Campus Cats in the Night Light
The poorly lit lobby had a slippery floor, and I skidded along it like a novice ice skater. A few other night-class students were straggling behind but had vanished as I stepped toward the front stairwell and set foot into the warm, dark night. Then a voice, a raspy one, rang out from somewhere nearby.
“Do you have the time?” the stranger inquired.
“8:30,” I started to say, lifting my head from my phone. But I paused when I saw nothing, no one around. I was surrounded by only stairs and dark air. The whole college campus facing me was practically pitch black. Which brought to mind the recent hubbub concerning campus safety. The recent student and campus council meetings full of finger-pointing, arm-waving arguments and shoulder-shrugging bureaucrats quoting legalese but promising progress.
But I hadn’t yet noticed much progress. Aside from those new yellowy floodlights encircling the school president’s mansion… Or that crisp white LED lighting illuminating the football team’s practice field…
“Do you have the time?” the mysterious voice repeated. But again I didn’t see anyone. Envenomed with fear that I might be getting stalked by ghosts, or YouTube pranksters, and wanting nothing to do with either, I decided to bolt, walked briskly down the remaining stairs and zipped off into the hot, soupy night.
Padding down the dark pavement, however, I stopped in my tracks when I spotted something peculiar- a curiously large pack of housecats about 10 paces ahead. The cats clumped, congregating, and occupying a whole square of sidewalk by my building.
Then I felt a presence, heard panoramic mewing. Looking to my right, then to my left, I saw cats coming forth from all sides. Cats crawling up from sewers, from bushes, from under parked cars. Cats leaping down from trees. Paws pounding the pavement. The cats scurrying up beside me. The cats picking up pace as I stepped forward. My brisk walk quickening into a trot.
More and more cats appeared. All were housecats, yet of varying breeds, different coats, colors of fur. The cats’ numbers steadily increasing. So much so that they began crowding me, inhibiting my movement. Soon enough, the entirety of the street and sidewalk was cluttered. Cluttered with cats.
It was then that the rain started. But it wasn’t a drizzle. Or a light film of water. It was something else entirely.
Cats.
Cats were literally falling from the sky. Like a ticker tape parade. As if the cats were feathers, falling from the sky, that’s how lightly they descended before landing perfectly on all four paws.
The cats coming from the sky, the cats creeping, crowding the sidewalk, all the animals appeared absent of ulterior incentive. Their faces were ciphers. They were simply being cats. They were pawing at each other, rubbing up against my legs. None, though, were purring and none were hissing.
Paralyzed, unable to continue through this flash flood of felines, I froze in place and marveled as the hordes of cats formed a stream, not unlike an actual flash flood, the massive surge of cats branching off toward the president’s mansion.
The wave of cats, like a storm surge, washed into and under, soon smothered the bright yellow halo encircling the mansion… The river of cats gushing, flooding into the mansion’s front doors, the doors open as outstretched arms…
Panicked guests emerged screaming and streaming out. I guess there’d been a get-together with donors, big wigs or university boosters. And now rotund, well-suited, cowboy-hatted old men, and equally rotund damsels in ball gowns- some of the ladies in more make-up than circus clowns- all came bumbling and stumbling out of the mansion, all screaming Kingdom Come. The tottering big wigs covered in attacking, hissing, biting, scratching cats… Cats swarming the cowboy hats and ball gowns like bees blanketing a beekeeper…
The sound of meowing was becoming deafening, louder than an air raid siren, and I gritted my teeth, seeing that the president’s mansion was in a dire predicament, starting to shake from side to side, like a boat… Clumps of cats bursting out, shattering windows, torrents of felines spraying from the mansion’s face, falling with the force of Niagara Falls…
The mansion then began to come undone, crumble. Bricks coming loose. The mansion too pregnant with cats. The mansion, brick by brick, quickly coming apart as a geyser of screeching cats shot up from the mansion’s chimney. Then another geyser tore through the mansion’s roof. The two geysers converging. The geysers forming an erupting volcano of cats that filled up the night sky with a wild collage of fur, paws, tails, whiskers and meows.
Then my jaw dropped as I saw a cat the size of the Sphinx, about 50 feet tall, rocket up from out of the lake by the library, the enormous creature soaring into the sky like a dragon. The giant cat was the color of gold, and parked itself, in a crouching tiger stance, in the sky, hovering over the campus like a blimp.
“Do you have the time?” the colossal gold cat, in that same raspy voice, cried over the din of cat sounds, as if beseeching the dark night sky.
But the sky stayed silent, and the giant gold cat roared out an earth-rattling, yoga-like OHMMMMMM…
Right as the OHMMMMMMM rang out, all the cats around campus silenced, temporarily froze as if paused on a screen. The erupting volcano of cats, the cats carpeting the campus then reanimated and converged into a silent stream that ascended into the great yawning darkness of the golden cat’s wide-open maw. As if the giant creature were sucking the cats up with a plastic straw.
After swallowing the stream, every last feline, the colossal gold cat unloosed another OHMMMMMM, flew toward the football field, and with massive paws, paws the size of armored tanks, the colossal cat swatted out the football field’s lights. Then the giant cat whipped back around, flew toward the rubble of the president’s mansion like Godzilla and swatted and smashed every one of its floodlights.
Watching the colossus wreak its wrath, standing underneath that great cat’s golden belly, I was elated, noticing the entire campus to be perfectly lit. Awash in golden light. For the first time, at night, I could see everything! The library, the cafeteria, the bookstore, the gymnasium, football field, baseball diamond, the dorms, every single building… Even the far-off parking lots!
I’d wished the giant golden cat to stay parked in the sky. But as it floated upward, began hopping along the stars, I finally knew the time, and that the cat’s visit would only be temporary. And I hoped for a better campus lighting solution.
