Cat's Milk, Page 3

  About the Story

  Before coming up with the idea for Cat’s Milk, I had already written the first drafts of two of my forthcoming novels, as well as a collection of badly-written short stories. I was new to the craft, so I expected my mind-sculptures to be terrible.

  Amongst the many books on writing I’ve read in an effort to improve myself, Stephen King’s appropriately titled On Writing proved to be the main influence of this story. I was, and still am, a big Stephen King fan--not to the point of wanting to kidnap him and force him to write stories for my pleasure, but edging close. In his book, he offers the advice of taking two completely unrelated things and combining them into a coherent story. It didn’t take long at all for me to pick my two things.

  From the time I was a teenager, I have been friends with a girl who had owned a lot of cats. At the most they numbered 12, and even though she lived in a spacious three story house, I still couldn’t help but think her strange., but in a good way. They were strays mostly, and her parents tolerated them with unfathomable patience. She never milked them; at least, she never mentioned she did.

  The tomato garden idea stemmed from my mother. She used to have a little garden in our backyard, and for a few years, we’d end up with a bunch of tomatoes sitting on the kitchen window sills. Although I make the garden in Cat’s Milk appear as a monstrous carnivore of sorts, I actually have pleasant memories of the real tomatoes my mother grew, as well as the strawberries that bloomed beside them. I can’t really explain it, but the stuff that came out of that garden was noticeably better than the produce we bought at the local food store.

  And so these two ideas melded together as one, with my demented sense of sarcastic humor working as the fire to bind them. I wrote the first draft in one day, but I refined it over a period of years until I felt that I was ready to face rejection and go public with it.

  Some complaints I’ve received about this story—besides the ones from squeamish folks telling me how sick it is—tend to focus on the disjointed structure. I’ve heard that the first couple paragraphs have little to do with the rest of the story, and the frequent flashback are a little confusing and slow the story’s pacing. I see it differently. They set up how the narrator views the world; also, keeping in mind the ending, we can see the whole thing as the ramblings of a crazy person. In fact, I generally encourage a second reading so that my audience can look at some of what he says in light of the the way the story ends. Aaron is what’s known as an unreliable narrator. In other words, knowing that he’s nuts, we have to assume that he might be lying in some places while hiding details in others. It makes me think of the movie Fight Club, in which the events we see do not necessarily represent how they actually played out. An example of this is when he dramatically talks about slipping the knife into his mother’s chest. As I wrote that, I actually imagined him sitting on her and stabbing her multiple times out of rage. So we can’t trust the things he’s telling us.

  Because this is my first published work, I hope you’ve enjoyed it enough to want to look out for my future releases. There are some short stories to follow this one, and then I’ll get more serious about the novels that have been on the back burner for some years now. Big things are on the way, I promise you….

  About the Author

  Spawned in Oceanside, NY from the nasty stuff of his parents’ lovemaking, M. Strain Jr. lived on Long Island until moving at the age of four with his family to Garner, North Carolina. He gained a younger brother at the age of six, but not through any of his own efforts.

  He was generally the outcast amongst other children his age, mostly because he preferred the fictional worlds of He-Man, Thundercats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Spider-Man, and then Star Wars in place of the semi-fictional world around him and its people.

  In the Lutheran church he was raised until, at the age of thirteen, he became a born-again Baptist. He started to frequently masturbate less than a month later. It wasn’t until toward the end of high school (through which he was taught at home) that he became disenchanted with the twisted form of Christianity being preached in the modern churches. This especially occurred because, starting in the eleventh grade and continuing to the present, he extensively studied the Greek behind the Bible’s New Testament and concluded that many of the core doctrines being taught are based upon pagan influence, poor knowledge of the original languages of the Bible, and a wretched system of training pastors with doctrine instead of Biblical truth.

  He never went to college, but that was because it took much time for him to figure out what he was meant to do. Once he realized that he had always had a knack for storytelling and discovered that he was already decent at writing, he further trained himself in the English language (his native tongue) and how to craft it by his will, thus saving himself thousands of dollars’ worth of debt.

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