Mandatory Parker: "The Ice Beast Emerges"

The Lint-Covered Breast Implant Faces Winter…Alone

It’s not newsworthy to note that winter finally hit the greater North Texas Area, and the Toad Ranch in particular. It’s January, and unless plate tectonics got a lot more active in the last few weeks, Dallas didn’t move to the antipodes without warning. (This doesn’t stop the fussbudgets standing just inside the doors in North Dallas grocery stores: they’re just accosting everyone coming inside with “It’s COLD” instead of “It’s HOT,” the way they do between March and November.) What WAS newsworthy was that we got actual snow for the first time in a while. More importantly, statistically significant snowfall, which is rare enough that everything shut down late last week. Most importantly, this was a kid’s snowfall. This wasn’t our usual fluff that fills hollows in the ground before ablating away. It wasn’t sleet, freezing solid on walkways and sintering into immovable masses on windshields and tree branches. This was a perfect snowfall for a snow day: slightly moist snow that, if you got enough of it, was exactly the precise consistency and clumpability for snowball fights, making snowmen, and even, if you scraped a whole yard, building a knee-high snowfort. I can attest as to its perfection for snowballs, and so can the local squirrels: the only reason why I didn’t knock one treerat off my roof was because we haven’t had a snow like this in years, and I’m way out of practice.

And Parker? Parker LOATHED it.

For those coming in late, Parker the Lint-Covered Breast Implant distinguishes himself from most other cats with his bilinguality. He demonstrates his fluency in Cat on a constant basis, especially at 3 am when I have to get up early, but he also has a grasp of essential English words. Unfortunately for me and anyone else in the vicinity, those words are “NO!”, “MORE!”, “NOW!”, and most significantly, “OUT!” The last gets extensive use, as the reason why he showed up in my life and continues to erode my stomach lining is his love of the great outdoors. The fact that he had no claws, front or rear, when I found him, and that the neighborhood around the Toad Ranch gets regular visits from coyotes and great horned owls, makes no difference. He only draws the line at insisting upon outdoor perambulations during torrential thunderstorms, and then only when the rain is cold. First thing in the morning, the middle of the night, in the middle of a solar eclipse: OUT is the only English word that matters, and he spends most of his days reminding me of it.

This is why last week’s snow vexed him. He tolerates the cold when it’s a dry cold, and often finds hiding spots in the garden leaf pile or atop a big sycamore stump I brought home for him after last May’s tornadoes. That snowball snow aggravated him, sticking to his paws as he walked. Actually, let me modify that. Parker, like one other cat I’ve known in my life, cannot walk like other cats. There is no delicacy, no grace, when he ambles into the room. Instead, he stomps. He stomps as if he owns a goth club and the DJ just put on Sisters of Mercy’s “This Corrosion,” and his whole goal in life is to compress the whole of our planet to a third of its current diameter. Forget dinoturbation: Parkerturbation would flatten Texas to neutronium if he had the time. This sort of snow is anathema to Parkerturbation, and it’s very hard for a ten-kilo lint-covered breast implant to look regal or even methodical when sinking nearly to his armpits with every attempted jackhammering of the earth’s crust.

And the really bad part? This time around, the snow sat around long enough and compressed itself enough that after two days, Parker couldn’t blast through. Hell, it was thick and strong enough that I could stand on spots without it breaking, and my general weight these days is about ten times his. This may be typical in more northern climes (nearly 39 years after escaping the clutches of northeast Wisconsin, I still have nightmares about trying to walk across unshoveled walkways where the only purchase on the ice came from bootprints from previous travelers trudging through the snow weeks or months before, and those bootprints being about four shoe sizes smaller than mine), but it’s happened to me in Texas twice times in the whole 45 years I’ve lived here. Now compare my surprise to that of a ten-kilo cat with no claws, trying to get through his patrol of his allotted territory, discovering that the white blecch that previously stuck to his paws interferes with his earworm of Ministry’s “Stigmata.”

If there’s any joy at the Toad Ranch, it’s that the snow doesn’t last. By Sunday, most except in the northernmost hollows had melted off. That, though, led to Parker’s domicile resembling southern Michigan when the snow finally melts off. Mud, endless mud. Parker’s favorite dust wallows are better suited for making flowerpots. The leaf pile is soggy and mashed. His favorite stalking sites under bushes are now frigid and sloppy due to snowmelt off the house roof, and both rocks and concrete walkways need days of sun before they dry enough to retain heat in the afternoon. Oh, he has such a horrible time, as he constantly lets me know five minutes after he comes inside of his own volition. And we have another cold front coming through at the end of the week. It’s going to be a very long January, for the both of us.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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