Q & A, 1.1
Q. Please describe your writing style.
A. My writing style is like a cougar fighting a leopard.
I know what you’re thinking: Impossible, cougars and leopards originate on different continents and, thereby, will never be observed fighting. And you’d be right in your facts but, come on, this is the age of globalization and anything is possible.
How about in a zoo? Most zoos are pretty good at keeping the animals in their respective habitats, but there has to be at least one shoddily-constructed zoo out there. Like, say…o.k., here’s a scenario. There’s this zoo that was built by a construction company that saved the cat house for last because the cat house is out on the far side of the zoo and it made sense to do it that way, it’s not a conspiracy or anything. But so, when the construction company set to work on the cat house, they got all of the spaces built for, like, the bobcats, the ocelots, the Geoffroy’s cats…no problem, let’s cinch this cat house and go get some beers, the construction workers probably said to each other. And then they realized—they didn’t have enough steel bars to finish the simulated living environments for the cougar and the leopard. One of the guys, though, was really smart, in fact used to own a candy cane factory before an out-of-control addiction to buying cans of steel-colored spray paint drove him to embezzle from his company’s coffer, ultimately leading to his company going belly-up and landing him in as a member of this construction crew. And while everybody else was freaking out, pacing back and forth in front of the feline environments, this guy cleared his throat and said, in a calm and confident voice, “You guys, I have an idea. I have a storage space full of candy canes and an unreasonable amount of steel-colored spray paint….”
The cougar and the leopard had come from the same zoo—zoos in fact, as they were career caged animals and had seen their share of artificial living habitats. And there was some bad blood, as is wont to happen when animals spend a lot of time in captivity, which is not an indictment on the concept of zoos as a whole but is rather a plain fact stated plainly—not every animal can like every other animal, that’s the science of zoology or something. Being career zoo animals, however, it never occurred to the cougar and the leopard that the bars of their cage could be anything less than steel, certainly not a hastily-spray-painted confectionary treat normally enjoyed during the winter holiday season. No way. So they paced their cages, eyeing each other menacingly, day after day.
Until that day.
Of course, we can’t be sure what happened—this being a hypothetical scenario, it could really be anything. I personally like to think that a pudgy kid with olfactory giftings visited the zoo and immediately recognized the “bars” for what they really were—candy—and exposed the ruse with a quick snap and gobble. But if there’s some scene you like better, well…have at it.
The leopard and the cougar, rage fueled even more by the realization that freedom could have been theirs many days/weeks/months/years earlier, wasted no time attacking one another. If zoogoers were present, they surely fled quickly.
Teeth sinking into flesh, rending muscle to tattered shreds. Sinewy tendons flexing and moving like serpents in a canvas bag—not like a reusable grocery bag, but much bigger and tougher, like an old fashioned flour bag that you’d see at a recreated historical scene of a general store or something. Hellish sounds, like, you know…stuff from hell, like metal scraping against metal and, well, giant cats tearing themselves apart limbs by limb, that’s pretty hellish in and of itself. And the blood—oh, the blood. You don’t even want to know about the blood, but suffice to say, there was a lot. Buckets of blood isn’t even an exaggeration in this scenario because there was a lot. A whole lot.
That’s what my writing style is like, a cougar fighting a leopard.
