Planetary Cats

By John Atkinson

 

The Instagram site of @Bill_dog_Willis added another hundred thousand followers in five hours. When @Bill_dog_Willis set up the site three years earlier, he had no expectations. To his surprise, its popularity grew steadily as he mixed nosy neighbour news with the personal drama and suffering of war veterans.

The sudden increase in visitors was completely down to the cats belonging to his new neighbour. She fed eight cats, and he nicknamed her the Lady with too many cats. Online, he tagged her as #LW2MC. Her real name was Rosie.

They lived in a small, failing town in the mid-west. @Bill_dog_Willis and #LW2MC discovered they had a common interest in crossword puzzles. He attempted them daily in the local library. He rarely finished them. The librarian joked with him one day about this and he picked up the previous day’s paper to ask the librarian to complete it. ‘

The clue is daft,’ he said.

But to their surprise, the crossword had been completed. He quickly checked other papers in the rack in the library to discover all the crosswords were finished. @Bill_dog_Willis staked out the library until he discovered #LW2MC came after lunch every day and finished the puzzles in a few quick minutes. They started doing them together every day over coffee and she always finished his start. Some days they played Scrabble, surrounded by cats until late in the evening.

#LW2MC (Rosie) had other interests. Every Friday, she hosted a group of her ‘alternative’ friends. They sat in a circle, wearing long gowns and strange headgear, around a fire in an abandoned church car park, singing and chanting. @Bill_dog_Willis with his military and strong conservative Christian background, had no time for this witch-like behaviour.

But using his drone and skilled editing, he turned these meetings into a colourful, and popular, series of online videos. #LW2MC and her coven were secretly thrilled at appearing on the @Bill_dog_Willis blog site, although they pouted publicly about it.

While these clips found a growing audience, the hits and followers exploded when he started posting videos of her cats. His follower count ran up from nine million to nearly twenty million in a few weeks. His savings account grew with the follower count.

On midsummer day, the cats behaved strangely in the car park of St. Patrick Methodist Evangelical (closed) Church. The big ginger, #bigbadtom, was a seven thirty regular to the centre of the car park where he picked a spot in the centre miaowed, stretched, and lay down.

One by one the other eight followed, #silverslut, #razorvenus, #mothergaia, #redmars, #jumpinjup, #sittingsaturn, #dontsayit, #naughtyneptune. They all strutted in circles until they found the planetary position to match their name. There, they curled up and lay down.

@Bill_dog_Willis sent up his drone as they formed the exact order and position around #bigbadtom as the planets did around the sun. They continued their pattern every day in June and July. As the orbits changed positions, the cats followed.

In August, a rare phenomenon occurred where three planets lined up in a straight line. The cats replicated it exactly. The online community lapped it up. @Bill_dog_Willis celebrated when the people at NASA followed the cats.

Every day #LW2MC appeared once the cats took up their positions on the ground. She swirled and danced, with her flowing purple robes shimmering in the light. The cats lay perfectly still until she sprinkled them all with silver confetti. Then, as one, they jumped up and ran off.

For another thirty minutes, #LW2MC chanted, swayed and swooned around the car park. Then she joined @Bill_dog_Willis for coffee and a bagel in the nearby Starbucks. She confided to him her friends prepared the confetti with the recipe of an old magic potion used to worship the sun god, Sonrisa. They believed this ritual would ward off evil spirits.

Teachers logged in to show their pupils the cats lying like planets in orbit and how they changed every day. Flat earth conspiracy theorists protested to anyone who would listen that it was all a fake. They demanded the location be made public. Religious groups forecast the end of the world was nigh.

Traditional breakfast-news media featured a clip every morning with different experts in the studio postulating the meaning of the actions of the cats and of #LW2MC.

@Bill_dog_Willis realised this was a winning piece of theatre. He was making a fortune from the hits on his sites. The price he received per click rocketed. He edited the drone shots to prevent mapping experts from identifying the location. He auctioned exclusive live feeds to the media and earned a fat premium.
Cat experts were called by broadcast-media shows to comment. They pontificated about the peculiar, yet accurate configuration the cats adopted. Experts analysed the dance and chanting ceremony of #LW2MC and compared it to tribal dances in the Amazon.

Detectives and researchers tried to track her identity, but her clothes and headpieces, plus careful editing by @Bill_dog_Willis, prevented anyone from obtaining a clear shot of her face.

Then one morning, #bigbadtom didn’t show up. The other cats walked around, stretched, chased each other playfully, but did not lay down. The media waited. The sites were inundated with complaints.

@Bill_dog_Willis knocked on the door to #LW2MC house to see what was happening. #bigbadtom was inside, stretched out on the floor surrounded by glowing crystals. He was sick. #LW2MC sat beside him wearing a tiara and a green robe, wafting incense sticks as she chanted over him.

@Bill_dog_Willis took a picture of the scene with his phone and uploaded it. The picture went global viral. The Nigerians in his online support centre were so overwhelmed, the server for the entire country crashed, throwing banks, princes, ports, and the love life of thousands into jeopardy.

