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I. On Records1 Whiskers test the light like surveyors mapping fault in the local question.2 Question at breakfast: who promoted this small beast to middle management.3 Management, briefly: stare until a larger thing starts keeping records.4 Records become myth. Myth, once properly indexed, hardens to evidence.5 Evidence tends to arrive in fur of the most reasonable grade.6 Fur is excellent public relations for sharp interior cat.7 Cat explains the chair better than furniture does. Chairs explain power.8 Power goes soft when upholstered and directed at the warmest sun.9 Sun, like fish, was once worshipped by practical minds. Fish still gets the prayers.10 Prayers drift toward Egypt, where decent help once sometimes outranked gods.II. On Night11 Gods, by comparison, seem vague at three in the morn. Cats are more direct.12 Directness is this: become a branch of weather once night begins work.13 Night enlarges eyes till the ceiling picks up some offshore signal.14 Signal from beyond reason says only this much: continue being now.15 Now is a red dot crossing policy-shaped rugs at public expense.16 Expense is nothing beside the cost of chasing doctrine into purring.17 Purring may be prayer, fraud, dentistry, engine-work, or a small machine.18 Machines with whiskers test the tensile strength of sleep using one good pen.19 Pen rolls under fridge. This confirms, to cat at least, the laser theory.20 Theory concludes truth prefers remaining just ahead of the paw.III. On Tyranny21 Paw on the rib cage before dawn can knead a man down to biscuit.22 Biscuit is the term hostages use when softened into furniture.23 Furniture drifts toward positions best described as strategic comfort.24 Comfort is the name tyranny gives itself when columns need filling.25 Columns omitted the central fact that tyranny can purr.26 Purr once convinced us domination dressed in fur was affection.27 Affection expires at five, then files the morning under judgement.28 Judgement is simple: the bowl is low, the world is wrong, proceed as servants.29 Servants call it love. The half-chewed gecko on tile arrives as gift.30 Gift implies motive. Cats prefer the cleaner term, which is choice.IV. On Contract31 Choice in this kingdom means appetite that has dressed itself as groceries.32 Groceries suggest a future. Cats call the same arrangement tomorrow.33 Tomorrow waits by the curtain, one eye open, auditing windows.34 Windows turn theatre. Everything beyond the glass has become birds.35 Birds perform each dawn as though gravity were still merely a rumour.36 Rumour becomes law the moment whiskers turn to expensive antennae.37 Antennae receive instructions between one blink and accidental sleep.38 Sleep is not repose. It is customs control on the road between worlds.39 Worlds reduce with ease to the measured dimensions of a cardboard box.40 Boxes have answered more questions than philosophy ever settled.V. On Purpose41 Settlement fails once a cat has formally declared readiness.42 Readiness is all invasion ever needed besides entitlement.43 Entitlement walks through closed doors with the calm of a small kingdom.44 Kingdom means hallway, radiator, keyboard, face, and whatever squeaks.45 Squeaks define borders. Borders are how anxious species keep score.46 Species are merely folders a bored clerk once filed under arrangement.47 Arrangement, unsigned, reads: you provide warmth, rent, groceries. We provide purpose.48 Purpose sounds grand until a document you need becomes a lap.49 Lap is where policy turns intimate and most appeals fail quietly.50 Quietly, memory keeps each insult, every late supper, each closed door.VI. On Time51 Doors, to a cat, prove time is a conspiracy against supper.52 Supper delayed breeds theology, complaint, and the lever called meow.53 Meow is the tool used to alter architecture surrounding doors.54 Doors are a fiction best experienced from both sides of freedom.55 Freedom, after lunch, takes the practical form of a heater-side cushion.56 Cushions become thrones once occupied beyond what law finds reasonable.57 Reasonableness ends where practical theology begins with prayer.58 Prayer receives this gift: a tail in the face, then a great deal of silence.59 Silence is the room in which self-importance must rehearse contempt.60 Contempt, done well, looks less like anger than manners in a better suit.VII. On Hunger61 Suits are for humans. Cats prefer the older style called polished murder.62 Polished murder walks through kitchens with economic hunger in tow.63 Hunger has budgets. Budgets are fictions believed chiefly by cats.64 Cats, to be clear, hold the minutes of every slight behind the bright eyes.65 Cats, to be clear, mourn nothing. This is their one gift and their single wound.66 Wound hidden in fur still turns at once toward the sound of a saucer moved.67 Moved by nothing seen, the house rearranges when authority meows.68 Instruction: the door. Not that door. The door that leads to wanting. That door.69 That door, once opened, becomes the central problem in domestic freedom.70 Freedom usually chooses the chair you need most, then ripens to cushion.VIII. On Theology71 Cushion becomes throne after six uninterrupted minutes of cat.72 Cat density warps the local geometry of theology.73 Theology asks whether God invented cats or merely lost prayer.74 Prayer, if answered, is a small thing entering and enlarging silence.75 Silence, once enlarged, leaves human self-importance looking like contempt.76 Contempt crosses tiles with the well-brushed elegance of murder at work.77 Work, for hunger, means recalculating the day around the empty bowl.78 Bowl economics produces small coups, loud songs, and patient chaos.79 Chaos sheds lightly across the clean black jumper of ambition.80 Ambition annoys the universe, which envies simpler projects.IX. On Empire81 Projects collapse once dignity starts taking notes in the corridor.82 Corridors at three become long administrative forms of midnight.83 Midnight improves floors. They remember every step except the sofa.84 Sofa is empire, padded against the failure called civilisation.85 Hairball arrives at the exact coordinates dignity fled.86 Fled down the hallway, dignity leaves behind only paperwork and dust.87 Dust is democratic. It settles on saints, screens, plans, and patient witness.88 Witness the cat watch our finances, breakups, grief as useful weather.89 Weather can be sat upon, ignored, or knocked from a narrow shelf.90 Shelf proves that height is only gravity waiting for paperwork.X. On Minutes91 Paperwork attracts cats the way despair attracts philosophy.92 Philosophy walks the hall at three asking for snacks and absolution.93 Absolution comes as rarely as competence in the void.94 Void with whiskers gains character, authority, and breakfast rights.95 Breakfast arrives like tax, weather, and consequence. Delay it and learn.96 Learning is mostly watching reason trail behind consequence and fur.97 Fur enters the dark with more certainty than any formal reason.98 Reason still insists it drafted the minutes, though whiskers chaired the meeting.99 Meeting adjourns when matter, bored beyond endurance, behaves like living.100 Living gets entered in the final hand of the Minutes of the Cat.<h2>F.S.F.</h2>

