Daily prompt: More or less

Daily Prompt
Slash and Burn
Write 500 words on any topic you like. Now remove 250 of them without changing the essence of your post.

It was a perfect spring morning, the air fresh and clear and as yet empty of nasty flying things. The sun, still tentative and polite after its comprehensive winter trouncing, was testing the waters of the kitchen floor with a delicacy that Dinah found entirely satisfactory. The sun, in Dinah’s opinion, was far too prone to getting above itself and blasting out more heat than any self-respecting cat could be expected to bear with equanimity.

What was less satisfactory was the behaviour of Dinah’s human. It was all very well to give Her the benefit of the doubt, but what this morning was clearly proving was that doubt was out of the equation. The weather was not a factor in Her late appearance.

In a well-ordered world, Dinah should by now be curled up on Her lap at the kitchen table, warm sun on top, warm human in woolly dressing-gown underneath. It was their most precious time of day: that moment of calm before the storm that involved Her rushing about like a scalded dog then flying out the door to something called ‘work’. Dinah’s sensitive nose had been quite out of joint, at first, at being left behind on these morning jaunts, but time had shown her it was probably for the best: whatever happened in the intervening hours was obviously not pleasant.

But nothing had prepared her for the current situation, and nothing was popping up in terms of a solution. The minute He had appeared on the scene, Dinah had sensed trouble, but again, being a kind and tolerant cat, she had held back on direct action. Not that she hadn’t been tempted. Not that she hadn’t been provoked. There had been instant antipathy between them the minute he walked in the door, and that very first night He’d spat at her when She wasn’t looking, and later in the evening, sat on her ‘by mistake’. By mistake? But if He made her human happy, Dinah was prepared to cling to her policy of ‘wait and see’.

Until now.

This was the third time He had stayed the night. The first two mornings-after were cold and wet. But this one wasn’t. It was a perfect spring morning, the air fresh and clear… and when Dinah should have been happily ensconced on her human’s lap blissing out on this rare confluence of all her favourite things, she was instead condemned to ignoble solitude by a ratfink who had no house rights.

It was time to consider her options. But first, a little compensatory comfort was in order. The table was strictly out of bounds, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and the delicacy of the sun might be aesthetically pleasing, but it didn’t do much for the warmth of the floor. The table, on the other hand, had a woven mat in the centre, and that mat was irresistibly sunlit…

Post slash and burn?

The cat sat on the mat.

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