BIKER CAT - one hundred words for Friday Fictioneers

BIKER CAT

Fernando always parked his bike beside his house, out of sight of potential thieves. The engine-warmed seat was Morena’s favourite place, but she usually jumped off when Fernando rattled his keys.

Not that day. She refused to budge, even digging her claws into the leather when he tried to push her off. He laughed indulgently. “All right, five more minutes while I fetch my football kit.”

He returned with his kit bag just in time to see emergency vehicles race past towards the motorway. If he’d left two minutes earlier he’d have been in that pile-up.

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I'm a firm believer in animal's ESP instincts - are you?

Either way, I hope you enjoy my story - please leave a comment if you can before you go to read other stories via https://rochellewisoff.com/  Thanks to CEAyr for the photograph - which reminded me of Tenerife where I lived for 15 years. I am due to return there this month for a short visit to catch up with old friends - and to celebrate a birthday. I am much too old to have them but hey! who cares?

TABBY - a 100 word story

TABBY

I was under the dresser when I heard Mum say Nan was really ill, and I pressed my face into Tabby’s fur. Tabby is the best cat ever but she hissed at me.

“Come away, Lucy,” Mum said but I couldn’t. Gross slimy things were coming out of Tabby’s bottom, and it was even worse when she started licking them, but Mum said, “Those are kittens. They came out of Tabby’s tummy like you came out of mine.”

“And like you came out of Nan’s?” I said and Mum cried.

That’s how I knew Nan was going to die.

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This story was prompted by the above photograph posted on Rochelle's blog for Friday Fictioneers. Follow the Blue Frog icon on  https://rochellewisofffields.wordpress.com/  to read more takes on the prompt from around 100 other writers. 
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KIKA - the A-Z challenge

For the whole month of April roughly 2000 people are blogging daily with the letters of the alphabet as a guide, and I am one of them.

My chosen theme is Tenerife, where I have lived for 15 years, and today's letter K prompted me to write about a Canarian cat who chose to live with us soon after we arrived.

KIKA

We had only been in our apartment for a few months. It was the week before Christmas 2000 and we were expecting a dozen people for Sunday breakfast – our traditional way of starting the season. On the Saturday afternoon, while we were setting out the tables, we spotted a cat and four kittens hiding in a plant-pot on our neighbour’s terrace.

The neighbours were away so we fed the cat, and the next morning we found her on our terrace. It’s quite a jump up from the community garden so she must have carried each kitten in turn. We asked our guests to leave them in peace, and the breakfast party was a great success, helped in no small part by the five feline faces watching our every move..

Over the ensuing few weeks they practically took over the place, and friends would pop round to share a beer and watch the kittens.

Eventually we re-homed the kittens but the mother stayed. We called her Kika and she would follow us to the bar. When other customers arrived with dogs she waited on the pool wall for us to come home.

She became quite a local celebrity when she took exception to one small yappy dog and launched an attack from the bar steps. The dog ran away yelping and she returned to the bar victorious.

When she died last year we were heart-broken. I still come home sometimes expecting her to be here.

CAT HEAVEN

There’s a special garden

where cats go when they die,

with vine-wrapped trees for scratching,

soft grass for them to lie,

and holographic mice to chase

for healthy exercise,

and all the fish and cream they need

to live their thousand lives.

CAT - a poem for National Poetry Day

It is National Poetry Day = And here you can read my contribution to the event - posted in memory of Kika,

KIKA                                                       

Cat sprawled boneless

on the softest chair -

scarcely breathing warmth

in a heap of silken fur -

the merest twitch

of tail or whisker

betraying a mouse-filled dream.

Your caressing hand
creeps in to borrow

some of that contentment

and its body lengthens

yielding a wanton belly.

You can lose all the tensions of a day

in the purr of a sleeping cat.

KIKA

KIKA

Kika died yesterday. We're not sure how old she was, but she had lived with us for thirteen and a half years. When we moved into our apartment in June 2000 we hadn't planned on having a cat, but Kika had other ideas.

It was the Sunday before Christmas 2000 and we had invited about 16 people for a full English breakfast. This was a tradition we started in England, where the numbers had grown to over 30 and had to be fed in relays in our tiny cottage.
For our first party here in Tenerife we planned to eat on the terrace, but it would still be a logistical challenge.

At four in the morning we heard noises outside our bedroom window, and when we investigated we discovered this beautiful cat had moved her four kittens into one of our plant pots.
 There they stayed throughout the party - watching us while we watched them, but not moving. The mother cat graciously accepted smoked salmon, bacon and pieces of sausage - clearly she had been domesticated - but the kittens were wild and hissing. Even so, they were obviously not going to be deterred.

That afternoon - slightly merry - I made them a bed out of a washing basket and they moved in properly.
We knew we wanted to keep the mother and we called her Kika. She and her kittens all lived on the terrace, through rainstorms and the fireworks of New Year, and it took several weeks for Kika to persuade her brood to come indoors. She saw off an Alsation which thought it could attack her kittens, and came to us for help when she couldn't round them all up at once after a thunderstorm. We enjoyed their company for a month but then we caught and rehomed the kittens.



Kika stayed. She would wait on the wall of the pool for us to come home,
and then weave through the railing or turn somersaults on the path in front of us,

In her last few months she acquired considerable street cred by sitting on the steps of the local bar while we had a drink, and on one occasion she leapt onto the back of a passing dog, which fled in terror. 

She was a lovely cat, a favourite with the entire neighbourhood, and we will miss her badly. RIP Kika XX

CAT & SALES - (or cat for sale!)

