Cats on Tuesday: Neighborhood Nightlife: Episode 6

Cats on Tuesday is hosted by Gattina.

Neighborhood Nightlife is the continuing ruminations of Necco, an apartment cat whose only contact with the feline race is through the open windows at midnight, while her guardians sleep.

Episode 6: The Mystery Lights

The sun's warm, yellow rays finally tipped over the tops of the trees, bringing Necco back awake. It took a few minutes for her mind to focus. It was dawn, the nightmare was over. Had it really happened? Necco yawned, stretched and shuddered, a flurry of cat hair rained down from the windowsill onto the carpet.

Still sitting in the windowsill where Necco had waited for the low slung sun to break over the easterly line of trees around the village, she delicately washed her face by carefully licking a paw, dragging it across an eye then down the bridge of her nose. Shifting paws, she licked the other one and repeated the process. All was quiet in the neighborhood now.

It had all started around midnight, the usual time for Thorny to visit his feline friends in the apartments at Rainbow Estates Senior's Village. Necco was usually always the first to jump onto her windowsill, her human guardians having opened the window a crack to let in some fresh, cool night air for sleeping. December was always a rainy month in the moderately cool northwest. This year it seemed even more so. Colder, too. Sometimes, so cold that the sliding glass windows could not be opened more than just a tiny sliver.

Because of the heavy wet winter clouds, Necco had missed seeing the stars and the cycle of the moon's phase for the whole month of December. As fantastic, mysterious, and exciting as December had been for the village, with all its bright, twinkling lights decorating each leaf-barren tree along every walkway and entryway, windows filled with decorations, often a small Christmas tree twinkling in front of the large plate glass windows of living rooms around the village, nothing was as fantastic as the lights Necco and her friends had witnessed for the past few hours. The red, green, gold, and blue of the Christmas lights, winking and blinking and bringing wonder and amazement to Necco's wide, curious eyes, could not be compared to the glowing, red, green, and gold-white lights that seemed to hover over her building, spreading terror and awe into all who witnessed them.

At midnight her guardians had drifted into a sleep that locked out the world around them. The man and woman in Necco's life seemed to be able to sleep through anything and had slept soundly through this event as well. Her friend, Frog, was the first to spot the lights above them. Easterly, more to the south, they twinkled and blinked. Just distant curiosities. Then, after first having gotten the latest gossip from Sissy, the white Persian that lived in the first apartment on the corner, Thorny arrived for his usual visit.

The night had been clear, cloudless for the first time in nearly forty-days. The air, though damp from the constant rains, was cold and crisp. Only the largest of the stars twinkled brightest through the bare tree branches above the competing village lights. The moon's first quarter phase having just set over the southwestern horizon, an hour before midnight, left the clear skies in inky darkness. Thorny sat on the hood of a tenant's frost-covered car, alternately shifting his massive body from one paw to the other in an effort to keep his pads from sticking to the frozen metal. With puffs of frozen breath he gave a report on the events of his day and the latest gossip of the village. But, Frog's attention was on the mysterious lights looming larger.

"Frog," Thorny asked, abruptly stopping his gossiping and turning to look at the spot of space that had so captured his friend's attention, "what is so interesting up there? You've been staring off into space the whole time I've been talking and…what in the world?" Thorny had noticed the lights blinking on and off; red, green, and gold-white. They were not moving the way an airplane or a helicopter would. There was a country airport nearby where small planes often landed in the darkness. Sometimes helicopters would buzz overhead late at night, too, often scanning the earth with their large, bright-white search lights, helping the cops chase down a crook, no doubt. So seeing red, green and gold-white lights in the skies around the village were not unusual at all.

Markus looked up at the same time as Thorny. Necco was next to spot the lights growing in size. She shifted her feet uncomfortably on the wooden windowsill, fidgeting nervously, her paws sweating as she remembered thinking only last month how the new cats above Frog, the polydactyl sisters, were somehow alien to this world and had come in disguise to overthrow the earth's human population and replace them with cats who had opposable thumbs. At the time, she had dismissed that ridiculous idea after contemplating on her own oddity, the single rapier on the side of her right front paw. Could it be true after all? Were aliens really coming?

