Advanced Composition
Mrs. M.
May 14, 2007
Millicent Brown lived in an old white clapboard house on the corner of Dawes and Brown. In fact, Brown Street had been named after her great-great-great grandfather, James Matthias Brown, who had founded their hometown. The house, too, had been his, and looked as such. Dilapidated with paint peeling off the walls and a screen door that could be heard creaking a mile away, it was the eyesore of the whole town. Cats seemed to grow up like weeds and could constantly be found crawling through the broken-glass windows and creeping out from under the bushes. The neighbors were just itching for a chance to clean up her sad plot of land as some sort of community project, but Millicent would have none of it. As a last remaining relative of a long, long line of Browns, she saw the house as a historic landmark and was determined to keep it in its original condition.
The cats, however, were another matter. She had lost count after 37, and knew they had at least tripled in amount since that time. If truth were to be known, Millicent hated cats. Yet these creatures seemed to have been around even before her time, and since Millicent was so keen on keeping things ‘historically accurate’, she felt it would be against her nature to get rid of them.
One day, however, a seemingly small event occurred that completely changed her mindset- forever. Things started off normally enough. Millicent arose at 5:43 AM sharp and hobbled down the stairs to fix for herself the same breakfast that she had eaten every single day of her life. On the table she carefully arranged a glass of orange juice, butter and bread. She deftly dropped the bread in the toaster, waited a few minutes and popped the bread back out again. She sat down carefully and realized something monumental; she had forgotten a knife! Because she had lost so much time in making this crucial error, she began buttering the toast on the way back to the table. All of the sudden, one of the cats darted out from under the kitchen sink and ran straight into little old Millicent with such a force that she lost her balance and the toast fell out of her hands! Not only had it landed butter-side down, but it had landed exactly on a splotch of wood that one of the cats had apparently used as a make-shift litter box.
It was not a very good day for Millicent. By the time she returned home that evening, she was determined to get rid of the cats. However, she couldn’t just bring them to the Humane Society or the pound- in the first place, she had too many. And secondly, Millicent wanted to be creative. This was the first time in her life that she could ever remember having an urge to do something unconventional, and in fact, she wasn’t quite sure how to go about being that type of person. She spent hours and hours researching at the library where she volunteered every Thursday, learning as much as she could about cats and their habits. She discovered the purpose of whiskers (that they were as long as the widest part of the cat, and without them, a cat wouldn’t know its dimensions and either fall over or try and fit through places it couldn’t) and the reason why cats had such rough tongues (it was actually rough barbs which they used to eat). Although this information was interesting, Millicent didn’t care to track down each and every cat and chop off all their whiskers and tongues. Besides, she needed a course of action that would bring about certain death, without any hope of recovery on the part of the cat. No, she decided. She needed an idea with spark, with spunk, with personality. She needed an idea that would make history! This was in keeping with her life goal, after all; to keep history alive! Some might see this as an oxymoron, but Millicent saw it has her destiny.
Finally, during an extremely late-night cram session that Millicent allowed herself, an idea came to her. She glanced over at the clock. It was already 9:57 PM! Millicent couldn’t believe she had stayed up so late. Quickly she jotted down her plan and scampered off to bed. Lying in bed that night, she began to have a few doubts, and wondered how people would react to her controversial plan of action. It was true that her well-meaning neighbors had been practically foaming at the mouth, begging for the opportunity to clean her and her cats out. But killing? That was quite another matter altogether.
Millicent decided to survey people and see their reactions. She started right away the next morning with her young gardener. He had some sort of new-fangled name and she was never quite sure what it was. “Suspender! Yoo-hoo! Suspender!” The boy looked up from where he was yanking out a pile of weeds and paused a moment, a questioning look on his face.
“Yes, Ms. Brown?”
Millicent stepped tentatively out from her front door and onto the porch. “I was just wondering…” she started. “Well, you see, it’s like this. My… er…” Now here she had to pause. She was about to say ‘granddaughter’, but as Millicent had never married it was obvious such a girl did not exist. Now that she was actually in the process of these interviews, Millicent panicked. She had no idea what she was saying or getting herself into! How was she supposed to ask this sort of question? She took a breath and quickly spat out, “Some kids were just asking me, and I thought it was rather funny, but I kind of wondered too, and well, being a kid yourself, I thought you might wonder, or maybe you know, but anyway…”
What was she doing? She was the calm, collected adult! And here she was, panicking in front of a teenage boy! This was ridiculous! Chiding herself for acting like such a fool, she took a deep breath and slowly asked, “If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet… what would happen if you strapped toast to a cats back and shoved it off a ten-story building?”
The boy stared at her a moment, and then looked down the street, as if answer would come rumbling down the street with the mail truck. Finally he turned back to Millicent and said, “You know, ma’am, I’ve been thinking a lot about destiny lately.” Funny, Millicent thought. So had she. The boy continued, “We all seem to be on a course that we can’t alter. And anyway, I think if you…” he trailed off after seeing the deep frown on Mrs. Brown’s face. “Or, someone was to try this, they will spin off into eternity.”
Well, this certainly wasn’t the answer Millicent was expecting to hear. However, she was trying to get a wide range of opinions after all, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a few odd ones thrown in. She continued on her walk down the main street of her small hometown, which was appropriately named Main Street. Ambling along, she passed many possible canidates, but no one really seemed to jump out at her… until she ran into an old colleague. Literally. Millicent knocked into Kristin VanEyk with such a force that poor old Kristin spilled her morning cup of coffee all over her white dress. Millicent reminisced fondly with Kristin about their days of teaching together for a few minutes, and then got up the nerve to ask the important question. Kristin pondered for a minute, and then said in her scratchy old voice; “Well, obviously, the cat will eat the bread half-way through freefall. I mean, its going to die anyway, it might as well enjoy it, right? So the cat will eat the bread, and then splatter its legs all over the ground. Basically, you won’t be able to tell which way the cat really landed. In fact, you might even be able to find the bread again.” Millicent thanked Kristin and went on her way down Main Street.
By this time she found herself somewhat hungry and slipped into Candice’s Candy Shop for a treat. Candice was behind the counter, her usual smiling self. Millicent figured that Candice would certainly know the answer, being a twentysomething and therefore the perfect combination of ages that Millicent had asked thus far. “Candice, what do you think will happen?” By this time Millicent had become quite emboldened. Candice served a few customers, and finally turned back to Millicent. “You know what? I think the toast will rip in two. Both sides are gonna land face down. And then! The cat will break its legs… and lose at least one of its nine lives.”
Oh, rats! Millicent had forgotten about the nine lives. Obviously, she would not be able to kill each of the 58 cats (she had finally gotten around to counting them this morning) nine times. That would equal to 522 deaths! Millicent drudged drearily home, her head down and her feet scuffing the sidewalk. She had been so sure that this experiment would work! Another thought hit her as she made her way home; there were no ten-story buildings in main street. Sadly, she let herself in her front door and padded upstairs to her room, where she went to bed early.
The neighbors found her a week later, with thirty loaves of bread piled in boxes around her room. She had died in her sleep, and the cats were never seen again. It was clear from all who had witnessed the previous days events that cats were almost immortal, and absolutely no harm would come to them by old Ms. Brown’s schemes.