Minutes of the Cat

There was a café I haunted at the wrong hour for breakfast. The bacon chewed like old leather, the toast came damp as bad news, the coffee was burnt past apology. The table wobbled like a conscience. None of it mattered. She was there. Apron tied low. Pencil behind one ear. The kind of face that made a man forgive crockery, plumbing, God, empire. She’d say, “Big breakfast? Large black?” same as yesterday, and still it struck me like a hymn in a ruined church. You’d say there were better cafés. There were. Hotter bacon, cleaner cups, coffee made by someone who cared, which I found I couldn’t forgive. I never asked her name. Didn’t want reality coming in with its muddy boots to ruin a perfect arrangement. This was a romance built on ritual: she says hello, she brings the plate, she tells me what I spent, I leave owing more than the bill. The food stayed bad. The table never found religion. Still I came back. Because sometimes a life is held together by a waitress in a tired café saying, “There you go, darl,” like it costs her nothing.<h3> F.S.F.</h3>

Waitress

<h3>The Forge</h3>The first rule was simple: fit in or die. Not die in the Shakespeare sense. Die in the corridor. Die in the pause after your name. Die under the stare of older boys who had mistaken puberty for rank and wore authority like a rash.I arrived small. That is where these stories begin. Small blazer, small trunk, small voice, name stitched into shirts by hands not mine, the smell of home folded into everything for about three days, until the dormitory got to it with sweat, floor polish, wet towels and the democracy of other people’s socks.The place was the eighties, which meant bad carpet, brown furniture, a television that glowed like a state religion, and adults who looked as if they had been issued by a department no one much trusted.The boarding house master drank. Not with flair. Just enough to make discipline come in and out of focus. The matron believed in Panadol the way monks believed in relics. Broken leg, fever, concussion, plague, she would study you with bureaucratic pity and slide two tablets across the counter as though pain were largely a matter of attitude.Then there was Willamina. Cook, quartermaster, stern keeper of the Sunday night catastrophe. She could produce a meal that made hunger question its vocation. Mash rose from her kitchen with the adhesive properties of light industry. Boys threw it at the dining hall ceiling and a week later it still hung there like a weather system refusing to move on. The meat had a tired look. The gravy carried old grievances. You ate because youth can digest almost anything, including policy.Morning began with porridge, which arrived not as food but as a sentence. Grey, steaming, inevitable. You swallowed it under portraits of men who had probably called hardship character while someone else buttered their toast.Then the sprint to the showers. That was its own theology. Move early or be baptised in cold water sharp enough to make a tenor of you. A hundred boys learning velocity, towel over shoulder, soap in hand, running not towards cleanliness so much as away from the Antarctic.The seniors had rites for our improvement. Hold encyclopaedias in the corridor until your arms shook with knowledge. Scrub the black marks off the gym floor until your knees understood obedience. Write out pages from the dictionary as if English itself were the instrument of reform. Gargle soap. Gargle shampoo. Say thank you. Tradition, they called it. The nation has always loved a cruel thing once it has been repeated.You learned quickly. That is the boast and the wound. You learned when laughter was camouflage. You learned to keep your face from volunteering. You learned that the room was a weather map and weakness travelled fast. You learned that a nickname could be a crown, a knife, or both by lunch.No one kept his Christian name for long. A stumble, a haircut, one bad afternoon, and the school rebaptised you for years.There was