A Tale from Pete the Cat

The box arrived with a dull thud, smelling of ink and distant trees. My human shook it, producing a sound like a thousand tiny skeletons tumbling in a cardboard coffin. "It's for family game night, Pete!" she announced, as if I were a participant rather than a discerning observer. She spilled the contents onto the large table, creating a chaotic landscape of color and shape, a battlefield of blue-backed casualties. The air filled with the dry, dusty scent of processed wood pulp. I watched from the arm of the sofa, unimpressed. It was just a mess, a problem the humans created for themselves to solve. How inefficient. For two evenings, they hunched over the table, muttering about edge pieces and sorting colors. I would occasionally patrol the perimeter, tail held high, offering silent, scathing critiques of their technique. They were trying to force order onto chaos, a fundamentally pointless endeavor. The true beauty was in the disarray, the potential of each individual piece. I saw a piece with a sliver of a famous dog, Lassie, I believe. Next to it, one with the disembodied smile of that loud woman, Lucy. There was no narrative cohesion. It was an assault on good taste. My moment came on the third night. The puzzle was about a quarter complete—a sad, patchy thing. The human was looking for a specific piece, one with part of a spaceship on it, for a section she called "the sci-fi corner." I had seen this piece. I had, in fact, been studying it. It had a particularly sharp corner and slid beautifully across the polished wood of the floor. While she was distracted, looking under the table, I hopped up with the silence gifted to my kind. I did not simply bat it away. That’s for kittens. I was a curator. I gently took the spaceship piece in my mouth, its cardboard texture a dull pleasure, and carried it to the living room. I then carefully, deliberately, tucked it deep within the pages of a book on the lowest shelf, a dusty tome on something called "economics." It was a commentary. This piece was now part of a different story, one of its own choosing. I returned to my post on the sofa and began to groom a pristine white paw, the picture of innocence. The human sighed in frustration, giving up the search for the night. She would never think to look there. This wasn't a puzzle to be solved; it was a collection to be curated, to be edited, to be improved upon. I glanced at the thousand-piece landscape of possibility. My work was just beginning. This "Television History" puzzle, I concluded with a deep sense of satisfaction, was an exceptional toy. It had longevity. It had purpose. My purpose.