Deep Reflekshuns

Musashi Sez:

This partiklr blog wuzn’t spos’d to tayk so long. Then it did. Sorree. Go to yer littrboks befor yu reeds it. Kthxbai. M/8

Mom Says:

For Agent Octavian, stuck in the green, long-leaved top of a Moroccan date palm, the heat seemed intense. Back in Boston, such temperatures only trouble the natives at the height of summer, in August. With a fan here and there, and ice cubes in the water bowl, one can withstand the furnace-like blast, knowing that it won’t last more than a week, two at most. But now here he was, wrapped up in leaves and roasting like a pig at a luau. And there was nothing he could do. Cats are very good at UP, when it comes to trees; DOWN is quite another matter. And that’s when you are talking about NORMAL trees with NORMAL branches stuck out every so often, as opposed to this, this telephone pole with a hat on it!!!

Octavian panted. Then he thought, “Did M noe that somthin lik this migt happin to me? Is that whut she was figtin about wift Mom? So wher ar them egstra resorsis she promist?” Then he remembered the neat pack that Q had attached to his collar. What had Q said to him?

“In this small case that can hook to your harness, you’ll find a micro-fiber rope ladder and MHDO tablets for emergencies.”

Oh! thought Octavian, so as long as I got spit, I got water, even if I can’t climb his ladder.

Q had also said, “The spikey-looking thing is a Spaw: part spike, part straw. If you stick it into something that contains a liquid, you can suck the liquid out through it. Since you’ll be near the desert, it helps to be prepared.”

And Musashi, er Octavian (it was hard to concentrate in such heat) thought, “Well, palm treez has coconuts, an them hav lotsa liqwid! So Q’s not such a Fail! gy afteral. I jus pul out the Spaw an stik it in a coconut.”

Octavian fumbled with the pack, then pulled out the Spaw, which had a string attached to ease the grabbing of it. Then he looked around his very small green sanctuary. He had an idea that coconuts were almost as big as him, or at least about as big as his head, and sort of brown and furry. But the only brown—or for that matter non-green—thing around him was much smaller, and sort of sticky looking, with no fur at all.

Still Octavian was game. He pushed the Spaw into the first of the little, shriveled brown things. And sipped. What he got from it was goo, not, he reminded himself hurriedly, entirely unlike the Petromalt® that his mom made him eat to keep him from hacking up hairballs. He quite liked Petromalt®. This other stuff was…semi-liquid. That would have to be enough. He moved, slowly, cautiously among the leaves, sucking out the sap of one of these strange brown things, waiting as long as he could, and then attacking the next.

The sun, far too slowly, moved past the place directly above him, to strike him instead at an angle. On the one hand he liked the heat; he was, after all, a solar-powered kittee, as all cats are. But on the other hand, his inability to drink was becoming a greater and greater burden. He faced the quandary of all those who wander in the wilderness: where is the line between squandering what you have too soon, and waiting so long that it cannot help you? He needed to still have some spit left for Q’s tablets to work for him.

Octavian waited. And waited.

Then he waited some more.

Finally, he thought that he had about as little spit as he had ever had in his life, so tremblingly he opened the first MHDO tablet and lipped it into his mouth. What happened next, he never described to anyone: not Jimbond or M, not even his mom, although we in the Narrator’s Guild must assume that he muttered in his sleep, or, presumably, we would not know about this at all. For Octavian had a vision, and his vision was this—

Musashi Sez:

Hey! I’m gettin the hang of this cliff-hangin thin! Huh!