"I hate them too."
"Then why do you eat something you hate?" He always thought it a physiological defect of his kind to eat something they hated. What was wrong with butterflies? They looked lovely and he loved the way they crunched between his teeth. Surely they were hard to catch, but that was why he was fond of caterpillars. They were slow and full of vitamins, since all a caterpillar did was eat. They were like raw butterflies, something the French would love--there was no room in his memory for remembering how the French ate frogs. Holy paws and purrs, why frogs? The Cheshire used to love them when he was a kid. The way they hopped everywhere, it was like they were kangaroos for humans.
But the Cheshire ended up hungry, so he began to hunt for himself.
Ypres was a small town by then, known for exporting clothes to England. They had that huge clothes tower where they kept the clothes for months, before they were shipped away. Rats loved it and were fond of the tower, so humans encouraged cats from all over town to visit and eat the rats.
In general, many Europeans didn't love cats around the sixteenth-century. Cats were associated with witches, and were said to be inhabited by demons and devils. But the clothes tower, that was the exception.
The first time the Cheshire went there, he saw a cat rolling a dead rat with its paws and playing with it. He thought it was mean to kill someone and play with their corpse. A dead human was honored by burial or cremation; a rat's corpse should have been eaten right away in that context.
"I am not playing with it," the other cat said to Cheshire. "I'm checking it for diseases. Rats are stinky. They spend their time in sewers and other people's cheeses."
The Cheshire wasn't going to go through that conversation again. Why did they eat them then?
It only took him a week before he turned into a rat serial killer. It was his first form of serial killing then. The rats tasted horrible, but gave him energy to run around and play all day. The townspeople began giving fish spines to the cats as a reward for killing the rats, as long as the cats only went to the clothes tower and not all over town, especially to the Grote Market, where humans had their groceries.
One day, the Cheshire's father brought his dead uncle's corpse to bury it. He was killed by the townspeople with a pan on his head for padding into the Grote Market. It was the Cheshire's first epiphany about how humans hated his kind--of course people now cherish cats and pet them, but that wasn't the case then.
It was rumored there was a man with a pipe and pied clothes who could tempt rats out of any town. He played the devil's music with his flute and the rats followed him out of town. If he had come, the cats would have been out of food and business.
The Cheshire's father was one of the first to go negotiate with the man whom everyone called the Pied Piper. Cats from all over Belgium and France traveled to meet the Piper. They begged him not to come to Ypres, or they'd be out of food. The Cheshire accompanied his dad that day.
After hours and hours of pondering, the Piper agreed not to come to Ypres. He remarked that his absence would make him lose a lot of money, since rat catching was a hot business at the time. So he made a deal with the cats that some of them had to sell their souls to him. He told them that demons and rogue spirits were lost in the cerebral realms of the world and needed a body to inhabit. Cats were the perfect host due to their agility and smart moves. The Piper promised that it wouldn't change who they were as cats. In fact, it might make them stronger. Reluctantly, a number of cats agreed and were never seen again. Although the Piper had his eyes on the Cheshire that day, his father rejected the idea furiously, taking his son back to town.
Months later, a series of crimes and unexplained phenomenon soared all over Europe. They were mostly connected to witches. In the town of Ypres, everyone believed witches performed their sins through cats.
Suddenly, the clothes tower was shut and fanatics began catching cats and throwing them from windows to kill them. It had become a new hobby, encouraged by parents and practiced by children.
But the cats were as flexible as yoyos. No amount of throwing killed them, only an inexperienced few died. And then in one of humanities' most absurd incidents, the Flemish townspeople, the raw meat eaters, gathered and decided to rid their town from the cats who supposedly caused all their misery. Instead of investigating what they did wrong as humans, it was the cats.