Thursday, February 16, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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Jerusalem, February 16 - A local feline met its grisly demise today on a stretch of wet roadway where drivers often fail to spot the traffic signal in either direction, witnesses reported, causing the animal to regret at once the profligate use of one of its previous remaining incarnations in a fatal effort to reach a part of the neighborhood with more or less the same trash in and around the dumpsters as anywhere else in the country.
The intersection of Bezalel and Nissim Bachar Streets saw ramming death of a feral cat late Thursday morning when the driver of a car barreling westward down Betzalel disregarded or failed to discern a red light and did not spot the animal on its way across the busy road; its mangled carcass adorned the side of the rainy road for some hours afterwards, pending action by the municipality's sanitation department. While awaiting its third-to-last embodiment in a new corporeal entity of fur, claws, and at least one soon-to-be-missing eye, the creature's lifeforce acknowledged the stupidity of trying to cross the Nachlaot neighborhood's hazardous major central artery at its most hazardous transition spot, all for the dubious purpose of finding better scavenging in the trash piles of the north side than of the south.
"OK, that was dumb," the anima admitted. "Really, really dumb."
The cat-soul found the incident its most embarrassing demise yet in the series of six, and eventually nine, lives. The grisly Thursday occurrence topped in its retrospective cringe even the animal's first death, dying at the ignominious hand of an infectious pathogen following an ill-advised confrontation with another feline whose numerous bald spots, scraggly fur, and numerous secretions from various orifices should have served as ample warning against approaching the diseased rival, despite the tantalizing morsel of day-old Moroccan tilapia it was protecting. "In my defense, I was hungry at the time," the now-veteran dead cat remarked. "Not this time. No excuse. Just stupid."
In terms of cringe, the incident even edged out the feline's previous death: being eaten by its mother within a day or two of birth. "Yeah, I'd rather forget that one, too," it conceded. "But at least in that case it wasn't my fault I was too scrawny to appear worth the expenditure of resources."
The intersection in question has proved dangerous to humans as well as cats: its unusual configuration causes eastbound drivers not to notice the stop line before the crosswalk, such that even when the red light is visible - during one stretch of winter it sits squarely in the sun's glare at 7 AM - drivers continue through the crosswalk before deciding to stop at some random point thirty feet on. Westbound, the downward slope of the artery has contributed to many drivers failing to notice the light in that direction, as well.
Municipal workers dismissed concerns over the intersection, noting that both pedestrians and cats need to be culled.
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