It All Started With Cats (boyxboy)

Week One: Meet Edam

        He supposed it all started with cats.  Not the musical or some crazy acronym like Clowns Around The Store but the animal.  Felinus familarius or whatever the scientific name actually was.

        Those cats.

        They had been around Edam as long as he could remember.  And he had been able to talk to them almost as long.  He often asked them questions about the weird things they did like, "Why do you bring me dead animals?"

        And the cats would grudgingly oblige him with an answer to the question in their own special way.  If he remembered correctly the answer to that one had been something like, "I want you to fuckin' eat the stupid bastard.  Obviously your teeth haven't grown in properly yet and your hunting skills are shit. So I'm helping you."

        He would often play with the cats and have long philosophical conversations with them. His parents were not too worried by this behavior.  They wrote it off as a phase.

        Like an imaginary friend.

        They figured as their son matured he'd grow out of this strange little phase.  But as the years passed he didn't seem to be getting over this little phase of his.  And going to school seemed to make this problem worse.

        See when Edam started school he didn't realize he wasn't like other people.  He thought everyone could talk to cats just like him.  Kindergarten quickly became an eye-opening experience for the young boy.

        It didn't take him long to realize that being able to talk to cats wasn't something everybody could do.  And the way the cats talked, specifically certain four letter words that they spoke, wasn't tolerated in classrooms.

        He shared his weekend with the class once saying, "My cat and I went hunting for fucking rodents with shit for brains." When the teacher asked where he learned such harsh language and Edam answered he learned them from Bianca, his tabby, well… the teacher wasn't amused.

        His parents, likewise, were not amused when they had to go to a parent-teacher conference in regards to their son's rotten mouth.  And when they found out who their son accused of teaching him the words they knew it was time to put an end to his nonsense.

        No.  They didn't get rid of the cat.  It was a family pet and getting on in age.  And they were all quite attached to the pretty orange tabby.

        They set their son up with a counselor.

        Edam was sent to this person week after week.  He would sit down and be told that cats couldn't talk, he couldn't talk to them and they didn't understand each other for forty-five minutes to an hour every week.  But through it all he insisted that he could do all those things.  Bianca was his friend. After a couple of months with the same amount of progress his parents decided that the counseling wasn't happening often enough.  He started meeting the counselor three times a week after that.

        By the time he was ten Edam had gotten wise.  Nobody was going to convince him he couldn't understand what the cats were saying.  He knew he could.  But that didn't mean that he had to broadcast it to the rest of the world.  He kept his gift hidden, only talking to them when he was on his own. And he started lying to his parents and counselor.  He started telling them what they wanted to hear. And in less than three weeks the therapist claimed her work was done.  The boy was cured of his eccentrics.

        Also at ten, Edam realized that his gift was growing.  He could hear dogs. And Horses. He loved talking to horses.  And pretty much any domesticated animal.