Here she is - Kika the little madam - catching up on her sleep in the sunshine after another night on the tiles.
Lucky for her she can sleep through the loud Italian party on our neighbour's roof terrace.
I could do with a decent kip as well, after the damn cat woke me - yet again - by miaoing outside my window in the wee small hours.

This was the sight that greeted me yesterday morning - behind those telegraph poles should be our mountain, but someone had pinched it.

The sky was clear as a bell today when my daughter Mandy joined me on my walk. Not only that, but the pods of cyclists who rode past us all gave us plenty of walking room and actually smiled - it makes such a difference having a pretty blonde companion!

We are apparently going to have a heat wave later - it may even start tomorrow - so all cardigans and jackets can be washed and put away until autumn. Barbecues such as the one at which I took this photo have been banned to reduce the fire risk - we don't want a repeat of last year's disastrous forest fires.

                                                                   .


Down in Las Galletas the Rebajas - sales - have started, and will  last all through July.

These summer dresses are selling for around ten euros each, which is great if your knees are good enough, but we were drinking our coffee opposite a very posh and expensive ladies' dress shop that displayed this sign.






The OH and I obviously have similarly twisted minds because the same thought struck both of us - they chose an unfortunate way to chop up the word DISCOUNTS!

A FELINE WELCOME

After a debauched two hours drinking and chatting with my daughter - if you can call two glasses of lime & soda debauched - Kika was waiting patiently for me on the swimming-pool wall. (She's in the centre of the photo above the hibiscus.)
Well, I say 'waiting patiently', though there was a definite 'Where have you been?' in her greeting and I think I detected a tapping of paw on the cement wall.




She proceeded to weave her slalom course through the railings - and then she heard the whirring of my camera.

What a poser she is!




Is this my best side?

....  or this?

...... or how about this?

Kika must be at least fourteen years old - she was a stray - but she's a real prima donna, isn't she?

CLEVER CAT

When the temperature's in the high 30s you have to take advantage of any patch of shade!
This is Kika under a potted ficus, and she fought off another cat to keep the spot. In Kika's opinion, there isn't enough room in the whole world for other cats, let alone in such a small space as this.

FELINE OLYMPICS

This is Kika.
She is at least thirteen years old - she turned up on our terrace one night in 2000 with four kittens.
The OH, who professes to hate cats, approves of her because she was a very good mother, and because her eyes are pale blue like his.
They also shine red at night. No comment.
Because of her colouring and markings, and because her eyes reflect red rather than white or yellow like other cats, our vetinary friend says she has a lot of Burmese in her genes.

Wherever she came from, she is spoiled rotten, and now she's an old lady she spends even more of her time sleeping, except when something happens. Like today, when one whole trunk of a palm tree fell onto our footpath.
She got so excited about this that she had to do her somersault act, which involves putting the crown of her head on the ground and throwing the rest of her body backwards.





She used to be able to do this in the middle of the path, which she demonstrated every time we came home. This was quite spectacular and caused endless amusement to our neighbours, but now she needs the help of a wall.

Step one - head on the ground and flop sideways.
Step two - push off from the wall with all four legs and roll onto your back.
Step three - land on the other side and then sit up and try to look smug and dignified at the same time.

Should I enter her for the Feline Olympics?

DEATHS HEAD MOTH

For the nature-lovers among you - this is one of the caterpillars chomping its merry way through my daughter's rooftop garden at the moment.
Credit for the photographs goes to my daughter.

These caterpillars can strip every leaf from a large tropical climbing plant in a day, which my daughter is happy about in view of my son-in-law's reluctance to prune anything as severely as he should..
They grow fast - this one will double in size before it pupates - and any sensible cat leaves it well alone. They exude an unpleasant irritant and they probably taste disgusting.

Looked at dispassionately, they are attractive creatures, but surprisingly difficult to find despite their size, and the lemon ripening in the background of the picture above is the same colour as this caterpillar.
They also come in a brown pattern. A friend saw one on a bar terrace and thought it was a dog turd until it moved!

My son-in-law showed me my first two - he had caught them in a plastic box and was taking them to the park.
 "Listen to this," he said, and flicked the box with his fingernail.
The damn things reared up and hissed at him!

Their cat caught one of the moths once and brought it downstairs to show them. It was the size of two spread hands and it was screaming.
They caught the cat and released the moth, which immediately flew back upstairs, out of the door and carried on laying its eggs on their plants.

CAMPEONES & Earthquakes.

As you can imagine, last night was not a quiet one here in Tenerife.

It started in the afternoon with children chanting “España!” in the pool. Then one of our neighbours moved his television onto his terrace, lit his barbecue and invited all his friends round. 

 Every bar was bedecked with flags, and the football shirt manufacturers  had obviously done a roaring trade.





A few practice bangers exploded and my cat cowered. She won't allow me to comfort her at times like these - Canarian or not, she hates fireworks - so I built her a tent in her favourite corner and went to my daughter's apartment to watch the match in comfort.

Then there were shouts, screams, fireworks and general rejoicing. Four-nil! I am not a football fan, but the excitement was infectious.

Even the children were dressed up, and this man, his wife and his family were all decked out in Spanish colours.

I did feel sorry for Simone, owner of the lone Italian flag on our block. I found him sharing a drink with a Spaniard, and patted his back in sympathy. “No importa,” he said, but his expression was sad.

And there have been more earthquakes on the island of El Hierro - see its dedicated page on the right..