=Cat's Rules=

They gave me a piece of paper that told me to report to room five. So that's what I did. It hadn't occurred to me yet to disobey them. It just didn't seem like something that could be done. You followed orders and things worked out for the best. That was the general idea you got. 

In room five, there was an old man behind a desk and on the desk a chessboard. On the chessboard were a couple of long teeth that looked to be those of a wolf but that I knew to be human, human teeth being longer than you expected them to be when they are extracted. There were also half a roll of breath mints and .38 detective special. "We've found you guilty," the old man said. 

I felt as if I should have recognized him from somewhere, but I couldn't quite pin down where. "Guilty?" I said. This was unexpected. "Guilty of what?" "Of everything," he said. "That's not possible. Not of everything. Who says so?" 

He pointed to a cushion on the floor beside the desk. On it lay a gray cat, curled up. sound asleep. I hadn't noticed the cat before. I felt like I should have recognize the cat, too, from somewhere, but that's how it always is with cats. "You're kidding. How can a cat make that kind of judgment?" 

The old man shrugged. "You're living in a cat's world. Surely you knew that? You chose this world, after all. Now you have to abide by the rules. Cats have the final say. That's just the way it is." 

"So now what?" I asked. 

"The only question left is whether you'll pick up that gun and do the right thing," he said. 

I couldn't believe my ears. "What are you saying? That I should kill myself?"  

"We can't tell you what to do. Those are the rules. We can only hope that you do the right thing," he said. 

For a wild split-second, I felt like grabbing the gun and shooting the old man and then shooting the cat, or vice-versa. What kind of crazy world was this, anyway? And no matter what the old man said, I had no memory at all of having chosen it. Who would? Unless the other choices were even worse. I seemed to remember a world of cannibal gnomes and another of space werewolves, among others even less desirable. 

Looking back now, bad as they were, those worlds seemed infinitely better than the one I chose where I was condemned by a cat and expected to pick up a gun and shoot myself because I was guilty of everything. Nonetheless, on an impulse, I picked up the gun and pressed the barrel to my left eye and pulled the trigger. 

They say that at the moment of death your whole life flashes before your eyes.  It seemed like the bullet was taking forever to arrive. I was at the train station, standing on the platform. The train was  late, having problems somewhere up the line; no one could explain more.  I was between here and there. It was no big deal. Nothing much had changed at all. I had time to do a lot of thinking. Beside me, someone asked, "Is that the train?" I looked up. I looked up.