It is a warm and cloudless night. Feline yowls meander from some easterly distance: they are mating sounds and the operatic warble of territorial warnings. There are, perhaps, a dozen of them: urban scruff cats that sound eerily like human babies. These, he knows, are tomcats—two of them, maybe three. He pictures them as gray things with black, tiger stripes and on one (or another) a patch of white on the chin. He has seen hundreds of such cats, and at least half of them wear the white beards like little old men. It’s a funny thing, really, to think of little old men in the presence of a wiry/wild she-cat with eyes like strange, almost luminous amber, or a tom with one ear left ragged and torn from encounters fence-wire flung like whips from the gnarly fists of ill-bred children. The cats are far away. They are city-smart and so avoid traffic. They prey on squirrels and laggardly sparrows; on occasion they forage through human trash and make off with the abandoned bones of chicken or gristles of beef. The entrepreneurs among them take work as pets, cunningly beaming near-lethal levels of cuteness from their smart/predatory eyes. These operatic impresarios don’t do cute however, and he is content to ignore their feral nocturnal sounds. It is strange that cats would live here in such prodigious number, but city-ecology makes room for them. There are rats. There are mice. And so, there is food. He has seen countless rats here: monster apparitions like naked-tailed ferrets. They, like cats, are one of the city’s ironies because here—where the wealthy dwell in close proximity to the lake—the rats are equally rich in number. They are bold, as well, and like the cats from whom they hide, will avoid traffic and humans on foot. He likes this part of the city for that: the rat-colored cats with black tiger stripes and the rat-colored rats larger than the small things that live in the exotic African and Amazonian rainforests. He is like the rats and like the cats. He is an interloper: marked as such by his accent and the number of dots and diagonal slashes that crown the vowels in his written name. Far from home, he has made something of a place for himself here. And like the cats, and the rats, the wealthy do not see him. No matter. He has no use for the wealthy, they—like money—are little more than a symptom of poverty. Now he picks his way through traffic noise and cat sounds and the shrill inconsequential prattle of party-hounds out for a night seeing and being seen. He hears the clack-clack of stiletto heels, and knows that soon one, another, or a third black-clad woman will stumble from her precarious balance and yield to gravity in a sprawling crumple of Prada or Ann Taylor ,and the cats—over there, there, and there—will glance once (if they can be bothered to do so) then focus on the more pressing needs of nocturnal urban survival. He is close to where he must go. He can smell the waft of subway stink and he recognizes it as the buff-chrome kingdom of rodents. Cats are not allowed there, despite what benefit their presence carries. In this moment, though, it flashes to him that perhaps the subway has its feline uses and exists as a feline allowance. It is a safe place in which food mice, and their larger rat cousins, may breed. He smiles at that thought, and though this is a black cat night, he recognizes the irony of that. In his home land, black cats are harbingers of good luck. Seeing one is a good thing, and seeing ten (in a day) promises an easy life. He glances around, wondering if he will see the singing cats, and if one of them (or ten) will be black. * * * I don't know what came first, the image or the mood that bore the story. At any rate, Marilyn and Tara, Mark and Corey (and a long-haired waiter at Reza's) have something to do with it. As always, thank you for viewing, reading and commenting.