Read Online The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka - Free Book Online Page A

animals tugged at the reins, the carriage barreled forward, swaying side to side as it came up to speed, until the swerve around the first carriage was completed and the horses moved apart again, only their narrow quiet heads inclined toward each other, and poor Gregor, quite soaked in a frozen slushy slurry of muddy water, had achieved transit across a busy street in his middlingly fashionable district of Prague. He congratulated himself, and then bent immediately to licking himself from head to foot, a compulsion he still found humiliating but undeniable, irresistible, as the sensation of the very slightest speck of dirt caused him to descend into a frenzy of washing, and his fur was now laden with quite a bit more thana speck of filth from his adventures.
    Gregor felt tired already. The fur of his cheeks was pale as the faded brownish red of his flanks, which had a kind of Moorish pattern to their stripes and spots. The lady by the doorsteps over there, who had up to now been contemplating her shoes, which were quite visible under her tightly drawn skirt, now looked at him. She did so indifferently, with perhaps a bit of scorn or protective instincts toward the supper she was no doubt preparing beyond the lintel frame. Gregor thought perhaps she looked a bit bored as well. “Well,” he thought. “If I could tell her the whole story, she would be astonished! She would certainly give me supper, then, and beg me to tell her more! On the street one works so hard at surviving that one is too tired even to enjoy anything at all. But even all that work does not give a kitten the right to be treated lovingly by everyone; on the contrary, a cat is always alone, an utter stranger and rarely even an object of curiosity. And oh, so long as I say ‘one’ or ‘a cat’ instead of ‘I,’ there is nothing to it and one can easily tell the story, even laugh at its twists and turns; but as soon as I admit to myself that it is me, it is Gregor that has been so ruined, I feel a horror, and a weeping within me.”
    And so Gregor did feel, as the woman left off gazing at him through the freezing rain and withdrew into her rooms without so much as dashing across the road to cuddle him orpat his head or give him warm milk and a pillow to sleep on. Now that he had no chance of such luxuries he certainly found that he missed them. He felt his small shoulders slump and turned away toward yet more streets and alleyways, all as unfamiliar now as a foreign country, for never had he seen them at such a height, nor been so conscious of their smells and prone to their dangers and wholly unable to hail a hansom cab. Indeed, so sensitive was he to all things that he could not help seeing each and every thing he passed wholly, with his whole being, as if he had to assess their danger to his soft and admittedly fuzzy person before he could safely observe something else. And so when soon enough he happened upon a square near the docks, he saw with great clarity two boys were sitting on a harbor wall playing at dice—which might be thrown at him, or one of the boys might pull his ears.
    A man—who might have a daughter waiting at home to whom he might wish to give the present of a kitten!—was reading a newspaper on the steps of a monument that seemed to glare down at Gregor with malevolent expression, a hero flourishing his sword on high as if to lord it over himself in particular. A girl, no doubt as enamoured of weak and furry things as Grete herself, was filling her bucket at the fountain. A fruit-seller was lying beside his wares, gazing at the lake. No doubt between the melons he concealed some foul weapon to useagainst offending strays and thieves. Through the vacant window and door opening of a café, Gregor could see two men quite at the back quaffing down their wine, surely discussing recipes for roast or boiled cat. The proprietor was sitting at a table in front and dozing—but wake him, and see if he would not chase Gregor off with a