according to color

A bulge rises from the sheets of paper on the floor. The first time it happened, I nearly squashed it. I thought maybe it was a mouse (but then I have nine cats, which cannot co-exist with mice). Now, the sight of a bulge suddenly moving is, well, normal. This one moves in sudden spurts, then wiggles itself free from the pile of papers I've been sorting through all day. A whiskered kitten emerges from the rubble. Blinking, it meows at me, probably wondering why I had again forgotten that I had thrown the previous semester's worth of scratch papers on the floor, disregarding the sleeping cats, which were on the floor first. But this afternoon only one cat had slept upstairs, in the bedroom, where I am compiling my portfolio of previously written and previously published works. Switching jobs means bonding with a domestic side of you you had forgotten you had before: your unemployed housecleaning side.

The kitten walks on the pile of papers on my left, leans on it, and the pile tumbles down. My other cats climb up the stairs and enter the room to see what the racket is all about. Now, there are six cats whose paws are trampling on my stuff on the floor. I grab one and put her on my right. I grab another, and another, and sort them according to fur color.

This could take a while. Unlike the sheets of papers, cats stand up and move about after I sort them.