Felix regarded his three cats late one evening as they bounded around his apartment, eventually coming together in a fur pile. “They must be play-fighting,” thought Felix, “can’t be yiffing, ’cause I’ve had them all fixed.” As the three cats rolled around together in a ball, it became harder and harder for Felix to distinguish just where one cat ended, and another began. The feline ball seemed to stretch as it rolled this way and that across his apartment carpet, eventually stopping in a dark corner of a room. From the ball something extended vertically, a neck and discernible head that were distinctly feline…why, the three cats had combined into one! The large, singular cat formed from several continued to stretch and rear itself, eventually sitting at about half the height of the astonished human. The augmented feline regarded the man with an unnerving, steady gaze.
“What are you?,” marveled Felix, “Why are you staring, and what do you want with me?”
The cat spoke with a voice audible only within Felix’s head. “See these eyes of green?,” it said, “I can stare for a thousand years!” The cat sprang at Felix, hitting him squarely in the chest and knocking him to the ground.
Pinned, Felix looked up at the cat, and beheld his baleful eyes. Wordlessly, the voice of the cat again filled his head. “See these eyes so red?,” asked the cat, “Red like jungle burning bright! Those who feel me near, pull the blinds and change their minds!”
Felix struggled and opened his mouth to scream. “Just be still with me,” advised the cat, continuing to pin the man. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through!” Glowing ectoplasmic tentacles emanated from the cat’s mouth, threading their way into the open mouth of the man, and filling it. Felix’s eyes rolled back into his head and his body trembled as he began a fateful transformation.
The transfer complete, the cat withdrew his mouth from the man’s face and appeared to be at peace. “It’s been so long,” remarked the cat, shrinking in size and dissociating into three separate housecats again, who wound their way around the body of the man, mewing and crying as they witnessed his rebirth.
The cat-person Felix sat upright, and instinctively began licking and grooming himself. “I’ve been putting out the fire with gasoline!,” he remarked half-aloud as he regarded the full moon through an open window. Looking at his cats with a new and fuller understanding, he carressed each one and then lept effortlessly to the window, looking back momentarily with new slitted-iris eyes. “This will be the Year of the Cat,” he remarked to the feline trio as he flung himself through the window and into the welcoming embrace of the night in fulfillment of his destiny…
(With thanks to the great David Bowie, and the 1982 movie Cat People…see the videos on You Tube!)
–Artists who have worked with animal themes are not all contemporary. One of the best was Franz Marc (1880-1916), whose work The Fox (1913) is shown here. He was one of the principal painters of the German Expressionist movement, and his work was influenced by futurism and cubism. Franz Marc also had a strong affinity for the work of Vincent van Gogh. Most of his mature work portrays animals, usually in natural settings. His work is characterized by bright primary color, an almost cubist portrayal of animals, stark simplicity, and a profound sense of emotion. Regretably, Franz Marc was killed in 1916 in World War I. 
FOXSYLVANIA 
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