(ESSAY) 'RIP Kougra_Rasputin (2005-2007)' by Shona McKenzie

We at SPAM were partly raised on neopets.com. The guilds, rare items, paintbrushes, festivals and forums were a convivial elsewhere in times of strife. Shona McKenzie's flash essay, for our Digital Dreamland series, enacts the dreamspace of the Neopian digital realm, in turn serving as an elegy for two feline pixel-friends.

I grew up in the Highlands and on Neopets.com. In the space left between the green world and the stretchy, dark realm of dreams, I navigated my second world of exploration, history, lore, gambling, banking, selling, haggling – how I craved those fat, gold coins spinning before my eyes, stuffed in sacks of rich little pixels, mine mine mine. 

When the screen fades to darkness, there are piles of money everywhere and I’m grabbing it and it is tumbling out of my hands as I scrounge the ground for strange coins in unknowable shining shapes.

I had two pets: a fat grey cat and a blue tiger. Two big cats. My whims and weaknesses summon me to slip inside my phone, scrolling through the archives of a younger person’s life and remembering how it felt to be seen by that lovely living creature, Rasputin. Then I am sucked through the laptop screen to repeat the same old purgatory act of searching for my old Neopet’s name – Kougra_Rasputin – and seeing him stuck, blue and smiling for the rest of time on a stranger’s banned account.

In my dream I am approached by my old cats; they have learned how to fly. Come, they say, spin the Wheel of Excitement! Glitching, they open their mouths and coins tumble out.

I had two email accounts, one for council tax and forms and the other with the embarrassing name I made when I was eight and can’t change, the one that guards my ancient digital detritus like a dragon. Scrabbling through the trash, I find my old password. I break in, do a Terror Mountain scratch card and lose, then abandon the world again. Kougra_Rasputin was missing, but there were others there, all my old pet pixels in their silly clothes that I loved once and can’t yet abandon completely, or else I abandon the little me before the bitterness. 

In dreaming, new big cats appear in odd shapes, asking why they aren’t mine, asking me where our money has gone, asking me where I have gone. I’m poor, I realise, penniless with no cats, and realise I’m not even dreaming anymore. Eyes half-shut, a disoriented native of so many worlds, I find myself in the middle multi i i plying, melting into a cauldron of regurgitative perpetual stew I have boiled beneath myself, wires and thoughts and flesh and all.

I don’t know if we ever truly wake, or if we can ever be as divisible as we believe ourselves to be, but through the me I experience here and now, cyborgically attached to a keyboard and scrolling, deskbound, through pages of cats up for adoption, I wonder if all this disorientation, this want, and this guilt awoke in me when I sent my Neopet to the pound in 2007.

~

Text: Shona McKenzie

Image: Shona McKenzie

Published: 14/10/2025