Curiosity of a Cat

Danny stared openly as the strange couple entered the hotel. Well, maybe they we’re quite so strange. They didn’t have three arms each or four heads or anything. They just looked a lot like the kind of people his sister Beth liked to hang out with.

The man had an artificially blond faux mohawk, huge blue tinted glasses, and a dark suit that somehow had a slight sparkle to it. The woman had long, long, pin- straight black hair, and was small and slender. Almost painfully thin, in fact. They both were. She was wearing a lot of makeup, applied in a similar style to that favored by Beth, but obviously done with much more skill and precision. The shiny, purply-black shadow that encircled her eyes looked as if it belonged to her face. Her lips were heavily glossed in a similar purplish color. On another woman, it would be garish, but somehow it was perfect on her. Perfectly unnatural.

The lady caught Danny’s eye and he looked down quickly, embarrassed. He then noticed that the two were not alone. At the man’s feet was a designer carrying case that contained a white cat, which glowered at him through navy eyes.

While the couple was fascinating, if a little weird looking, the cat made Danny uneasy, which was odd as he was generally fond of cats.

They finished checking in and turned to Danny. The man smiled graciously. The woman looked up at him, her large dark eyes full of expectation. Why were they looking at him like that?? Oh! Right. Time to take up the luggage.

Mentally berating himself for his awkwardness, he loaded the luggage. He suddenly realized with dread that they might expect him to carry the cat. Thankfully, the man leaned down and picked up the case himself before Danny had a chance to inquire about it.

Later, after he had them settled in their suite, Danny rushed to the men’s room and washed his face with cool water. He needed to pull himself together. He felt a confusion of emotions and didn’t understand why. He shouldn’t feel anything. Normally he didn’t feel much at work other than boredom. Basically, his job was very simple, practically menial. He was only a bellhop, although the refined hotel had a more sophisticated word for his position that Danny kept forgetting. At first it had been more interesting, and Danny had enjoyed the elegance of his surroundings. But soon enough it became like any other job that requires you to depend on tips to get a halfway decent salary.

The couple hadn’t seemed that bad. The man has even given him a nice, if unusual tip. It was a gold coin about the size of a half dollar from some European country. "I’m sorry, but we haven’t had an opportunity to exchange our money yet," he had apologized. Somewhere in the back of his mind Danny thought he would rather keep the coin instead of changing it for a few dollars of cash, but that was not important at the moment.

He couldn’t figure out why an animal could terrify him that much. As Danny looked in the mirror and reflected on the incident, he understood what had bothered him the most. It was the sensation, when he looked at the cat, that he didn’t know what it was. He felt that he was looking at something he had never seen before that happened to look like a cat.