photograph by anna traverse
I’m Tuesday Traverse, and I’m glad to meet you.
HI! Hi. Hi?! Yes, that was me headbutting you in your eyeballs while you were trying to look at this magazine article. Because if you are looking at that, do you know what you are not looking at? Me. Yes, true, you are at this moment looking at a magazine article written by me, Tuesday, a cat. But the version of my glorious feline self who wrote that article has already happened! I am a creature of the present, of the infinite NOW.
Which is, coincidentally, why you should scritch my tiny little chin RIGHT NOW.
Ah, that’s better. Thank you. True, I will not stop headbutting you, and neither will I allow you to pay attention to anything or anyone other than me, but I will purr for you and swirl lithely around your wrist as you stroke my tiny head. The better for you to admire me from all sides, wildly asymmetrical markings and all!
Why yes, I AM wearing a swoop of eyeliner on only one eye. And yes, I DO have a white armband on only one of my forelegs. Details like these are how you know I am jaunty and insouciant! Plus, have you seen the off-center charcoal smudge on the underside of my mandible? That is where, I believe, someone tried to use a pencil eraser on me, genetically speaking. I resisted! Ha!
photograph by anna traverse
Despite my humble origins, please don’t refer to me as a “Weasel-Possum!!!!.”
I understand you are curious about my life as a “rescue kitty.” First, I would like to make one point abundantly clear. No one “rescued” me. I merely waited in the human’s backyard until she came outdoors one morning with her resident wolf, back in the late autumn of 2022. I was perfectly content, if a little wall-eyed, a tiny ball of fluff in a pile of leaves beside the deck. And then when she swooped down and picked me up, I made a split-second decision to curl up on her sternum and see what happened next!
I would also like to note, regarding the phrase “rescue kitty,” that my status as a “kitty” remains unclear to me and to the humans who share the house with me. In fact, they maintain that I more closely resemble a cross between a possum and a weasel, or at least some manner of stoat. Sometimes, when I am being a real menace (but an endlessly charming menace!), they refer to me, with deep sighs and giggles, as “Weasel-Possum!!!!”
How can one creature act so angelic one moment, so demonically possessed the next?
When I was small(er), and my ears did not know how to stand up yet, I also bore a tilted resemblance to Grogu, sometimes called, incorrectly, “Baby Yoda.” I sort of look like Grogu … if Grogu were drawn by a child who didn’t know how to draw very well. Indeed, the humans almost named me Grogu, before deciding to name me after the day of the week on which they discovered me.
About my name: TUESDAY. (I prefer it in all-caps like that, don’t you? Furthermore, I believe my name should come with a built-in exclamation mark: TUESDAY! Yep, yep.) It was fortuitous that the humans realized this was my name. After all, it is a weird thing to name a cat, and I am a proud weirdo. Plus, Tuesday is a genderless name, and I am beyond gender. I was a boy, and then I was a girl, and then I was a boy again! Now I have transcended such silly constraints. Allow me to explain.
When the human found me, close to the “winter holidays” (the time of interesting new cat toys dangling on a prickly indoor tree!), she thought I was a boy and called me, for a matter of hours, “Tiny Tim.” This was when the human was still pretending that I was not going to stay at her house for longer than a week or two. (The other human, the one I make sneeze, says he always knew I was staying. “Achoo!”, he says. Ha ha!) I was taken to the vet that very day, and the vet told the humans that I was very healthy, but also said, “Tiny Tim is actually Tiny Tina!” I acquired the name Tuesday, and months passed, until one day I was taken back to the vet for something called my “spay.” Well, I fussed, but the vet made me sleepy and then when I woke up, the vet told the human that … surprise! The operation had gone well, but instead of a spay, it turned out to be a “neuter”! From that day forward, the humans have used “they/them” pronouns when referring to me. I approve, especially since this sometimes confuses other humans. I enjoy fostering befuddlement wherever I go.
What will I do next? Why did I just steal the pencil from your table? Will you ever see it again? (No!) What am I chasing when I sprint from one side of the house to the other, like wind, like lightning? How can one creature act so angelic one moment, so demonically possessed the next?
My answer to all of the above: MEW. Meewww!
