A Practical Proposition

Okay, admittedly, I'm a little drunk at the moment. But honestly, that should come as no shock at this point. I've been drinking more or less every night for the last month or so. And I've been smoking more.

It's like I said all that time ago -- I'm a vice-fueled individual. But that's not the point.

The point is that a few minutes ago, I was contacted again by our friend Practical Cat. Well, contacted is a relative term. But I digress. This happened just a few minutes ago. I was surfing around the net, poking around a few choice sites and sipping my drink, when suddenly I got disconnected. This isn't a rare occurrence -- our MiFi card likes to crap out every now and again. However, as I came downstairs, I was confronted by this:

A note, addressed to (you guessed it) Little Mouse, attached with electrical tape to a jacket and draped over a chair at the table off our living room.

The note, when opened:

Looks like the Cat is offering me some kind of way out. Who does he think he is, bloody Redlight? At first I just got angry. How dare he even talk about my aunt, let alone taunt me with her?

What does he mean "she will not be spared?"

Of course, I nearly cried when I saw this:

Of course, the lighting in here doesn't do justice to the light gray color; Rose always had the best taste in fashion. This is -- was -- her jacket. The same jacket I told her excitedly to buy when we went down to Towson for her birthday last year. We'd gone to Sushi Hanna (her favorite place) and stopped in at a little sex shop down there to giggle at nonsense, and then stopped in at the mall and the Hot Topic there, where she found this jacket. A few months later, she spilled coffee all over it and had a minor panic attack over whether she'd be able to get it out (she was). A month after that, it got soaked when she finally made it to one of the little airsoft games that I play in the summer with our guy friends.

And a month after that, I picked it up and helped her into it, inched it up her shoulders and slowly pulled the zipper up, lovingly situated the scarf just so on top of it, before she drove off to work and never came back.

I read the note again, reflecting on how I was just too damn drunk for all this tonight. And then, for no real reason at all, I thought of Zeke. And I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I had to cover my mouth because I was afraid I'd wake the whole house. The closest thing to write with was a purple Sharpie marker, so I grabbed it, taped the note shut again, and turned it over to write on the back. I'm going to give the Cat a response, all right. I think he should find it just peachy.

Because tomorrow morning, the only message he's going to find is this one. It may not be witty (there's a little too much blood in my alcohol system for that), but it's short and it's sweet and it does indeed convey a message: