Anti-Cat

The reporter found Geraldinium Holmes in her new studio. She was sitting at a table gazing out of a window that looked over the sewage recycling plant. In front of her was a cup of tea, smelling strongly of Chamomile.
"Miss Holmes?" said the reporter tentatively. The artist didn't respond, so he looked around for the girl-waif who had shown him in, but she had disappeared. "Miss Holmes?" he tried again.
Geraldinium stirred slightly, and picked up her cup of tea by the handle. She sipped from it, and put the cup down with a look of disgust.
"This is dreadful," she said, and the reporter looked around to see who she was talking to. "Fix it."
"Er, are you talking to me?" he asked, his hand already half-way to the cup. "What's wrong with it?"
Geraldinium turned round and saw him for the first time.
"Who the hell are you?"
"I spoke to you at the art exhibition a week ago; I was hoping I could get another interview with you. A girl let me in…."
"The orphan, yes. She has difficulty telling who is a visitor and who should have a bucket of water thrown over them."
"Well, she let me in…."
"So you think that entitles you to an interview, do you? I am busy you know. I have a new installation to create, and hate-mail to answer, and that's even before I go and punish the orphan until she learns how to make tea."
"Hate mail?"
"For Flat 31."
"The flattened kitten?"
Geraldinium shrugged her shoulders and stood up, picking her cup up as an afterthought. "I think 'pressed kitten' sounds better. Flattened makes it sound like I just dropped something heavy on it, whereas pressed sounds more artistic."
"Either way, you did kill a kitten."
"It's art. Although the people writing the hate mail seem to agree with you, so there's a lot of uneducated people out there still. You should see the letters they send me: crayons, chalks, letters written on the backs of recent bills, they're all insane. And none of them can spell!"
"Perhaps they're just getting a little excited when they write to you--"
"I've had evidence of that in the letters too. I have to burn some of them."
The pause turned into a silence that finally the reporter felt he had to break.
"What's the new project called again?"
"Anti-cat."
"Aunty Cat? Is this making up somehow for the squash-- I mean, pressed, kitten?"
"Not Aunty as in your mother's sister, you ninny. Anti-cat. The opposite of a cat."
"What, like a dog?"
"That's a different species altogether. No, a collection of anti-elements held in a magnetic holding bottle shaped like a cat. If you brought it together with a real cat the two would annihilate causing an explosion, much like when you bring two angry, hungry cats together over a small fish."
"Um, is it wise to create art that appears to be encouraging the wholesale destruction of cats?"
"Was it wise to make my own orphan and then employ her? Probably not, but it wouldn't be art if I didn't do it!"