Panda was once, before the business with the Frisbees, just a regular neighborhood cat, about which nothing miraculous could be said. She took her cues from the general status quo of cat behavior, and thus spend the typical midsummer afternoon on 171st St. engaged in activities such as sitting on porches with all feet tucked beneath her, or attacking a passing ankle for amusement. In the evening, she’d come in through the cat door for one of those semi-moist dinners from the foil pouches, and then perhaps, allow herself to be petted until she grew cranky and bit the petting hand.

Often she observed, in this somewhat childless and well-heeled neighborhood of 171st, that the people seemed to fuss a great deal over the dogs, often bred to resemble one another disconcertingly.

Across the street lived a matched pair of jumpy little dogs with pointed ears, and one blue and brown eye apiece. They wore dreadful matching bandannas around their necks, and were often carted away for god knows what dog-related activities in a Subaru Outback fitted with a special folding dog ramp on the back.

These two fuzzy, bouncing dogs irritated Panda greatly, and she often eyed the Outback with her special condescending stare, where her eyes would fix upon the dogs and their little dog ramp, and then would slowly close, as if she were crushing dogs and ramp together into dust.

“Just what in fact is it that those jittery, fox-faced little things go off in the Outback to do every Saturday, exactly?” demanded Panda of Liverwurst, the introspective, paté-colored neighbor cat who lived with the hated dogs.

“Well,” said Liv, (as he was known to some), “There are these plastic plate things, and this dog park, where the people throw the things – Frisbees, they’re called—and the dogs-- you know what a shameless kiss-ass a dog can be-- run and catch the things in midair, with their idiotic bandannas, and everybody claps.”

Both cats sat for some time after this revelation, flicking their tails in disgust, until Liverwurst sulked away to go loiter beneath a recently parked station wagon, and Panda wandered off to chew a bug she saw in the grass, and then spit it out again.

**************

When Panda dragged a Frisbee all the way up the basement stairs with her teeth the following afternoon, and dropped it into the living room in front of her people during a summer rerun of “Malcolm in the Middle,” it certainly made the intended impression. The people stopped eating their nachos at once, and stared at the cat.

“She’s a freakin’ Frisbee cat!” yelled one. “She’s Panda the Miraculous Frisbee cat!” They chugged Cokes and made Panda the Miraculous Frisbee Cat jokes for the next half hour.

“We can take her to the dog park, and she can kick ass on the Australian Shepherds!”

“Where the hell is the video camera? We can get her a bandana!”

Panda sat there crouched by the Frisbee, figuring that she would soon have her own special ramp in the back of the car, instead of that wire mesh box with the little door that they usually shoved her down into. Maybe then she would get a ride to somewhere other than the vet’s.

“Throw it to her, dude.”

One of them got up, and picked up the Frisbee that Panda had dropped on the rug. He angled his wrist and tossed the Frisbee, which of course, startled the cat.

She ran.

They laughed. One of them left the room and came back with a bandana.

“Panda. Kitty-boo. Come here.”

Panda sat stiffly under the table, where she had escaped the oncoming Frisbee minutes before. Of course whenever humans called you, they wanted merely to make you stay inside for three days, while they locked the cat door and went away for the weekend, leaving you with a big bowl of the dry food. Or maybe they wanted to shove a pill way in the back of your throat the way the vets told them to do.

“Panda!” yelled the one with the bandanna. The other one, from the couch, ate nachos and loaded a tape into a video camera.

Panda backed away from the reaching hand, but how reaching hands always seem to do, it grabbed her and dragged her forward. She then had to resort to the ace every cat plays in such situations, and she attacked the hand. Then she raced across the room and down the basement stairs.

*************

That evening, Panda the Miraculous Frisbee Cat was still too angry to reenter the house. She sat on the porch, with all feet tucked beneath her, attacking the hand again and again in her mind. Across the street, the wiggling, barrel-shaped Frisbee dogs in matching bandannas were loading into the Outback by way of the little dog ramp. Panda fixed them with her special condescending stare, the one in which her eyes locked upon the dogs and their little dog ramp, and then slowly closed, as if crushing dogs and ramp together into dust.