The following is the result of an experiment in which we, The Heckler, gave a typewriter to a cat. We hope you will be as moved by the results as we were.

An excerpt from “The Myth of Sprinkles” by Albert Catmus:

Chasing, catching, attempting to hold the light of a laser pointer is exhausting, impossible. But Sprinkles, alone in his struggle, chases on with desperation, cursed by the gods to never actually hold the beam of light.

If playtime is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sprinkles returning toward his laser, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in a cat’s heart: this is the laser pointer’s victory, this is the laser pointer itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. “What! by such narrow ways—?” There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness, echoing in the wild and limited universe of cats. This happiness teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings— shining that laser pointer for his own entertainment. But the labor, the struggle, is not his. The struggle belongs to the cat. It makes of fate a feline matter, which must be settled among felines.

All Sprinkles’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His laser is his thing. Likewise, the absurd cat, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd cat says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when a cat glances backward over its nine lives, Sprinkles returning toward his laser pointer, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly feline origin of all that is feline, a blind cat eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The laser pointer still shines on the floor, and someone must capture it.

I leave Sprinkles on the floor of the living room! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sprinkles teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and chases light. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each photon of that laser, each fiber of that stained shag carpet, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the light is enough to fill a cat’s heart. 

One must imagine Sprinkles happy. And so I will be too.