Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo by Heather Wardell

Author:Heather Wardell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781456347185
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2010-11-23T13:00:00+00:00

Sunday, August 14th

I am standing by the side of a long country road. I know that I am in Italy, even though I've never been there before. A funeral passes by. An old lady, small and wrinkled and somehow inherently Italian, stands near me, crying and wailing with more misery than I would have thought one person could express. Clearly someone very important has died.

I find myself rising away from the road, but the wailing continues, and grows steadily louder. Louder and more pathetic...

My eyes still closed, I realized that I was snuggled down deep in my bed. The wailing, though, was even louder than it had been before. The pain, the absolute desperation in it, was overwhelming.

The hurt... the sadness...

The cat!

It was Ninja, crying out his agony and devastation. Over what, I had no idea, since his life seemed to be just about perfect. My eyes drifted open and I managed to focus them on the alarm clock.

4:44 in the morning.

On a Sunday.

I rolled onto my side so that I could get out of bed, and found myself face to face with the cat. The wailing, which had stopped briefly while I was trying to return to the land of the living, started again when he realized I was aware of his presence.

I put my hand under his chin and stared into his eyes.

"I thought someone had died. If you don't hush up right now, someone is going to die."

I glared at him for another moment, and then he pulled away from me and walked to the end of the bed. He stared back at me for a moment, with the kind of disdain that only a cat can really pull off, and then haughtily jumped from the bed. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the grunt he made when he hit the ground. Fat cats can't jump.

I heard Ninja's claws clicking away on the hardwood, and drifted slowly back to sleep, the last thought in my head, "Why didn't I just get a hamster?"

*****

At a more civilized hour, I got up and surveyed the house. Things were coming along quite well. I had a bit of time to kill before my lunch with Larissa, which she'd asked to have later than usual since she was getting her hair colored, so I looked around for a nice easy job to do to make the house better.

Wandering up to our bedroom, I found the job. When we looked at the house before we bought it, I had dreams of sitting outside on the balcony outside the bedroom with a drink and a good book. Unfortunately, the previous owners had covered the balcony's floor with a very unattractive carpet, of a color that reminded me of the place where brown and puke-green go to die, which didn't make it a nice place to sit and relax.

Ian and I weren't innocent either. On the balcony as well were our window screens (which we took off once when we were feeling particularly energetic

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