievous achievement that she wouldn’t have expected from the hard one, that Bridget forever changed her night exploring habits to enjoy it.
Sometimes she’d just sit there, listening to his mouth pipes all night. Sometimes she wouldn’t. After all, around the house there were crickets chirping, roaches marching, moths fluttering, locusts buzzing, bats sounding, hellhounds howling, mice scurrying, air vents blowing, curtains billowing, moonbeams flirting, floorboards creaking, old walls groaning – and all of it in complete darkness.
What cat could resist that?
There were times Bridget wanted to. Times when the cold settled in, and nestling against Jessica’s neck seemed like heaven. Or when John got boisterous in his soundings, and his mouth opened so wide, Bridget could gaze in to see the little pink digit dancing in the caverns of his throat. Many a night she’d sit at attention at his chin, stabbing with her left paw at the throbbing stalactite, but it always seemed to evade her touch. Other times Bridget would stick her nose into his mouth, trying to get a better view of how that thing moved so. Once she managed to get her whole spotted head snuggled in there, only to find there wasn’t room for a paw. Then came the hot, damp bellows. To her fortune, she’d clamped shut her ears before that, or else the resounding thunder might have sent her scurrying down his chest with her claws in full glory. As it was, his moist breath permeated her fur like a thick fog, so that as she squeezed her head out, the hair about her neck and chin hung limp and soggy, like bits of Jessica’s alleged cat food after it had floated awhile in her water dish.
Jessica rose the next morning to find John hanging over the bathroom sink, sucking up handfuls of water, only to spit them out.
“Hi, honey,” she’d mumbled, hugging him. “Something wrong?”
“I’ve got a mouthful of fur,” he grumbled.
Jessica managed a weary smile as she walked back out of the bathroom to the kitchen. “I know just how you feel,” she said.
John stopped, surprised. “No – I mean it. I’ve really got a mouth full of fur.”
“Sure you do, honey.”
And so it went.
As the novelty of John’s window-rattling snores wore down, and the little pink digit seemed ever more elusive, Bridget started leaving them as the music began, returning her night eyes to the mysteries about her. The crickets that seemed to know every crack in every wall, the colonies of crawling bugs that nestled under the cabinets, the footprints of the mice – that sort of thing. The most fun escapades, though, were the ones that brought discovery.
One night she was playing with a little black spider she’d found on the big pillowy lounger. She was chasing the critter, letting it escape, then pinning it back down again, when during one flight the tiny bug scrambled beneath John’s favorite little box. Bridget sprang on the hard, bumpy thing, thinking it’d give her eight-legged toy a good jolt. Just then a surprise burst echoed from the wall. Bridget leapt to the top of the lounger’s padded ledge; the favorite little box, meanwhile, slid off its pillowed arm. Across the way, the black picture window beside the bookshelf started glowing, even as a series of crashes and rat-a-tat impacts seemed to come from its insides.
Bridget almost jumped with joy. She just loved that magical thing!
The picture window had a large square top of polished artificial wood – you know, the kind that looked like all that smooth, dark deadwood the giants loved around their house, but stank of old oil and had little more thickness than one of John’s artificial skins. When the picture window was “awake,” or in other words, when it was actually showing moving images of things across time and space, that shiny artificial top would get nice and warm. The few times Bridget had been there, it had seemed more appealing than the sunny windowsill! But for some reason John never wanted her lying atop his picture window; indeed, he had always reserved some of his angriest assaults for when she tried. She had never understood that – and now was her chance to figure out why!
With three bounds Bridget was lying in comfort on the active box, which was now filling the dark room with dancing gray ghosts and a stream of high-charged echoes, shouts and screams and explosions and concussions and who knows what else. None of that mattered to the spotted kitten. She sprawled her growing body across the smooth surface and waited for it to warm up.
Then Bridget heard random flex twangs from the soft board beneath her sleeping giants. Suspecting their rise, she fled into the dining room shadows.
“What is it?” came Jessica’s weary voice.
“Don’t know,” John mumbled, his ragged gait carrying his half-asleep body up to the picture window. Smacking his dry lips, the giant turned his head one way, then the other. When that brought no answers, Bridget watched his chin drop so that he could view his beloved window. “TV came on somehow, I guess. War picture.”
“Well turn it off and come to bed,” Jessica called.
John mumbled his agreement. Taking one last look around, he stumbled over to the beaten couch and bent to retrieve his favorite box.
Just like that, the picture window went dead.
Bridget half-expected him to take the box back to Jessica, but he only scratched his nose, leaving the remote on the cushy arm.
Something about that intrigued Bridget. Without waiting for the spider to return, she scampered across the floorboards and leaped atop the box.
The picture window crackled back to life!
“John,” came Jessica’s tired voice, “you forgot to turn it off.”
Bridget started to hide as the pale gray light illuminated her, but then she realized she didn’t need to.
“Get up, John! You left the TV on!”
“Ah, honey, are you sure?”
A cavalcade of roaring tempests shook the picture window, the floor, the transparent wall – just about everything.
Bridget heard Jessica’s head snap up on their padded night board. “Don’t you go back to sleep, John Michael Fergus – ”
“All right,” he interrupted her.
But Jessica wasn’t finished. “Go turn that off! Now!”
Bridget recognized that tone – and so she hid, all the while priding herself on a fantastic discovery. Not only had she figured out what fed the window, but more important, she knew now how to get that John giant up in the middle of the night!
You see, for a while now she’d been thinking of different things she could do to him. Not that she disliked him; he was mated to Jessica, after all, so Bridget felt obligated to like him. But the more she was around the bull giant, the more Bridget couldn’t help thinking that he just wasn’t very nice. No, that wasn’t the right word – he was quite loving to Jessica, and so he had to be a gentle, protective, compassionate giant. He just wasn’t kind to her. More important, Bridget thought John wasn’t responding well to her training. For example, Jessica was learning how and when Bridget wanted fed, her sandbox replaced, her water changed, her back rubbed, her sleep undisturbed… all that sort of thing. But John was a different story.
The great test came a couple of nights later. Bridget had been stalking a moonbeam that kept floating across the floor – it was just a fun sort of game to her – when she spied something fluttering atop the bookshelf. At first, it made no sense; she knew there weren’t any birds in there! And indeed, when she stopped to stare up at the high edge, remaining frozen for who knows how long, nothing happened. But then the breeze came out of the floor vent, and there, at the edge of the bookshelf, Bridget saw it. The unmistakable waving of feathered wings!
Now, you must understand that not even Jessica liked Bridget climbing the bookshelf, as the kitten well knew. Every time Bridget had tried, Jessica had shooed her away, her touch gentle yet firm, saying something about how she had to take care around Sebastian, whoever he was. And since Bridget loved Jessica, she felt it necessary to try to accommodate the gentle giant on things like the bookshelf, especially since Jessica was responding so well to her training.
But on the other hand, Bridget knew Jessica wouldn’t want any birds or bats, rats, or ostriches in the house. Probably not any snakes, lizards, pigs, or goats, either. And heaven forbid, not a dog! If she ever saw any of them around, Bridget felt it was her responsibility to get rid of them as quickly as possible – even if it meant climbing the bookshelf.
So up she went.