“I have the sneaking suspicion this window is sexist.”
My friend looked at the window of the university cafeteria we were sitting near as streams of rain ran down it. Currents moved within the streams, appearing as moving scales of fluid on the pane of glass.
“What makes you say that?” she asked, turning her attention back to her food.
“Just got that feeling,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I stared at my reflection in the window, darkened from the thunderstorm raging outside. My light green eyes looked back at me. The rosettes and spots in my thick grey fur were the same shade as the dark window, looking less like camouflage or decoration and more like gaps in my being. Thunder rumbled.
“I mean look,” I spoke up again, “there are lots of girls in this cafeteria, but none of them are reflected in the window, only guys. You’re even sitting at this table, and all I see of you are your arms, and sometimes, part of your muzzle. Never your whole face. I can see your food just fine,” I pointed to the reflection of her hamburger in her dark-furred hands, ”but not you. Pretty suspicious to me.”
“Ever thought maybe it’s just the angle you’re sitting at?”
“What?”
“Well, I can see a few girls in the window,” she said. “I think you’re just sitting at the wrong angle.”
“Or MAYBE the window is just putting up a front, trying to trick you into thinking it isn’t sexist.”
“The window is tricking me?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow incredulously.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“How should I know? It’s a window. A lying window at that.”
“What if it isn’t a sexist window at all, and you’re just wrong? Wouldn’t that make you feel guilty?”
“It would, if you could prove it. What evidence do you have?”
She glared at me. “I can see girls in this window.”
“We’ve already established that’s a trick employed by this discriminatory piece of glass,” I replied with a smug didactic air.
The vixen stared at me, her red-orange face mostly expressionless aside from her dark ears laid flat and a twist of disbelief in her hazel eyes. I returned it with a wide-eyed grin of satisfaction.
“You’re crazy.”
“They said the same thing about Van Gogh,” I replied knowingly.
“Van Gogh was crazy. He cut off his ear and tried to propose with it,” my friend replied, biting into her hamburger.
“He did that to prove a point.”
She spread her arms wide and glared at me, exasperated yet chewing. “What?” she said, swallowing. “What point could he possibly have been trying to prove?”
“That you have to suffer to become great,” I answered with conviction, sticking my furred finger a few inches from her face. “How famous is ‘Portrait of the Artist with a Bandaged Ear?’ It’s flipping everywhere. Why? ‘Cuz the skunk knew, man. He knew what it took to become a legend, and he went there!”
My friend looked from the tip of my silver finger, which had migrated to be nearly touching her black triangle of a nose at the end of her long muzzle, to my spotty feline face, which had hardened with conviction, an authoritative eyebrow raised and ears swept back like horns.
“Maybe he cut it off because he was tired of listening to sexist windows.”
“Windows can’t talk, they’re windows.”
“Yet they can be sexist?” She shook her head, but smiled all the same.
“Uhduh. We’re looking at one,” I replied with a gesture at the window. Rain continued to run down it in sheets.
“You’re crazy,” she chuckled, smashing her food wrappers into clumps of brown paper.
“Yeah, well, when the sexist windows take over and spread their propaganda,” I put a particular sneer on the word, “to things like doors and elevators, don’t come crying to me.”
“How can a door be sexist?” the vixen asked, picking up her things and moving to toss her wrappers in the rubbish bin. I went with her.
“They’ll only open for men.”
“So a man will have to hold doors open for ladies?”
“Yes.”
“Shouldn’t they be doing that anyway?”
“Well, yes, but that isn’t the point. The point is those doors and their bastard window cohorts are holding women back.”
“And why, exactly, would a window gain power on a platform of sexist discrimination?”
“For all their silence, windows can be very convincing. And,” I exclaimed, the thought occurring to me suddenly, “and windows are in a very strategic position. They literally connect the outside and the inside. It’s a position of immense power.”
“Maybe us women are plotting with the windows and doors,” she said, turning to me with a suggestive look and a swish of her tail, “to bring back the days of chivalry? Maybe we’re just using the windows’ connections and charisma?”
“So you admit it!”
“Yes,” she laughed, “women are plotting with windows and doors to make men more gentlemanly. It’s a conspiracy.”
“A-HA!”
“You’ve figured it all out. Now we’ll have to kill you.”
“Should you strike me down I’ll become more powerful than you can ever imagine!”
The vixen gave me a sarcastic look.
“Or at least more annoying. I will haunt your ass!”
She kept laughing as we walked into the rain, despite the funny looks we got.
