Some countless millennia ago, when God was busy building mountains, one day He said: “Making mountains is a fascinating work, and a project of boundless satisfaction when completed, but today I’m tired. Reading the blueprints for a mountain is tedious and exacting. I would like to do something just for fun.”

          So God went into His Workshop to a bench where He had put aside interesting bits of left-overs which He hoped might serve some useful later purpose. There, He started with a little skeleton of bone structure to which He gave four feet and a tail, and He covered it with the softest fluff that had been shed from the flight of a comet, and He made two round eyes, guileless and wise; and He put in them a mercurial spark, so that they would glow in the dark; and He made a soft pink nose with some clay mixed from the droppings of rose petals, and He put on top of the round head two pert, pointed ears. 

       Still in a whimsical mood, God put some cocky little whiskers on each side of the pink nose, and He put tiny springs in the cushion pads of all four feet. Then He filled the inside of this little body with enough  courage to make a fearsome show of bravery to an antagonist ten times its size, and a spirit which carried an independent aloofness to take care of it, if it were without friends, but also a spirit capable of responding with love, if love were offered it; and He put in it a heaping amount of the desire to romp and play and bring gladness to all who watched.

        And then, as if this were not enough for one little body, God remembered how much He enjoyed the faint whir of hummingbird wings, of the gentle ripple of a young stream, or the soft whisper of early leaves, and He took all of these sounds and made them into a tiny motor, and He added this to the altogether winsome creature built just from left-overs in His Workshop. Then God looked at the sprite now completed by Him, and He said, “I will call it ‘Kitten’”.

     And in a moment, Kitten was tumbling on the floor of the Workshop, chasing bits of paper and scraps from the bench; and he tumbled and rolled and played hide-and seek with his shadow; and he boxed with kitten reflections in the window; and he did so disport himself that God laughed and laughed as He hadn’t laughed for a long time. Then God sat down and said, “ I am pleased. Kitten will indeed give pleasure to man when he is careworn and distraught.”

       And as He sat there so thinking, Kitten jumped up in God’s lap, and kneaded until he had a spot just right for lying down, and then he curled up, turned on his whirring little motor, and God and Kitten both snoozed.

Marion Bauman