10.15.2006

Our heroine, having come to the realization at a very young age that certain fates are inescapable, finally gives in and gets her first job at a library. In her spare time at work, she masters the art of knitting and crochet and begins a lifelong habit of knitting baby blankets, booties, and sweaters for the children that she will never have. Fortunately, she has a host of attractive, jet-setting, unassumingly wealthy friends in loving, committed relationships that they report to her about at every available opportunity. Their boyfriends and husbands are men who view her with a sort of bemused affection, baffled by the connection that their women have with her but fond of her quirky ways; they often ask her why she's still single, telling her that she's not so bad-looking herself, and why doesn't she have a man of her own? That seems strange. She drops her eyes modestly and smiles a small, wistful smile, remembering the days when she first met these men and they would flirt shamelessly with her, charming her despite all vows on her part that she wouldn't fall for the same old tricks again. Sly grins, innuendo, she'd seen it all before and knew what was going to happen, but hoped against hope that maybe this time it would be different and that this was the man for her, but alas, was proven wrong time and time again! Along came her beloved friends, and away went the men, starstruck as always. After years of the old, familiar tune ("you're cute, but your friend, wow!"), she finally hung her head and admitted defeat, hanging a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob of her heart and slid into the humble seat held throughout history by the many doomed to play the role of the Cute Friend. She began to accumulate a small army of cats- 29 of them, to be precise- and cloistered herself in the library with her booties and beasts to pass the rest of her life in peace... but woe was just around the corner! One day as she wept over a pair of mittens, she dropped a strand of yarn that her favorite cat, Freud, began to innocently bat about the aisles. Little did Freud know that there was no innocent play to be had that day: he snagged the woolly skein on a loose board of the bookshelf of encyclopedias just behind his unsuspecting mistress, triggering a deadly avalanche and squelching our dear heroine's life out of her in the blink of an eye! Without so much as a squeal, she expired beneath her dear Brittanicas, surrounded by cold-hearted felines who did little more than bat a lazy eye at the crash that announced their mistress' untimely end... that is, until their food supply ran out. When Freud and his cohorts realized that their kibble hadn't been replenished, they attacked her body with what could only be described as animal ferocity and soon had consumed her entirely. Monday rolled around just as lazily as the cats after their heartless feast; all that the fellow librarians discovered were sticky-mouthed kitties and a fraying, half-finished mitten hardly big enough to cover a baby's fingertips buried beneath the upset reference books. "What ever happened to that cute friend of yours?" her friends' lovers would ask. "Oh, I really should call her..." they would say, "I'm not sure."