Free The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka

might sound. A kitten, still, his fat making his cheeks puffout and his body very sweetly round instead of the largesse of this grand specimen: Would his greeting sound like a boy’s tremulous voice? A castrato or worse? He felt a piercing shame, as often he had when trying to converse with his father on the issues of the day, for no matter what opinion he ventured his father disdained it, even if he himself had defended that same position the evening before, chalking up his son’s paucity of intelligence to natural defects in his character and sneering at his efforts to sustain the argument, all the while drinking port Gregor had purchased and sitting upon a couch bought with Gregor’s earnings. It was with this burning memory of humiliation fresh in his mind that he spoke:
    “Who are you?” He had been too brusque, he saw that immediately. He could smell his own scent now, so strong had his fear of shaming himself become, his mind flooded with the image of a door slammed tight—but creaking open to let a terrified child peer through, trembling with mortification.
    “I am the tabby Josef K,” announced the cat calmly, and began to nonchalantly groom his large, slate-colored paw as though Gregor were not standing before him, desperate for approval and comradeship. “And whatever your name may be I can smell that you were a man with a profession just a few days past—I was once a bank clerk, so you see I understand your predicament completely and can even sympathize, though ofcourse it was all so long ago in my case that I can hardly recall the state of having been a bank clerk, which I understand was a common enough profession and for all I know still is, though why anyone would want to spend all day indoors chasing bits of paper money I cannot begin to speculate, I truly cannot. Indeed when I reflect on it—and I have time and disposition and capacity in abundance for such exercises now—I see that catdom is in every way a superior and more marvelous institution than clerkdom. After all, when I chase bits of paper, I really commit to it! Apart from us cats there are all sorts of creatures in the world, wretched, limited, dumb creatures who have no language but mechanical cries without any scent to enrich and deepen them; many of us cats study them and give them names, try to help them, educate them, uplift their moods, and so on. For my part I am quite indifferent to them except when they try to disturb me; I confuse them with one another, for they all look alike, I ignore them when at all possible. But one thing is too obvious to have escaped me, namely, how little inclined they are, compared with us cats, to stick together, how silently and sullenly and with what unspoken hostilities they pass one another by, how only the basest of interests such as food, drink, or breeding can bring them together for a little time in ostensible union—and how often those very interests give rise to violent conflict among them! Consider us cats on the other hand!One can easily see that we live all together in a heap, all of us, wherever we find ourselves, different as we are from one another on account of numberless profound and infinitesimal modifications that have arisen over the course of time. All in one heap! Of course I am not in a heap now, you might say, but all I had to do was stretch out and you immediately arrived, as if drawn by some invisible force, and though one cannot in seriousness call two cats a heap, they are well on their way! Where there is one there shall be two; where there are two, four cannot be far distant; where there are four, well, might as well give up the game! We are drawn to each other, and nothing can prevent us from satisfying that communal impulse; all our bylaws and institutions, the few we have and that I can be bothered with remembering, are rooted in this longing for the greatest bliss we know, the warm comfort of being together, tail to nose, belly to back, piled one atop the other