(S) CATCIDENT!!!! (D) Final version

CATCIDENT!!!!

In the first house of a street about to be witness to an unusual event there were three people sitting down to dinner in front of a television. The couple next door were having a romantic candle lit dinner. Two doors down a wife was beating her husband down. Three doors down two sisters were fighting over spilt milk whilst their father, a widow, dozed in the living room. Four doors down, the boiler was broken, and so the family that resided there were already under sheets. Five doors down an author smiled, writing his last line before heading for the bathroom. Six doors down, two teenagers were drinking on their front porch. Seven doors down, a single middle-aged woman fed her cat. That cat then walked across her garden before jumping the fence and landing safely on the pavement. The black cat walked across the path of a dirty ruffian of a man. The two girls called out to him by the name of John. They laughed about it being unlucky. The irony being that John could not be unluckier. He lived like a tramp, smelt of wee and was nearly always on a hangover. The twist was that he owned that entire street. Yes he was officially their landlord. But… life being what it is…and what it can do to people…
Anyway… the black cat walked across his path, as it would do on any other day and onto the road. The girls laughed louder now.
Two car-screeching seconds later a dead cat lay on the road. The car swerved and hit an old fashioned electricity-carrying wooden lamppost. The girls stopped laughing. More in shock then anything else. The tramp landlord turned around slowly. The vehicle’s headlights were still on and they were on the dead cat.
The middle-aged woman, a woman named Claire, calmly came out of her house aiming solely to put her rubbish bag in the outdoor bin. She addressed the landlord like on any other night. She said with a smile: Morning Landlord! When neither he nor her neighbours Jane and Tilda (shortened from Matilda), gave their usual reply, she looked on at the accident and knew not how to react. Her cat was lounging in the middle of the road like it would do on any of the neighbours’ garden. Benjamin Franklin was dead stiff!
Claire, John, Jane and Tilda looked at the driver who was now coming out of the car. He looked like a repairman. The four knew who the man was talking to when he began talking on his mobile phone. He spoke not a word to any of the four present. And half a minute later, Jenna, a clamshell phone in her hand came out. Her hubby and her cubs were still in bed. She looked at the four so as to say that the engineer had come to see about the boiler. All she really did was imitate it. She too was awestruck.
And in the next moment, three people walking in a hurried pace came to seek answers for another query. Sandra Jessop, Amy Jessop and Jonathan Jessop came to see the reason why the television all of a sudden switched off. In fact they were the only houses for some weird reason that had had their entire electricity supply switched off.
Josephine Henderson came out -stern as she always was- simply because she had through her curtains seen a mini-crowd gathered there. Her husband, whom she had bruised, went out the back door to the local hospital. In the space of a minute and twenty seconds, Benjamin Franklin had an audience. He was in the middle of a brainstorm linking the lives of everyone on the street. Everyone in the minute that followed took the cats death to mean something in their own lives. The event to be symbolically, metaphorically and/or even literally significant to their lives. Which I am sure the readers can decipher for themselves.
And the author…well the author -if he had come out- he would have been surprised by the peoples attitude to the death of a cat. What’s so interesting about a dead cat? Or maybe ‘it’ being black made a difference… He would laugh it off and not be tempted to read too much into it. “Seriously!” he would say, “what’s so interesting about a dead cat? I mean okay he links all your lives if you really really think about it but what of me, the Manson sisters next door and Mr and Mrs Barker? See what I mean?”
And he’d be right except…

The enD

based on true events....