After some shouting on his part, something that @Bill_dog_Willis regretted afterwards, #LW2MC agreed to let #bigbadtom out. The cat followed his usual behaviour, and the other cats took up their planetary positions. The drone made the picture, and the world calmed.

After a week, the numbers on the site and the TV minutes allocated to talking about the phenomenon dropped. The media attention switched to the next big thing- a hairstyle trend in South Korea. @Bill_dog_Willis anticipated this waning of interest. He knew the fickle world of social media could only maintain an interest in a few cats for a short time before moving on. The next day, he implemented a new twist.

@Bill_dog_Willis added an extra cat, #plumppluto. It wasn’t an actual cat. He used some slick photoshopping of old drone images to manipulate the scene on the ground and incorporated the new cat. The internet buzzed and the #LW2MC meme reacted as users tagged the new cat with the meme #plumpluto.

It lay exactly where the so-called planet Pluto orbited. The arguments erupted as NASA did not consider Pluto a planet, yet the planetary cats now included it. Some argued in favour of Pluto, others argued in favour of NASA and their opinion that Pluto was not a planet.

@Bill_dog_Willis celebrated as visitors to the site soared once more, driven by this new line of arguments. He worked late into the night with the Photoshop software and created enough fake images for thirty days. After twenty days, #icypluto the site hits dropped off.

@Bill_dog_Willis prepared for his next master-stroke. As ex-military, Bill put his logistical experience to work, figuring out how to make money from the thousands of people who would arrive. He brought in a food truck and, with the help of the local mayor, set up a field for camper vans to park.

And they did, within hours of his releasing, accidentally on purpose, an image of the church car-park shot with a wide lens. The mapping gurus quickly identified the heretofore secret location. By then, he and the town were ready.

The media revealed the location as a big expose. Within days, the town was hit by a tsunami of cars, vans, and trailers. Swarms of people, from religious evangelists proclaiming the end of the world to animal lovers protesting the disturbance of cats in their planetary cycle, took up residence in some part of the town.

In Schrödinger like fashion, the cats didn’t line up once the crowds were watching. Dozens of drones flew over the church, disappointed spectators stood behind police barriers waiting for the cats to perform. They didn’t and protest marches were held with a sit-down occupation of a nearby highway featuring on TV as groups fought for online visibility.

Fights broke out as groups wanted their moment of fame in front of the media. #LW2MC fled from the circus, seeking peaceful vibes in the nearby hills. She locked up her house and brought four of the cats with her, including #bigbadtom. Without him as the sun, the other cats wandered off. @Bill_dog_Willis filled the camp sites and stocked the food wagon as fast as he could.

A group of Hell’s angels arrived after seeing the disturbances on TV. They acted as security for the people with the most money. Soon after, some thugs from the nearby city followed them, bringing in drugs and supplies. The police called the Governor for support and back-up forces. Meanwhile, the ratings on @Bill_dog_Willis’s sites soared as he streamed live feeds to all the news channels. His bank account hit fifteen million dollars.

The infrastructure of the small town collapsed from the influx of tourists and campers. The governor declared a state of emergency as the garbage overflowed and a new strain of Covid spread around the campsite. In response to the crisis, the crowd left and just a few stragglers remained. Every ready to raise his media profile, @Bill_dog_Willis announced he would set up a trust for spaced out cats and started a go fund me page. When that reached five million dollars, he closed it down.

Believing he had milked it for all it was worth, he sacked the media platoon in Nigeria, stopped posting on all his sites, adding a fixed placard on his page to say the town was delighted to welcome guests, and switched his sites to private.

#LW2MC came back home with #bigbadtom as the chaos passed. @Bill_dog_Willis comforted her and her cats in the calm of the aftermath. They began a romantic relationship. Rosie persuaded him to buy the old church and set up a cat rescue centre. They were happy together.

Over time fewer and fewer people came to the increasingly quiet rural town, but occasionally cats did something weird somewhere in the world and the old clips of #LW2MC and her cats doing their planetary thing were dug out and rebroadcast. In the church, the cats behaved normally, well as normal as one would expect from an old church filled with scores of cats.

#LW2MC and her friends returned to their regular chanting sessions, the cats became so numerous they formed shapes aligned with the galaxies, but @Bill_dog_Willis kept his drones grounded. He had new responsibilities as he taught his sons how to play baseball and grow vegetables in the old field once used as a campsite..

 

John Atkinson from Ireland is a nomadic project manager. His writing tries to capture the complexity of the small moments in human life. His work published in several literary magazines including East of the Web, Kenmare Chronical, Little Old Lady, Swerve 3, New Context 5, Backchannels 13, Quibble, The Wingless Dreamer, among others. Wexford Arts Centre also put on his play, 'On the way to Fethard-on-Sea' in 2023. He has published two Prof. Harriet crime thrillers. John spends time keeping cats and chickens away from two sporty dogs.