Tales of the tails of my friends

sevenstars777 had a cat that was most extraordinary. His name was Friday, and he has left us and gone to the heavyside layer, crossed the rainbow bridge and is now confusing the crap out of the elemental spirits.

When I began to fall in with a Brad Crowd, I met someone who was living in the Brad Davidian Compound. She had a half-grown kitten, or catlet, named Friday.
I am probably misremembering this, but I seem to recall that his name was related to Heinlein's book of the same name.

Friday was fierce, and fluffy, and a source of endless amusement for the Brad Crowd. I never caught him stealing underpants, but I'll lay good odds that he might of swiped one or more of mine.

He had this thing he'd do to try to bring down a human prey; he'd wait in the shadows and fake-hamstring us from behind just after we passed him in his ninjalike invisibility. I'm embarrassed to admit that we were all tagged multiple times before it dawned on us that we could dodge these attacks nimbly. The trick was first knowing the places where Friday lurked, waiting patiently for one of us to stagger away from the herd. He had a few favorite hiding spots. I particularly remember the one near the front door. If one were to travel from the kitchen to, say, the hallway where the bedrooms were or to the main stairs to go down, one would take about four steps into the living room and then... pause. A catlet would spring PAST one and realize too late that the prey wasn't in the calculated spot.

This went on for months, and the weird thing was that there were places in Brad's house where we all paused out of habit, even after Friday and his human moved out. Some of the people followed the pattern even though they'd never been hunted by Friday. They simply saw the custom and adopted it without thinking about it too hard.

I miss you, Friday. My dear friend will miss you more, but I will pause in shadowy areas of my house in honor of your passing.