Cat Head
by j.Kemble 10

I slip into the bedroom unseen by my wife looking for my best friend, and I find her right where she was last night, under the bench on a pizza box.
I can’t fit, so I stuff my head and shoulders under the bench, resting my head inches away from her head. I can hear light Mexican music resonating from the pizza box, from the hive like apartment downstairs where my neighbors are stacked. The box is a stiff, cardboard pillow, and I can feel my friend sniffing the dusty air, inhaling my pheromones. Her tongue is rough, and feels like sandpaper wearing away at my head, causing me to bald faster than genetics.
Once I saw it up close; it looked like sea urchins at the bottom of the ocean, small micro-tentacles washing back and forth in the tide. But, strangely, it feels comforting, like Mother. My eyes are closed, and I feel the familiar vertigo that now keeps me from roller coasters and carnival rides pull me over and over, uzumaki, sick and insane, like premature death.
But I don’t want to miss T.V., so I ignore the sleepiness and when she is done licking, I un-wedge myself from under the bench in the bedroom and return to the bright halogen lit living room.
She follows and lays behind me; her father/son, batting her tail, while my wife watches a rerun that we saw together in the theater and relinquishes the computer to my lucid abstract descriptions.