Slow Mo Cat or Majestic Sea-Eagle? (3/10/15)

Emily and tables go way back. Ever since she was a kitten she has sought to attain their rarified heights. Viewing every "food platform" (as she calls them) as a personal challenge, she leaps to this day with reckless abandon onto their exalted surfaces. The desire to sit atop a lofty perch is not enough. In moving herself onto the table, Emily does more than jump, she soars. And, in soaring she undergoes a transformation.

Gliding effortlessly from the floor to the table, she cuts an elegant figure. In this movement, if you squint your eyes while she is in mid-flight, you might even see, not a member of genus felidae, but of genus accipitridae borne aloft not by a push, but by enormous wings. The boundaries between species dissolve as this apex predator of the land briefly takes to the skies, her claws suddenly transformed into talons, her legs, no longer those of a cat, but of an ancient airborne predator. Like the four-winged dinosaurs of old, she glides just above the surface of her landing spot, and for a moment she slips the bonds of evolutionary reality and the observer's mind is left to wonder: What is this fearsome avian mammal? What evolutionary side road from the biological superhighway of genetic progress lead to this beautiful animal? How, with a mere leap, could a creature that was so clearly a cat become something so much more?

Then, as she lands, the spell is broken, but the ferocity of the eagle, and of all animals, past and present, that have taken to the air, still burns in her eyes as she looks down from her place on high. Yes, it is enough to make any sane person wonder, am I living with a cat, or a majestic sea-eagle...

Slow Mo proof of the incident in question: