CAT-A-TONIC

As the First Gentleman awoke one morning from uneasy dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a beast striped with a blur of orange and black. He was lying on his side, and was surprised to see Gloria standing on the bed. Her flesh peeping through the rips on her nightgown while scraps of shredded stain shook with her every scream.

“Tumahimik ka nga!” he shouted. The words all came out a cacophony of guttural growls.

“Jose Miguel tried to grab her – pulled her down, shut her up, springing vivaciously towards Gloria's ankle. Four claws sliced the air and were cushioned by Gloria's old, soft flesh. Jose Miguel, surprised at the sight of the blood pouring down the President's foot, retracted his paw. The embedded claws exposed Gloria's ankle through its side, hooked band of tough fibrous tissue that holds the bones together snapped. As cut cartilage and torn flesh fell on the blood-drenched bed, Gloria collapsed, her limp ankle giving way to the gravity of her body.

“What has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream, save for the ripped linen and his unconscious injured wife, the presidential suite lay silent between four familiar walls. Gloria's picture still hung silently atop her desk, pasted smile and her mole above her lips all in place. Below it, last night's Newsweek, Asiaweek and Time lay where she left it. At the far corner, the grandfather clock a foreign dignitary gave on one of her trips abroad stood at its usual post, chiming eight tiems. Eight. A high pitched wail reverberated through Malacanang.

The tiger that was Jose Miguel rolled over in a rush and in the bat of an eye was standing on all four legs beside the bed. Jose Miguel stood, not moving, amazed. The strength that coursed through the tensed muscles in his legs made the fur at the edge of his balls bristle.

Jose Miguel could smell the coffee brewing at the kitchen four rooms away, and the conversation of the Presidential guards on the other side of the door came as clearly as Gloria's heavy breathing. “Hindi ba Bai, may miting si Sir kay Abalos?” asked one guard. “Eh panu yan? Iistorbohin natin habang nirurumansa si Prisidinti?” retorted another. “Minsan na nga lang rumansahin si Ma'am,” muttered a third under his breath.

Jose Miguel leapt forward, from the bed to the closed wooden door beside the clock, his tail whipping the stuffy air.

Then he set himself to turning the knob with his mouth. He was now raised upright, standing on his hind legs. Foamy strings of saliva dangled from the hairy edges of his open jaws, while the knob began, not to turn, but to give, loosening at its wooden base. A final jerk, wrenched the knob out and flung the door inwards.

The security personnel were caught off guard at the sight of a tiger emerging from their master's bedroom. Shaking, they readied their machine guns as the tiger in front of them roared. Jose Miguel lunged towads the guard in front of him, rushing as fast as the bullets that whisked between his whiskers and shot past his ears.
“Bai” screamed one of the men as Jose Miguel knocked the guuard down. The hapless soldier fell, his trigger finger tensing as the First Gentleman clawed at his face. With a thud, the head of the man who screamed “Bai!” fell on the hallway floor, severed at the neck by a line of stray bullets from his friend's semi-automatic.

By the time Jose Miguel was out of the hallway, thirty-three men were already chasing him, firing at him. Luli, in her morning jogging outfit, had gone to comfort her mother; and a smiling Mang Eli, the Malacanang gardener calling his former employer and childhood idol Erap, telling him about a tiger that ate the President.
Jose Miguel eluded the shower of bullets that followed him. He exited the Palace gates, and scurried off into the streets of Manila, ten squad cars and armoured vehicles at his trail. He leapt from hood to hood, to the disgust if the motorists trapped in the Roxas Boulevard traffic.

The gentleman all dressed in a fur of orange and black, racing almost as fast as the Van that fetched Jun Lozada from NAIA, the same Van that slammed his ribs, crushed hus skull, and painted the Macapagal Avenue red with a tiger's blood.