The Cat that Lives in the Bookstore

Haunting the shelves of decaying authors, hunting for things bigger than bookworms and smaller than castles. Felis domestica. She spends her life in lazy, quiet corners. Where sun dapples in warm waves against her sleek felinity. She does not know how to read, or perhaps she does but does not spout it. She is catalogued here, among the shelves, like the rest of them. She features herself across many fonts, and before there were words she tip toed across the laps of Pharisees and into their glyphs. In her seven lives, she had seen the burning of ancient scrolls, the rise and decline of empires, the rewriting of history again and again. And she watches it now, as she watched it then, her tail twitching, slightly annoyed.

What is good writing? Ask your cat. It's the trance you enter when you fall through worlds just ink stains away on a page somewhere. It's the sometimes not so gentle thrall of the open door waiting there on the bookshelf. When people watch the movie and say "the book was better." The book is always better... why?

Cheshire cats read themselves in and out of stories, navigating with their minds eye to tea parties and pirate ships. When you read, you become entwined, you have been taken as a lover. It is an intimate thing. You are, with the help of someone skilled, creating an entirely separate reality. One where the adventures and lessons are very, very real.

To be the cat at the bookstore, watching, playing with our lives as they beckon us from the window and through the door. Taunting us with their soft fur, and softer bellies, to sit and stay, to read. Sometimes it takes the beckoning of tools apart from written word to fall onto the pages of adventure.