It began with This gift.
A seemingly harmless jar of bubbling treachery, handed over by Felix’s brother with the nonchalance of someone delivering a cursed heirloom and calling it “fun.”
“Here,” he said, smiling. “A sourdough starter. It’s really easy to keep alive.”
Alive.
That word should have chilled us all. Alive, we are talking of bacteria, rotting flour!
But Mum, ever the patron saint of doomed hobbies, welcomed it like a long-lost friend. Within days, the kitchen transformed. A sanctuary of bubbling jars, each one labeled, fed, cooed over like an orphaned Victorian ghost-child.
I thought, at first, it was a phase.
A fleeting obsession. She once tried knitting. The yarn still haunts the couch.
But this… this was different.
The changes came quickly. My morning and lunchtime baths—skipped. The sacred sandbox rituals—neglected. The rhythm of the day, the thread that held our fragile universe together—unraveled. All for the sake of something that smelled like wet ambition and mild despair.
Worst of all, she talked to it.
“Look at you, so bubbly today!” she whispered to the jar, her voice tender.
The same voice she once used for me.
From my perch above the fridge, I watched it unfold.
Tail twitching. Heartbreaking. Dignity dissolving like flour in warm water.
This is not a story about bread.
This is a story about displacement.
About being dethroned by goo.
About two cats caught in the rise of a carbohydrate cult.
I needed an ally. Enter Schmutz—my sister. Chaotic, easily distracted, but ultimately loyal when snacks or existential dread are involved. I found her draped dramatically across the windowsill, sighing at pigeons like a noir heroine with feathered regrets.
“We’re being replaced,” I said.
She didn’t look away. “By what?”
I flicked my tail toward the kitchen. “Bread goo.”
Her pupils dilated. “No.”
“Yes.”
“And it gets fed… before us?”
I nodded. That was all it took.
Schmutz, though frequently foolish, has her limits.
Thus, the rebellion began.
Our tactics were subtle at first. A tail flick here, a jar lid nudge there. I slid the sacred sourdough instructions under the couch—never to be seen again. But the thing was resilient. Like all bad ideas, it thrived on neglect and hope.
Then Schmutz, in a rare moment of clarity, found our advantage: distraction.
So now, whenever Mum glanced longingly at her precious yeast jar, Schmutz unleashed a theatrical wail—an operatic cry designed to cleave human focus like a buttered blade.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeh.”
Mum faltered. She turned. She hesitated.
From the fridge, I held her gaze, tail ticking like a countdown clock. A crack had formed in the dough’s hold.
Would she see it? Would she remember who we were?
Who she was?
Or would she knead herself further into fermentation, swallowed whole by the Cult of the Crust?
One thing is sure:
This house isn’t big enough for both me and the dough.
To be continued…
