A Cats Choice

I don’t know if we were the first, other's had sailed away. There were rumors of settlements. Years later, pleading petitions to the king, then silence. Months of turmoil and torment upon the merciless seas. Our ship almost a wreck, the pox and plague having whittled us down, to a motley band of hollow eyed scavengers. Then Land sited! The fabled Americas! Those yonder shores must be that fearful, paradise of legend. We had overcome! The Captain led his weary folk ashore, but being the ships cat I stayed to find the last remaining rat. That night I dreamed that the ship up-anchored all by itself. The men dashed back to the shore to save the vessel, but I, the last sailor, rigged the tattered sails and flew before the wind back to England, but not before I had fired my pistols into the yelling, stranded, and doomed crew. ‘Not yet America,’ I thought – ‘not yet.’