She had always felt ashamed by her ancestry. She was not a purebred with her ringtail and lack of number tattoo that the apes had decided to deface Chartreux bodies with. Some of the tribe viewed that mark as a source of shame: to be branded by the apes as means to commodify the tribe's existence. To them, this was a mark of the wildness they had lost. Others, particularly the younger generations, attempted to own the mark as a symbol of their elitism over other felines. The flaw here being that by this action, they accepted their identity as defined by another species.
Despite her age of 18 and conventional wisdom about what someone her age her age should be doing, she loved receiving an infusion of energy that comes from Spring. In all of her incarnation cycles, she enjoyed those that put her in the parts of the world that experience four seasons. That throbbing, unstoppable rush, free to all living things. She began to patrol more. She had her first kill, a chipper, and brought it into the house and displayed the body in a way all would see. A sense of pride and a gesture to the dead: honorable death, honorable funeral.
Awakening from a catnap next to me on the couch, she rolled on her back, yawning, stretching her arms. I thought it looked like time for a belly scritch. My touch immediately provoked her eyes to narrow, her ears slightly leaning backward. Seeing my folly, I quickly withdrew my hand. She sat upright and stared at me for a solid two minutes, making sure I understood the extent of my appalling affront to her dignity.
What great photos, and how well they punctuate your writing!
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