115

The yellow warning stickers on the Tokyo Metropolitan Subway doors depicting a highly distressed cat with its tail stuck in the door have been replaced by stickers of a masked raccoon and its pup pointing at the closing door. Upon first inspection the stylized violence seems to have been replaced with a more sober cautionary lesson; however, upon closer scrutiny one notices that there is a large, severed human hand in-between the closing doors that they are pointing towards. They must be enjoying the spectacle of human dismemberment because I detect the slightest hint of a smile in their masked faces. The explosive red graphic sited at the severed wrist is truly gruesome. Quadrupedalism trumps bipedalism. At first I missed the traumatized cat whose eyes practically popped out of its sockets enough to reveal the sinewy nerve, but now I have been won over by the ingeniously encoded horror. Unfortunately, I don't have a tail, so I will have to put my forearm in the door to see if what they are warning me against really is as extreme as I am told.

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3

While running this morning along the Shakujii gawa (river) I saw two crows in a park carefully scrutinizing a large wooden sign with a cat painted on it and a real cat standing just a foot away intently watching the crows. I wonder what the reason for the slight curl of the cat's lips indicating the presence of a knowing feline smile?