Burdened by her knowledge, she used to roam the streets trying to warn all she met of the encroaching finality. Sadly, nobody she met ever understood her: they only saw a little cat twining around their legs and meowing, which they interpreted and responded to in various ways.

Most people kept walking right on past, their lives apparently too full of other supposedly more important affairs than paying attention to a little cat. Some people favoured her with a quick pat and scratch behind the ears before continuing on their way. One woman walked past, only to return five minutes later with a plastic bowl of tuna, having interpreted the little cat's cries as those of hunger.

The little cat had not refused the food, for prophesy is hungry work indeed.

She soon got frustrated with the lack of willingness to try and understand her warnings, despite the occasional pats and tuna. So she left the streets one night and climbed up a high hill and cried loudly up to the moon: "Why will no one listen to me?" she asked. "Why is everybody deaf to what I have to tell them? Why?"

But the moon did not answer, for the moon was busy in its own preparation for the end of everything. For even the moon has its own affairs that it must tie up and conclude, and even the moon has its suitcases to pack for the long voyage to oblivion. And wrapped as it was in its own preoccupations, the moon did not hear the small meowings coming from atop the little hill far below it.

The little cat from the Czech Republic sat atop the hill for a short while, thinking and brooding over the indifference of the world to what the future held.

At last, in the small hours just before dawn, the little cat left the hill and went down to the wharves and piers of the town where she had arrived at, and stealthily stole a very small boat for herself.

And so this Cassandra of a cat drifted out into the sea, catching the occasional fish as she went, and arrived at last at a small, uninhabited island, where she relaxed for a short while. She decided that the end would come regardless of whether anybody else knew about it or not.

And thus satisfied with her place in the course of it all, the little cat proclaimed the island as her own, and went off to explore her new domain.

Many more things came to pass before the end of everything finally arrived, but these things were, by and large, fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
G4b(5)

Video clip of story as part of a Thomas Carnacki set, 31 March 2007, Temescal Arts Center, Oakland
courtesy Karel Sidorjak