Petty Remarks

My pet is doing her strange ritual again. She does it every sunrise. I have not yet ventured to understand it, and I decide, for lack of anything better to do, to study it today. She is doing something with her bit of mane. Is she grooming it perhaps? It is such a small patch of fur, it doesn’t seem much worth the bother of grooming; but, I suppose, it’s all she has. I often pity my pets for the lack of pelt.

She is using something long and flat and, on a wider end of it stick things protrude from the surface. It looks rather painful. Perhaps she is doing a form of penance for her wrongdoings. No, not every sunrise and she is not intelligent enough to think to do so anyhow. I remain with my former hypothesis of grooming.

She pulls the thing through her mane in repeated up and downward motions. As she makes these motions she recites sounds from their primitive language. The sounds are familiar ones but they are not any of the few words I have been able to learn such as food, no, goodcat, and badcat. “Won, too, three, for” she says. She continues for a very long time then ends with “wonhundred” and puts the pointy tool down, stops staring into the shiny, rectangular dish of still water that is mounted on the wall, and turns to me.

“Wont sum food, Oreo?” I am not entirely sure what she means to say, but I hear “food” and my name (or “Oreo”, what they think is my name) and I kindly show her to the place I store my food. I watch her as she serves me. My pets are so ignorant, but they serve me well. I suppose I shall keep them in spite of their strange habits.