the little fella

'Screwfix' apocalypse. These chunky odes for screwed up people are in abundance today; some homes even getting 2: mail the size of a brick jammed through their letterbox, taking the draught excluder with it, how ironic. if that weren't enough to drag around the village, 'saga' mags to boot...and here's me in the village of the damned, the same decrepit faces trundling round the village every day, zimmer frame in hand(s)...grinding a rut in the pavement. Then I see the cat, dangling halfway out of the front bay window.
I think it's asleep or sunbathing but on closer inspection it doesn't seem to be breathing. It's mate is inside the house, looking complacently out of the window. It's jumped out of the window and got stuck in the 'v' of the open window. I feel it, it's warm..hmmm, still alive. Then I realise it's warm from the morning sun. It's actually as stiff as a board and quite dead. I knock but no reply. I try the neighbour but again, no reply. Then I hear a call and an old dear shuffles out of the 3rd house along. "did you knock?" she bellows, fearing the Grim Reaper no doubt. "where's the little fella?" she enquires. I assume she means the regular postie but out here she could be referring to the cloven hoofed pixie in her shed...I ignore her questions and tell her that her neighbours cat is dead and hanging out of the window. She says she doesn't want to see it and then proceeds to go and see it in the flesh. There's not a lot we can do. I feign sympathy and crack on, it really is jammed fast. She says she won't say anything, how neighbourly of her. I'd leave a note but it's redundant, you can't miss the feline corpse. It's a sunny day as well, god knows the state it'll be in when the owners return...crispy cat. I give the old dear her Saga mag and two Screwfix catalogues, keep her busy.
I like the silence here but the people are definitely odd. They all ask where the 'little fella' is, motioning with their hand his diminutive height. At the bottom of your garden I suppose. One poor fella receives 2 to 5 threatening letters every day and has done for the past year or so. I know they're threatening because the accuser scrawls (prints) on the outside of a sealed envelope in a spidery, illiterate hand how evil such and such a person is, how he owes him so many thousands of pounds etc etc. When I first came across these I told an uninterested line manager but now they're part of the scenery. Come to think of it, the guy sending these hate filled missives has already spent a LOT of money on fucking stamps, the knob. He should send a letter asking for that money back.