Snickers didn't want to be saved. Having accomplished the miraculous feat of making a break from the green Victorian on Vine and scampering across the stretch of front lawn, Snickers had scrabbled up a tree on the parkway and now there was this grown man wearing spandex reaching towards him. Snickers would have none of this. Unsheathing his claws, Snickers brandished them at the man with all the threat his little bell-collared self could muster.
"Come on, Snickers, just come on over here," the man was saying as he clutched at the trunk of the tree and reached out for the cat. The old woman who lived in the green Victorian and provided Snickers with cat nip every week on Friday stood at the base of the tree, looking up. She tilted her head so far back her big round glasses slid up the slope of her nose and rested on her face. Snickers fostered little pity for the old woman who had her young grandchildren come visit on the weekends and pull his tail.
"Why don't you fly, Superman?" yelled a skateboard-toting boy from the sidewalk. The man in spandex ignored this jibe because evidently he didn't deem it necessary to rise to this occasion. In Snickers' opinion, the man in spandex would probably be able to better coax his feline self to come down if he displayed some level of inhuman skill. Lex Luthor must have had the day off otherwise why would this man who called himself "Superman" be climbing a tree to retrieve a cat?
Snickers did not find this amusing. He bristled at the hand reaching towards him and promptly slashed it across the knuckles, drawing blood and leaving little carvings of parallel lines across the hero's extremities. Superman immediately stuffed his bleeding fingers in his mouth to stifle the un-super hero-like curse that threatened to escape.
"Come here, Snickers, Granny's got a nice new ball of yarn for you to play with if you come down," the old woman beckoned, her face still tilted to the sky and her eyes squinting through her glasses at the bristling ball of fuzz that was Snickers who was still unconvinced that his adventure needed to end here and now.
Superman pulled his fingers out of his mouth and slowly returned his grip to the tree branch where Snickers was standing. His face seemed to soften into a guilty expression and he looked at Snickers, speaking softly, "Look, Snickers. Let me level with you. I'm kinda not having the greatest day. Lois is moving out to focus on her career, Lex Luthor TP-ed the Fortress of Solitude, and I have a wicked hangover, so if you could just come on down, you'd really be doing me a favor."
The man in spandex let that sink into Snickers' little cat head and little cat thoughts. He could see that Snickers was relaxing his muscles, toning down the bristles. The cat's eyes softened and his scowl relaxed into a far more neutral expression. Which is when Superman reached out and picked up Snickers with a grab as fast as a speeding bullet, realizing only too late that Snickers still had his claws out.
"If cats looked like frogs, we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
- Terry Pratchett
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