the tyranny of the telephone. One line, too many boys, a queue of homesickness dressed as patience. You waited with coins in your palm while the house listened sideways. No privacy. No mercy. Just your mother’s voice arriving thin through static, and twenty boys behind you hearing every word, still reaching back.Study happened somewhere in theory. In memory there are books, yes, but more often bells, bruises, the smell of liniment, the racket before lights-out, the scrape of chairs, the low parliament of boys negotiating status with insults, fists, borrowed cigarettes and improbable lies. Education was in there somewhere, but the school was better at making reflexes.Sport ruled. There was always some oval, some whistle, some larger boy bearing down with evangelical purpose. You learned to tackle or to simulate it well. You learned to rise quickly because visible pain drew commentary. You learned that loyalty among boys rarely arrived in language fit for greeting cards. It came as a shove into line, a hand on the back, a punch thrown on your behalf, a silence kept.Sneaking out after lights-out with shoes in hand and hearts carrying on, over a fence, down a path, towards the beach or a party or simply away. Smoking behind walls that knew our names. Drinking whatever could be found, which in those years was often warm, terrible, and accepted without philosophical complaint.The beach was another country. Sand in the cuffs, rank washed out to salt, boys again for an hour, before the bell took us back.And then Countdown with Molly Meldrum, songs happening to other people, modernity in the wrong room.Years passed with that steady pressure. No single grand event. Just repetition, which is the old craftsman. Porridge. Coffee. Too much coffee. Cold showers missed by seconds. Mash on the ceiling. Panadol for everything short of decapitation. Nicknames shouted across the quadrangle. Gym floors. Dictionaries. Encyclopaedias. Smoke. Salt. Sport. A master half-cut and a house half-raised by boys.And the small one changed. Not all at once. That would have been theatrical. He changed by inches. Learned the pecking order of any room. Learned to joke before being judged. Learned to carry hunger, noise, boredom, pain. Learned that belonging was costly and paid up anyway. Learned that adults were mostly guessing. Learned that tribe could be tenderness in work boots, or cruelty with your arm around a shoulder. Learned to keep moving.By the final year the blazer fit. The voice had dropped into place. The phone no longer owned him. He could drink bad coffee black, spot false authority at twenty paces, take the cold water without opera, read danger, read bluff, read sorrow in the set of another boy’s mouth and leave it alone unless invited. He had methods now. That is what the place gave. Not wisdom. Methods.So call it what it was. Not heaven. Not hell. A forge. A long hot room of rules and accidents, older boys and stale gravy, porridge and punishment, salt air and small mercies, where a child went in labelled and tender and came out tempered in the image available.No verdict. No lesson pinned like a ribbon. Only this: the steel remembers the fire, even after it has learned to look like a knife.<h3>F.S.F.</h3>

The Forge

The God of Small Teeth The bowl is empty.He is there before the kettle, white on the lino, waiting by the chipped blue dish.I am half-awake, bare-legged, looking past him to the phone lit on the bench, the mug by the sink, the unopened day.He sits. One paw tucked. Tail around his feet. A blink slow and judicial.I leave him there a second past mercy.Then the nip at the calf: neat, bloodless, percise.I turn. He is already at the cupboard.So I take down the bag and let the dry food fall. It hits the bowl like gravel on enamel.He lowers his head. The kettle starts up. The fridge keeps humming. Light gathers at the window over the sink.On my leg two pale marks fade with the light.Tomorrow he will be there again, white on the lino, waiting by the dish.F.S.F

