Yarn Cats, by Michael Matthews
I landed a big contract to landscape the whole city, except I didn’t really do anything with plants, but more with buildings and streets and sidewalks. I turned my street into this wildly banked trough of concrete, so that it was like one long, undulating half-pipe. Everyone that lived there had adapted by selling their cars and getting really good at skateboarding.
Outside my building, there was a car tipped into the trough of the half pipe where there was still a road that met it. The car had apparently been there for a while, because people had festooned the inside of it with yarn – some of it functionally woven into mats and hanging platforms, and some of it just decorative – and all of the cats in the neighborhood had moved into the car, and some of them had been trying to figure out how to make the yarn into clothes, but it wasn’t turning out well at all for them and mostly just looked like they’d been rolling around in it.
My girlfriend was quite taken with one of them, a boy cat who kept shoving all the others aside, and who’d arranged a bit of yarn atop his head in what he seemed to imagine looked like a hat. We had a disagreement about cats trying to act like humans (I was opposed and was stroking a yarn-free cat while we discussed, the main thrust of my argument that cats were already superior to humans and debased themselves by aping us), and the bossy cat interrupted by doing a little four-footed tap dance in between us while my girlfriend sat on the car’s hood. I just didn’t like the looks of him, and it worried me that she seemed not to perceive that he was clearly a shady character, and probably behind the whole business of hanging yarn in the abandoned car.