And so we see what the severed cat head represents; a sore need to vomit up new life. You, or someone mimicking your appearance, feels a need to bite. The symbols erupt and speak by themselves. Nothing in the shed seems pure and the gardening shears are rusted. The garden's cactus is lactating up a storm. The pleasure in your shed could be yours and immediate. We enclose a pair of steel-toed boots which clack like a keyboard. You will complain to the art gallery about the severed cat head, but your boots will drown out your words. The museum is now a shed, and the gardening shears were not used as intended; on further inspection, we think that the rust on the shears was dried blood. You carve more symbols upon your flesh. They'll erupt one day, but for now we let them rest.
You hear a voice: "Twice bitten, thrice shy, but it will happen again, better luck next time."
We will discuss the aforementioned cactus: white translucent fluid leaks from its spines, it has a mocking appearance, but thankfully its growth is stunted because your shed is blocking all the light. One day we suckle from a cactus and the next we try to starve it of sunlight. This is the way of things.
While it is true that you wish to bite the cactus, you instead resist the urge; you currently lack the ability to symbolise the event. Without inner change, you are nothing but a sadistic fantasy dreamt up by the Moirai. But the symbols are taking their time.
There is likely only one choice a human being can make. Your tap-dancing sounds like an old keyboard, and this amuses you. You zone out. You stop resisting yourself. You remember and your skin is inflamed with a deluge of symbols.
Let us discuss again what is represented by the feline head. It is obvious that we have coughed up new life from a corpse, not unlike a furball of the divine. You are in the shed, and the slit pupils staring at you make you feel as if you were looking into a mirror. Finally, you remember when the shears closed down upon your neck when you were neither dead nor alive. Let us set the cactus on fire, and let us reject the Wire Mother for the warmth of the blaze. Let there be warmth inside you now.
These days you keep your old severed head safe in the shed which has become your museum. Perhaps the redness of the shears was but dye from severing the red strings of Fate. The black cat destined to both cause and suffer misfortune has traded one un-life for nine lives. The public complains of the cat head in your art gallery, but you drown them out by tap-dancing in those shoes we had prepared for you. The pleasure in your gallery is yours and immediate, and they will take from it nothing.
- Esssie Nihil, 29th October 2022