Don’t lend cats money. Image Source

What sort of stupid name is that?” asked Astral Projection out loud, even though he was obviously alone. His face obscured by a failing newspaper, he continued to prattle. “What sort of name is Dingus? Dingus O’Hara? That can’t be right. It’s… it’s too moronic.” He put down the paper with the impact of disgust; his eyes darted across the dingy kitchenette following a trail of nothing to the garbage can, to where the cat used to eat. He suffered from a mild condition commonly known as cat vision flashback. It is the imaginary peripheral vision, an instinctive blur etched forever from owning and being conditioned by a cat.

A very long story short, he was abandoned by his wife, Celestial Interstellar Propaganda-Projection, of eight lackluster years, as well as their cat of five years, Fractal. Celestial started up one of those on-line Etsymacallit® businesses. It could have been moderately successful if she hadn’t fallen in love with the FedEx® clerk, Randy. Instead of keeping up with production demand, she doodled pages and pages of “CIP-P + R? TLF” inside of lop-sided hearts. She used so much blue ink; you could smell it. She moved out with Fractal under her arm three weeks ago.

Astral took a chomp out of a toasted English muffin and sighed. “When did I become the smartest guy in the room?” He bopped himself in the head as his eyes followed the trail of an invisible cat to the closet, the closet with the litter box. The taste of the bread soured in his mouth, it had broken down into the preservative chemicals just before he swallowed. For the first time in his 31 years of “living”, he realized he was a cat person.

Astral