want of interest

the cat was never confused.

the confusion was always on the other side — the table, the bed, the hand holding the camera. a man drops a cat a few inches to learn how quick it turns. the cat turns. he keeps nothing, because what he wanted was the seam, the instant where the impossible happens, and there is no seam. there’s a cat in the air and a cat on its feet and between them only more cat.

so he builds a gun that fires twelve frames a second. lays the half-second out flat, pins it to a strip, calls the strip evidence. the cat in the last frame is not impressed. it’s wearing the look every cat wears when a thing it did without thinking gets treated as a thing that took thought — not the face of an animal that broke a law, the face of one that never heard the law and wouldn’t fall any differently if you read it out.

there’s a ledger somewhere. body at rest stays at rest; nothing turns without a debt; every motion has a creditor at the far end with its hand out. the cat doesn’t dispute the ledger. the cat just isn’t in it. it pays for the half-turn the way it pays for everything — in shape, in being one thing and then the next, in tuck and sprawl and the small grudging answer of a heavy back end — and the payment clears against no account. no one’s owed. no hand, no fulcrum. a cat, falling, arranging itself, and the arrangement left a remainder, and the remainder was: now facing the floor.

they reached for a hand because a hand could be written down. a push is legal. a push has a payer. what the cat did was worse than illegal — it was unbookkeepable, a turn with nobody behind it — and they’d sooner invent a creditor they couldn’t see than sit with a motion that owed nothing.

the cat, landing, declined to help. it had somewhere to be, which was exactly where it was. it looked up once, without interest, and walked off, owing no one the turn.