The Birthday Suit
Mortimer Dowling was three thousand years old when he unbolted the front door and cursed the winter chill that swept through his house, embedding its icy fangs into his porcelain bones.
He stood unwavering with his grey legs apart, knees bent, spine stooped, like a bald monkey embalmed mid-leap between branches, propped against a birch-wood cane. It had taken him so long to shuffle down the ten-foot dusty hallway, that by the time he squinted blindly into the brilliant snow, no one was there. He cursed again, and as the warm puff of profanity dissipated into the crisp cold light, Mortimer wondered whether there had ever been anyone there and whether his dampened ears had heard any knocking at all.
“Happy birthday me!” he wheezed, with less a voice than a wispy draught, and rolled his tongue over the crevices of his gums. “At least I haven’t crapped myself yet.”
He was about to close the door when a small tabby-cat tiptoed over and stretched its mottled velvet neck against his bony shins. Seeing only its blurry outline, Mortimer leant forward like an elm resisting a gale, and hung out his leathery arm. The cat licked Mortimer’s bowed forefinger and pressed its salient cheekbones against his swollen knuckles.
They had never met, but centuries earlier Mortimer had been kind enough to offer a bowl of fresh cream to one of its ancestors. So, as the memories of a cat’s forbearers are etched into its soul at conception, he was no stranger to the animal. The opposite is true of dogs, whose senses are acute barometers only of the immediate present, and who learn of the past only through their encounters with ghosts.
“Hey puss-puss,” Mortimer whispered, and scratched behind its ears.
