All Things Considered

Martha

436 [[use Montreux Ramble]] The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, mainly, it has to be said, in order to alter its route to enable it to avoid contact with the moon-leaping cow, whose conduct and social fauxes-pas since the onset of bovine spongiform encephalitis had been so reprehensible as to discourage everyone except the donkey from further attempts at social intercourse.

The rabbit, meanwhile, was becoming enveloped by its rapidly increasing family responsibilities, and had regretfully decided that it was unable to continue to host its popular Thursday coffee mornings - the demise of which had contributed not a little to the increasing sense of isolation that was descending upon the inhabitants of Willow Tree Farm.

In the chicken coop, the cluckings and mutterings were not the happy and inconsequential gossippings of yore. With the collapse of regular outside contact, the hens had been overcome by suspicion and schadenfreude, and petty bickering had become the normal currency. Worst of all, the previouslyStakhanovite weekly laying rate was down to dismal single figures, and morale was still plummeting.

Up at the farm-house, things were little better. The pervading ennui had persuaded Lily Rackstraw that it was futile to continue to expect that her beloved Martha would recover her previous passion for pointless slaughter, and accordingly had installed a series of murderous looking mouse-traps at strategic points around the old house's myriad nooks and crannies.

Martha, oblivious to the delegation of her primary household function to analarming number of very primitive machines, snoozed on in that ineffable peace that only a cat comfortably ensconced in a south facing and sunny bay window-sill can achieve.

A sudden, sharp snap and a descant piccolo squeak announced the untimely end of one of the wall cavity's furry little denizens, and as the first intimations of redundancy filtered through Martha's luxurious torpor, she stirred gently and stretched a pawful of gracefully curved, but rather blunt claws, turning her belly further into the sunlight.

Ignoring the anxious rustlings behind the skirting board, she dreamt on, and in her dreams her belly ceased to be the bulging, furry flab of reality, and became the taut, lean abdomen of one on nature's slickest killers.

No excess adiposity flopped beneath this surreal cheetah as she stalked her nervous prey through the dusty scrub; no tinned and sugared cooked meat had softened her slavering jaw or rotted her bloodied fangs. Menace oozed from every pore; death dripped from her wet mouth, her hot breath scorched the brown grass around her. Her strong scent floated on the light breeze, away from her twitchy quarry, and small mammals behind her froze and slicked their fur as it blew by them.

A cloud covered the sun. In the farmyard, a duck quacked at its string of fluffy progeny, nagging them as they straggled and stumbled over obstacles, and Martha sighed, yawned, raised and stretched herself, and wandered away from the cooling window-sill towards the kitchen stove.