Monsieur Solitaire

They used to talk about her outside his window as he sat waiting for the night to drop over Paris again, waiting for her. They said she sat on the hills at Montagne de Solitude late at night singing gently, whispering merely to the tunes of the wind and the quiet of the night. How her cats would roam the hills like creatures with no place to go, yet strangly well-fed and proud with shining furs, how they would suddenly sit in one of their windows and be gone just as fast. Just like their owner, they said. No one knew her, no spoke to the woman who wandered the outskirts of Paris all alone when dark, and never showed herself in daylight. They called her Rosse-Anne.

This peticular night monsieur Solitaire did not pick his stars to fasten in the furs of the cats who seemed more than attached already to something much different. He felt himself more enticed to behold the nature of the cats, now stretching themselves on his shoes, curling up into small balls of shinging black and grey fur. How at ease they could sleep, with the smile of a clown crowning their hair-covered faces, vicious in a way, insane. Monsieur Solitaire leaned his head in his hands and watched the almost unnoticable twitching of their paws and whiskers. Maybe they were dreaming, sniffing and running. Maybe they were not. How he wonederd what haoppened behind the lids of them, what spectale of a cats life was presented by the play writers in a cats’ mind, what could ineterest a cat in his dreams, long after it went to sleep. They twisted and purred by monsieur Solitaires’ shoes, and rolled across the small shine that was still left in the shoes, for they only reflected the dark back to his face, like sinful mirrors. That’s when he felt the arms fall over his shoulders once again.