This is my lovely, sweet Moriarty. A kitten that's 8 months old.
Here's how he really looks:
He has the most amazing eyes! They're orange! (well, they look yellow in this picture, but they're really more orange. Btw, there is no saturation in this photo -- the eyes are that intense.
It felt really creepy trying to take one eye away in photoshop.
But then again...
Moriarty creeped me out...
I'd never read "The Black Cat". The cat starts out all black, and when his owner did in the cat, another black cat shows up later. A creepy black cat... one that follows him all around... and has a white splotch on his chest.
Ummmmm....
Moriarty has a white splot on his chest... Look at the real picture! It's there!!
In the story, the splotch gets bigger slowly and morphs into a gallows.
At the end of the story, the guy kills his wife, and sticks the body behind the wall. When the police come a couple of days later to investigate the crime, he happily shows them around. Here's the end of the story:
""I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls --are you going, gentlemen? --these walls are solidly put together"; and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! --by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman --a howl --a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were tolling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"
I mentioned to my husband that it's kind of creepy that Moriarty has a white splotch... He agreed... and he said that it's getting bigger!!
But maybe that's just because he's a kitten growing into a cat?
[Nov. 10th, 2011 10:08:09 PM]
As far as the comment about the eye and the hair. I figured without an eye, he'd still have an eyelid, and those would be fuzzy.
The humane society from where we got him, said they want us to send a picture of him sometime. Perhaps I should choose that photo carefully???
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Very clever and quite creepy. Something about the mortar lines in the brick seems to steal a bit of the thunder from the noose, but that is a minor quibble on a shot that ought to be on the front page.
White patch gallows a warning of fate you fail to outrun
Once I revolved around you like Pluto to the Sun
But your cruelty plucked out the amber orb forever dimming my sight.
To unveil the blood severed wedding vow, my wails will be your blight.
Nice attention to details of the story - the elements of the brick wall behind the cat, the gallows emblazed on the chest, and the one eye all allude to Poe's work. The biggest critique I have is that 'something' is not quite right about the one eye aspect of the cat (and yes the composition does creep me out for the violence done to the cat and the lady in the story is unnerving). I guess it is because the plucked eye area looks flat....like the fur has grown over it.