I have an orange, fat tabby, who, despite being named Mouse, is a killer. He doesn’t just hunt animals to eat; no, we feed him nice standardized pellets of already dead animals. This cat hunts for the pure joy of it. I can recall one example of his vicious cruelty in particular: the night he killed the King of the Moths.
This wasn’t some species of moth called Kings or any such nonsense: this creature was actually the reigning monarch of all flying bugs with proboscises (though his Queen tends to handle the more tender court of Butterflies). The King had decided, on one sweltering summer night, to expand his fiefdom into the realms of my dust-laced garage, as was his God-given right. What the King had not taken into account however, was that this holy movement would be met with some resistance. The King examined the ceiling and double-checked the structural integrity of his newly claimed man cave, dragging his hand against the patchy plaster and kicked his feet up on my extra sofa, with a prideful survey of his bounty. It was milliseconds after the last of his spiny legs had clasped into the tobacco-stained fabric of my couch, when all the sticky air in the garage was upset with the leap of the mighty saber-tooth tiger which forced all of it’s momentum through his front paws, claws sharp at a glance, into the backside of the King’s chitinous armor. The evolutionary metal gave way with no resistance, even made room for the killers pawful of knives, as they reached into the cushion, as if no obstacle impeded. The hunter sheathed his knives, to wipe off the dripping green ooze that threatened to rot away the metallic blades, and expertly flicked them out again, shining like a new toy. The King grasped for breath, finding himself disoriented, upside down, with four extra holes, spilling his 5-course lunch onto the fibrous ground. Instinct overtook him, and he took flight, unearthing his aching body with wing beats faster than his heart could keep up with. There were seas of dust, falling from the ground and rising from the ceiling, stinging his eyes and whipping his face as he flew higher. His heart was about to explode when he felt himself flying downwards now, faster than he had risen. His eyes caught the glimmer of a claw, sticking out of his own chest, staring him in every single one of his eyes. Like a flash, he was flying away now, twisting his head to see the behemoth smile with blood-drenched eyes. Like a cymbal crash, he collided with the sturdy walls he had not five minutes ago admired, sending an earthquake through his limbs, teeth and skull. His right wing was now two, torn down the middle while his left was cut into fine ribbons, dancing with the slight breeze of a giant stepping behind him. He felt the furnace of hot breath that only a killing urge can stoke on his neck and back. The King’s vision was starting to fade behind a wall of night-time when he felt a great pull on his abdomen, and then like the release of a pulled rubber band, the tension was gone. He looked down to see that, like his wing, now his body had been duplicated, ripped apart. His bottom half was an acidic volcano, erupting and spewing black tar, ruining the pristine, cloudy fur of his murderer. The darkness crept further from the edges of his sight and overtook him as the fangs chipped from too much bone chewing, imprisoned him and engulfed him.
Mouse got what he deserved, in the end, for his regicide: that bile that flowed through the moth’s veins seems to have given him a bit of indigestion. Unfortunately, there can be no funeral services for Our Liege, since my cat decided it was absolutely necessary to liberate every limb and organ from their immediate neighbors, and rearrange them in quite the artistic fashion on my bed. As for the fate of my cute, innocent kitten’s soul, I would have to say that he might want to get a haircut, as I can’t imagine his ten pounds of fur will do him much good in Hell.