Her male guardian was a huge, huge fan of science fiction movies and TV programs. He watched them over and over and over until Necco, who'd often be sleeping in his ultra warm lap, would get so bored with them, she'd move to the other room to finish her nap on the bed, even if it meant sleeping on a cold comforter. Flashing endlessly across the large, wide TV screen she'd seen strange lights in the sky that would grow brighter and brighter as they hovered over a house or a person, then, suddenly—poof—they'd be gone in a flash, the alien spacecraft disappearing into the blackness with them. Sometimes the shows her male guardian watched seem so real that she often dreamt about them. Maybe that's where she got the idea in her head about the two polydactyl's being aliens. Too much sci-fi.

To be sure she wasn't dreaming now, she leapt from the windowsill, bounced once in the middle of the sleeping couple, bounded down the hall and leapt onto the living room windowsill. The outdoor village lights spaced about the landscape produced too much light for her to see anything in the black sky but the brightest of stars. To further take her mind off such ridiculous notions of alien ships coming to the village, she decided to have a bite to eat. As she purposely stood over her bowl of kibble, crunching nervously on a tiny, fish-flavored morsel of goodness, her ears perked backwards, towards the open window in the bedroom. She heard the faint gasp of her friends and rushed back to the windowsill, expecting to see a spaceship landing in the parking lot, flooding the air with blinding light while scooping the cats from their windowsills—sucking them up into its giant mouth and disappearing with them forever.

Was Necco a coward? Was she going to shrink from disaster while her friend's lives were in peril? What could she do, really? She was locked behind a heavy, double-paned, glass window, only open to the outside world by an inch. Barely room enough to slip a paw through the crack. And then what? What could she do to help save mankind—catkind, from the evil forces that filled the skies above them right at that moment?

Imagination gone astray is a terrible thing to a cat. Cats are grounded creatures. Sure of foot, sound of mind. Balanced. Sensible. Sane. Aren't they? They knew the order in which the earth rotated. East to West. Didn't it? Necco wasn't sure anymore. Many times she had let her imagination run wild and ended up feeling remorse for her thoughts, for recently accusing Sissy—Miss Prissy Prudence—of being a snob, stuck up…for accusing the web-footed polydactyl sisters with the extra toes of being aliens…

In the silent darkness, the red, green, and gold-white lights blurred into one massive, spinning display. Suddenly, as Necco had feared, an enormous round shape overshadowed the parking lot, the village, and the trees around them. One by one the round globes of the village blinked out. The stars seemed to disintegrate. Then she saw it. Just like on the TV screen, a hot, bright-white light shot out of the mouth of the beast as it hovered over them, over Thorny, and suddenly…poof! Thorny was gone. It was too much for little Necco's heart to bear. She tore at the window, pawed desperately through the one inch crack at the screen. The great light that sucked Thorny up into its belly now searched the windows for the others. Necco watched in horror as Frog was torn from his windowsill, siphoned through the small opening of his window like liquid sucked up through a straw. Markus was next. Then polydactyl sisters were drawn into the beast belly like the others. Everything happened so fast, not a single yowl had escaped from anyone's lips.

Her mournful yowls, however, could have wakened the dead; it should have wakened her guardians. Wails of terror spewed from her throat. Hot, lava-like tears fled from her eyes…there was nothing she could do. Her guardians seemed frozen in place—why wouldn't they wake up. It was too much to bear—she bounded from the windowsill, and back again, then back to the bed where she pounced, pawed, and nipped at the cold, stiff humans lying in the bed. "Wake up!" She screamed as she tore at their covers, "The aliens are sucking up my friends! Wake up!"

"Necco?" The voice was distant, alien.

Oh no, I've been sucked up into the beast as well.

"Necco?"

A bright-white light was shoved into her eyes, making it hard for her to focus on the strange being at the other end of the light wand. She suddenly became aware that she was on a metal table, strapped down. Tubes and probes hung from every orifice. "They got me," she screamed with silent despair. "They got us all!"

The light darkened and the voices resumed. She could hear the metallic clinking of surgical instruments and muted voices laughing in the distance. Laughing at her? How terrible. It is one thing to be abducted by aliens and quite another for them to be laughing at her! How rude.

"Necco, sweetie…it's time to wake up, little one. It's all over."

Oh no, that voice. The aliens have my female human, too?

The veterinary assistant lifted the multi-colored cat up off the table and placed the drowsy feline back into her guardian's arms. "She's going to be a bit out of it for awhile, a slight hangover effect…like too much catnip. We only gave her a small sedative to clean her teeth. You can take her home now."