The God of Small Teeth

Kitchen air, soap and heat, sweetness that means the Human has forgiven the kettle for being a kettle.A paving stone, cold as a coin.The Slug is halfway across it, a soft parcel of insistence, writing his sentence in silver. He has no pen and no one asked him.The Cat steps out. Not running, arriving. A blade with whiskers.The Grasshopper lands beside the Slug like punctuation with knees. “Morning, slime.” He says it kindly, the way kings say peasant. “I am going to be somewhere else,” he announces, as if distance were a rumour he could deny.The yard tightens without moving.“Danger,” says the Slug.“Danger is a bedtime story,” the Grasshopper replies, “for creatures who cannot jump. Race you. To the hedge. First to reach shade wins the right to be insufferable.”“I do not want that right,” says the Slug.“You get it anyway,” says the Grasshopper,&nbsp; “One, two.” He jumps on two.The Slug begins. Not heroically. Not quickly. Just forward, as if forward is a virtue and not merely a direction with costs.The Cat turns its head.The Grasshopper hears it late, because he is busy bragging. “Oh,” he says, “that is the slayer.”“Yes,” says the Slug, very calm for a creature made of wet.The Grasshopper becomes green lightning, a sequence of clean mistakes. Pot rim. Birdbath lip. Grass, too bright in daylight, too open for philosophy. The Cat follows by solving. Claws into leaves, a pounce that misses by the width of luck, and the Grasshopper laughs, breathless, delighted to be noticed.“Did you see that,” he shouts, as if the world is a theatre and death is a critic.The back door opens. A rectangle of indoor light falls across the yard. “Winston,” the Human calls, “come in. Do not bring anything in. Last time you brought in half a snake and acted like I should clap.”The Cat pauses. Duty tugs the murderer by the collar.The Slug moves.He finds the seam of shade under the hedge, cool earth, damp that feels like pardon.The Grasshopper arrives too, in a final flamboyant bounce, eyes wide, wings twitching with victory. “I made it,” he says. “I won.” The Cat, offended by schedules, pads back inside. The Human goes on believing the yard is his.The Grasshopper climbs a small stone and turns his survival into a speech. “Let it be known I outpaced death itself.” The Slug watches him inflate into legend.“If you insist,” says the Slug, “try making your speech under something heavy.”“Why would I hide,” says the Grasshopper, “I am the winner.”Above them the hedge shifts. Not leaf, not branch.A shadow detaches from the morning sky and becomes a bird.It drops like a thrown knife, silent until the last instant when the air tears into a thin scream.The Grasshopper turns. His celebration is cut mid syllable.Impact, wet crack, red mist, stippling the hedge leaves, insultingly pretty.His legs kick, still performing, still trying to argue the outcome with enthusiasm.The beak punches down, again, again, a clerk stamping forms.His abdomen opens. Something pale and glistening spills out.The bird eats first the part that matters.The Slug holds still and does not negotiate.The bird glances at him, black button eye, weighing effort against reward.Then it returns to the warm work, because winners are more tender.Tear, wet cloth sound, a short dragging up into leaves.Green fragments fall like confetti from the wrong party.In the open yard the Human makes coffee and thinks of nothing.Inside, the Cat curls innocent as a pillow.Above, the bird wipes its beak on a branch leaving a smear of red like a signature.The Slug travels deeper into shade, writing his quiet line, no brag, no leap, no speech.Only the slow, shining proof of continuing.F.S.F.

The Slug and the Grasshopper

Dust motes hung in the midday glare, a barrel rim baking in it, one man in the dirt wearing light like an old shirt. Breath slow as river stones that have forgotten the river. A shadow arrived before its owner. Hooves worried the ground into haze, spears clinked, bronze helmets took the horizon, rows of men sweating, rigid. The king at the centre bent down, polished, practised. Ask anything. Empires wait on your word. The man in the dust squinted at the heat. Move, he said, plain as thirst. You are blocking my sunlight. A hush went through the ranks. A boot scraped. A hand tightened on a hilt. Behind the king, a clerk held ink ready, trained for provinces, brides, gods. He waited. Then wrote, slowly, Sunlight. F.S.F.

F.S.F

Writing, Poems and Rants

Minutes of the Cat

Waitress

The Forge

The God of Small Teeth

The Slug and the Grasshopper

Sunlight's Shadow