The epitome of psychotic grace, of spinning plates and nightshade, the cat arrived without caveats. Not man or woman or even truly beast, this cat was something else entirely. An opium blend of myth and legend, suspended beliefs and foreign fallacies. Its smile was a hoodwink shine in the dark, diamond pinpricks and scalpel gleams from beneath the leafy fronds of a potted fern on the second floor. Just a smile, nothing should be so menacing about a smile, but perhaps it was the lack of a face to go with it that made the sickle curve of coma white so strange. Even here, it was strange.
But he liked strange, and perhaps he woke up when odd arrived, perking for the entrance of an old friend. One eye blinked out from the base of the fern, black slit in blue, like a predatory tally mark in the open sea. Then the other eye appeared, and after that the cat began to take shape with tabby brown stripes and a tail that rustled the potted leaves, twitch-twitching.
Wayfaring and fickle, nothing could have held truer to the blood bottled up within, the cat vacated the plant with a hop. Across the walkway before little paws took him up onto the ledge of a railing that overlooked the milling populace. He was intimately cognizant of the holes that could be made in common sense, the corset strings that could be pulled through nice and tight so that common sense couldn't breathe. Common sense wilted like a mourning lady in the summer sun, black parasol puddle in the park. Someone grab the spirit of hartshorn!
He landed back onto the carpet in twisted synergy, lithesome limbs bloomed in cream sleeves and trousers with diagonal black stripes. A slender chain dripped from the pocket of his vest, the silver noose of a pocketwatch laid out on a bed of violaceous silk. His hair was smoothed with macassar oil, fragrant and shiny. The cat was now a man, but the man was also still somehow a cat, but it wasn't anything to be questioned. So he peered down the walkway.