Sherry Chandler » I’ve often seen a cat with a smile…
I’ve often seen a cat with a smile…
“You strike me as a cat of parts,” says this young man when I’m arrived at his window-sill. I made him a handsome genuflection, rump out, tail up, head down, to facilitate his friendly chuck under my chin; and, as involuntary free gift, my habitual smile.
For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quiet Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains.
— Angela Carter, “Puss-in-Boots” in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Penguin, 1979)
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