Charlotte Cindy Blueberry Part II - With a Pond and A Cat

mmThere was a pond behind CeeCee’s house. Not directly behind the house I suppose. It was across the cow pasture, down the hill, and through a small grove of willows. Many of her younger childhood summer days were spent there. She would wade up to her chest in filthy water hoping to catch tadpoles, snails, minnows, or frogs in an old Mason jar she had stolen from her Mother’s cupboard. She often came out of the water with little friends attached on her legs and smelling like sewage. She didn’t even seem to notice the grossness of the situation, even as she was prying leaches off her calves and thighs. As she grew older, her trips to the pond had grown less frequent. It didn’t seem like something a twelve year old going on thirteen should do.
This particular Saturday had been an uneventful day at her house and she was really itching for an adventure. That’s when her hair decided it was time to take over. She felt a little twinge on her scalp. She reached up to scratch her head when an idea came into her nearly teenage brain.
“The pond!” she said excitedly.
A wild hair had, at that very moment, grown anew out of her scalp. That wild hair put the “hairbrained” thought into her head to visit an old childhood love. It had been so very long since she had been to the, not so directly behind her house, pond. Or “Far Pond,” as it had been named by CeeCee. So, with that wild hair growing faster by the minute, CeeCee decided to put on her treasured and worn hiking boots to make the trek to the Far Pond.
She couldn’t keep a generous grin off her face as she pranced through the pasture. The sun shone off her ponytail and it seemed to glow just as bright as CeeCee’s face.
“Hello Cows!” CeeCee said while passing the solemn looking cattle that were chewing on pasture grasses and munching their cud. They looked at her with little interest and then promptly put their faces back to the ground to nip more brown grass to fill their giant bellies.
She found herself skipping and singing an Oklahoma Musical tune while heading down the hill and through the willows.
“Oh, what a beautiful morning! Oh, what a beautiful day. I’ve got a beautiful feeling, everythin’s goin’ my way,” she belted at the top of her lungs.
As CeeCee passed through the willows and spied the pond ahead of her she found herself slowing. Her new wild hair wanted to relish this reunion. How lovely Far Pond looked with its green slimy moss covering almost the whole of the water. The weeds were quite overgrown, and CeeCee could smell the rotting of untended foliage and dirty pond creatures. Ah, what a marvelous stench.
She let her eyes scan the scene and they stopped quite abruptly on something that was sitting at the far end of the pond. Squinting and craning her head, she moved closer to the thing. It looked like some kind of animal.
“Where did that cat come from?” CeeCee wondered aloud when she realized what the something was.
She rarely saw anything other than a few bullfrogs and a myriad of bugs and gross, slimy, swimming things in the pond. The cat was nearly hidden behind the overgrown cattails that surrounded the murky brownish green water. The cat was out of place, and standing very unusually close to the edge of the water. It seemed to be peering at its reflection admiringly in the water. And, its paws were brown and caked with sticky mud.
“I thought cats didn’t like water,” CeeCee stated at full volume.
She didn’t know if she was talking to the cat or to just to herself. She did, more often than not, say what she was thinking out loud. You can imagine her surprise when the cat responded to her declaration.
“I am not a cat!” said the creature.
Charlotte Cindy Blueberry thought it was unusual for a cat to talk. She shook her head and scratched at her newly grown hair before thinking aloud.
“I’ve never heard a cat speak before. But, then, perhaps no cats had ever wanted to make conversation with me before now. Or, maybe, someone’s voice from the next neighborhood, which is 45 miles away, got caught up in the wind and blew right into my ear. The voice did sound agitated and desperate. Stumbling about on the wind for 45 miles, rolling and tossing with no direction in mind would give any traveling voice a desperate edge to it. Wouldn’t you think! But, the voice did seem to have come from the cat,” she rambled.
“May I jump in on this little moment of self expression at any time? Or, maybe I should come back when you’ve thoroughly convinced yourself that you’re crazy,” the animal retorted.
Startled, CeeCee took a few moments before she answered the smallish beast.
“Are you talking to me?” CeeCee exclaimed. A very logical question, she thought, under the circumstances.
“No, I am talking to this rather intelligent looking bullfrog with the abnormal growth coming out of its face,” he added sarcastically.
He was looking disapprovingly at a rather disgusting, and deformed, bullfrog sitting close to him. The bullfrog seemed to have been mutated by some discarded chemicals left over from a science project went bad.
“It shouldn’t get me into any trouble to talk to a cat, right? Besides, it probably wasn’t the cat who was talking anyway.” She again exclaimed to no one in particular.
At this, the cat looked up at her. He now seemed extremely annoyed. It was only then that she regarded his beauty.
“My goodness, you are pretty.” She said surprised.
His brilliant orange fur wasn’t interrupted by white stripes like a tabby cat. Nor, was it spotted with bits of black and white like a calico. His luscious fur was all orange with bits of yellow tangled in it. Looking like some misbehaving child had taken a yellow highlighter and marked the cat’s fur with it while hiding in a dark closet.
The Cat didn’t talk for a minute. He seemed to be enjoying CeeCee admiring him. And, because of the momentary silence, she was almost certain that she was just imagining things. But, there was the Tom Cat standing on the other side of the pond. To make matters worse, he was looking directly at her with eyes that seemed to burn.
She didn’t know how she knew he was a he, but she knew. It must have been the deep voice that came from his feline throat. His fur was long, but not straight like other cats of longhair varieties. It was curly and unruly! Actually, the fur was so disorderly that it reminded CeeCee of her own unmanageable tresses. The cats mane looked a bit like something else CeeCee had seen before. Something that warmed her insides so completely she almost felt like curling down right there in the wild hay and taking a nap.
“FIRE!” she nearly yelled.
Her exclamation startled the poor cat so that its fur was now sticking straight into the sky. It had jumped nearly two feet in the ground before landing directly on his four paws. The fur quickly recoiled back to its original disarray as he gathered his composure.
“Will you stop this nonsense and just act like a calm, rational person? I need to tell you something. In addition I still need convincing myself that you aren’t crazy. You aren’t helping your case much with these outbursts!” he said with very apparent irritation.
“Okay, so we’ve established that you are talking to me then?” CeeCee said, still with a lingering question in her tone. Her eyes were wandering the scene were looking for someone hiding in the brush that might be playing a trick on her.
“Oh, you do catch on quickly don’t you,” he said while rolling his striking emerald eyes.
“You know, you aren’t a very polite cat.” CeeCee said a little offended.
“I am not a cat!” said the creature, raising his voice to a very alarming mini roar. “I am a Catopuma.”
“A cata whata,” replied a disbelieving CeeCee.
“C-A-T-O-P-U-M-A. Cato-puma, Catopuma. Cat – o – puma. . .”
“Fine, I get it!" CeeCee interupted him. "You can stop saying it. Catopuma.” She exaggerated the word so the creature would know that she was capable of intelligence.
“It still has the word cat in it, so I don’t see why you are so uptight about it.” Now CeeCee was the one rolling her eyes quite impressively.
The Catopuma let out an enormous sigh that still had a small roar behind it. He lifted his left front paw and licked it clean and then wiped behind his ears a few times. He looked at his murky reflection again to make sure he was still presentable.
“Charlotte Cindy Blueberry”, he addressed her with poise and self confidence. “I am here to deliver a message and an artifact to you. I have come over thousands of miles and hundreds of years to see that this message safely reaches your ears. I am quite tired and rather hungry so I suppose I am slightly discourteous at the moment. I do apologize. Now, if I may, I would like to have a word.”