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.

a biography of whiskers

he surest sign that the bedroom is a mess is a fluffy balled up cat sleeping on all those sheets of papers on the floor. There. He shivered in his sleep. Maybe he's fighting off a tomcat in his dream. One paw is covering his eyes, like a drunkard with a hangover denying the morning after. How am I going to clean this up if I keep staring at him? There! He shifted, exposing his fluffy belly. As I scratch it his whiskers twitch, and then he stretches to his full length, kicking away the previous semester's stacks of photocopies. I used to spend nights writing with only him, Bolabola, sleeping on my books, for company. Now, new cats add to the roster. Behind me, snug-comfy on the beanbag that Bolabola used to completely own, are two more cats, not really cats, just a bit older than kittens: Bangus and Lasing, two new whiskers who sleep in the room at night, on mornings, at noon.

I'm going to have to ask the two beanbag cats to leave me the room, nicely, so I can start cleaning up. But how to convince them to do that when their elder brother is stretching in the center of the room, and I am tolerating it?