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I was watching a kite as he desperately flapped his wings for a breath of warm air to lift him up; someone asked me why I was standing there. He escaped, and in that split second I knew, once again, nothing about him and his flights of futility, searching, anguish in his heart, for a whisper of the familiar truth. "Metaphore, metaphore", they cried to him, and no avail.

***

Neruda wrote of love, war and the unreachable heights of Macchu Pichu. Dali painted compositions exquisite: never had a rose been so filled with latent potency, poisonously floating above a matte lanscape of clocks, cesspools and slow decay in a desert land. The man in the bowler hat stood still at that mysterious threshold, the murky sea roaring silently behind him, never spraying his suit, time never slowing enough to let that apple fall from its suspended place. Monet held the light in his hands, letting it fall by degrees on the grass, the trees, the sky. David stood alone, the sadness in his eyes invisible to anyone who could not see past his sinews. The spark from the Creation of Adam came and rent his heart to the very core. Cambell's soupcan said silently to him, "Metaphore, metaphore".

***

Massimo stood before his mirror and wondered. What was it that made him fall in love with these things? They were so different. No, disparate, he corrected. Dark eyes looked out from the glass but not at him. Everything was like everything else. But they were called by different names. What was this Surrealism? Even the sunset on the shingled beach off the chalk cliffs was surreal to him. What was this Renaissance? Was not everything ever created a re-naissance of something else, something older?

These categories defeated him. He did not know what to do. When he wrote prose, it came out in iambs and turned into poetry. When he wrote poetry, it emerged in long, torturous lines which coalesced spontaneously into paragraphs and indented the first in every one.

Massimo scratched the front of his old jeans. He loved that sound, the feeling of that friction under his nails. The ginger cat came and went yet again, always returning in its constant emaciatedness to remind him - you eat, I get nothing. You make money, I get nothing. You are educated, you have access to Art, Culture, Music. I have nothing.

The cat was everything that was wrong with the world. Gripped by the old, inexorable guilt every time he saw the cat, he shut it out of sight but could not shut it out of his mind. He grimaced at the automatic pun that hit him. Maybe he was out of his mind. After all, he just realised that his sneaking suspicion had been confirmed, yet again. This cat was no ordinary cat. "Metaphore, metaphore", it called out to him in his language.

Schrödinger kicked in his grave. Any moment now, thought Massimo, I will realise that all the things in the world I had not attributed to Schrödinger's ephemeral cat also came from nowhere else, and will also conglomerate into one hideous heterogeneous ball of energy, only to Big Bang into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really the First Law of Everything: "Entropy Increaseth".

Massimo looked down at the newspaper which had carried his first review. "Postmodern" was there even in the title. That word irked him no end. It had been a year since that review and he had not been able to shoot himself. The gun lay in the drawer silently, as before. To shoot himself, he reflected, was to make too strong a statement. His grave, he continued to reflect, should carry an epitaph - monument. A single epigram would not do for his epitaph. How would he explain all his multiplicity of contents?

In a flash, the gun was out, two sharp reports were heard, and Massimo's brains were found spattered all over the Edwardian furniture, Warhol reproductions and his own prosetry.

His epitaph has one line on it: "And all for want of a horseshoe nail".

The cat lies buried at his feet, conquered.

Conquered? Massimo's life is over. The cat has nine to go.