Wishing I hadn’t left my cell phone at home (one look at the voice mail list of reporters who wanted quotes from me made me shut it off the night before), I could only watch, camera-less, as the cats did their dinner dance, backs arched proudly in the dim light, until the smell of the cat food came wafting down the alley, and I hurried away from there.…
Once I’d spoken to all the reporters who’d left messages, I felt as if I’d absorbed a part of Areille Quies as surely as if I’d been a cat partaking of that final meal with her. Eventually, interest in the murder (which was eventually solved; the cop at the hospital was right, it was a group of cat-haters who ironically also belonged to a local bird-watchers organization) died down, the Muslim business owners got together and fed the cats on their own, and gradually, the everyday business of getting back to my life as a Friends of Feral Cats worker took over my thoughts. I’d made Ursula What’s-Her-Face go through Areille’s apartment and photograph all her stuff for eBay, per Areille’s request (amazingly, everything, even her high school and college diplomas, sold, with the proceeds going to FoFC), and soon it was spring, then summer, and I was certain that the whole Areille-in-the-Alley part of my life was over, done with, a sad/funny/surreal interlude…until the day when Ursula came into the office and demanded that we all log onto YouTube, to see a specific video—
Déjà vu washed over all of us as we watched the action which took place in the alley behind Asad Avenue, obviously filmed with a cell phone camera, but this time, the only thing missing was Areille herself, as the cats danced and walked and stayed upright in that alley and gradually other people, the Muslim shop owners and their customers, entered the alley, too, but the cats kept on their feet, and danced willingly with whomever was brave enough to extend their hands…and while I recognized some of the cats from the time when their original partner was alive, many of the other cats were young, little more than kittens, and the people in the alley had to bend down quite low to dance with them, but all of them were smiling, and silently laughing and clapping their hands to some unheard song, as the cats kept on dancing, and I kept doing the feline math in my head, Nine weeks gestation, plus five months, maybe six equals whatever was in her blood that morning did get into the cats after all…but I don’t think it was just Toxo they ingested.
And when I saw one of the children pick up a kitten, and carry it away, I remembered what she had said, about the bald cat in that barn, and those mutant cats with the tiny legs, and for the first time since the cat tracker lady of Asad Alley died, I found myself wanting to get myself to that alley, and dance with the first cat who would walk up to me, and allow me to take his or her paw in mine.…
Inspired by the life of Joseph Zeman, “the pigeon man of Lincoln Square” (1931-2008), and the articles of Barbara Mahany.
With thanks to James B. Johnson, who suggested this story to me.
Dedicated to the memory of Grady, Quinn, Sheba, Trudy, Baby Biscuit, Max, Mongo, Ebony, Graykins, and Fluffer-Nutter.
And also The Dude, Harley, Inky, Bogie, and Chickpea.
—A. R. Morlan (and cats) 2013
A LIMP DEAD CAT IN MY ARMS, by Michael Hemmingson [Poem]
Worf died in my arms.
That’s the name of my cat. Worf.
Yes, Star Trek: Next Generation.
Whenever the TV was on and someone
yelled, “Mr. Worf!” my cat, Worf,
would jump up, wondering who was calling him.
The problem was renal failure—drinking a lot of water
and peeing up a storm like a drunk on
a Friday night with too much extra
money for too much beer.
Then: he couldn’t stand, walk, or eat,
his legs and lower body shaking
as if he had Lou Gehrig’s Disease,
as he tried to move from the floor
to the litter box, giving up
and taking a painful shit
as he lay crying, cursing the fate of old age.
I thought about taking one of
my two-year-old daughter’s diapers
and putting it on him, reminding
me how my father had to wear adult
diapers in his last hours
in late Spring, 2011, finding out
the truth when I returned from
Mexico to see my child.
It happened again, Mexico and death.
I came home from a trip to Tijuana
and he was half dead, my cat,
like my father was two years prior;
my other cat, Poe,
did not understand
what was happening to her brother.
I didn’t think Worf would make it
through the night, in bed with me.
Death slept between us.
Twelve years ago, when he was eight weeks,
he was rambunctious and liked to bite
everyone, everything,
bouncing and leaping from
one end of a room to another.
In the morning I got him ready for
the Humane Society, a quick and peaceful end
of a good twelve-year run. I wrapped him in
a blanket and he was excited about
going outside; he went limp in my arms,
mouth open and eyes staring glassy at nothing,
the way my father looked when he killed himself with a gun
and I saw his face when the
Medical Examiner team carted him out of the
garage on a gurney, a hole in his temple
where he had put a .22 bullet like
a nail into a slab of wood.
I sat down on a green lawn chair
in front of my studio apartment
on the beach,
the grass not so green beneath my feet, yellow and
dying like all living things die.
The mail carrier came by to drop off a batch
of books and said, “Oh, your cat likes to lounge in the sun.”
I said, “Actually, he just died thirty seconds ago.”
The carrier peered closely at Worf and saw this was true,
muttered, “I’m sorry,” and quickly walked away.
Death is too much for the US Postal Service.
He must have had a heart attack, Worf.
I wasn’t sure if he was quite dead: he was warm
and I was certain I could detect a faint heartbeat
like the final clicks of ticker tape at the end
of a bad day on Wall Street.
The intake person at the Humane Society
said they would check for vital signs to make
sure, then administer the drug, the Big Sleep, and
prepare him for cremation. “We cremate twice a week
and once a month a group takes the ashes
out to the sea,” I was told.
I did not want to think of
Worf in some freezer with a pile of dead cats
waiting to be fried into dust and chips of feline remains
like the dead were piled up and burned
after the bombing of Dresden in February, 1945.1
I was asked if I wanted the blanket back.
No, no I did not want the blanket he died in.
I paid the $10 handling fee.
As a cute, black-haired kitten, he cost me $125
at the pet store twelve years ago.
His death cost me ten bucks and a blanket.
1. See Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969.
THE RUINED QUEEN OF HARVEST WORLD, by Damien Broderick
“Where are my mausers?” cried Gloriana Avid, dressed in seven layers of floating white and gray muslin. “Ullimus Wong approaches! We must prepare the defenses of the orbital ladder in his honor, or against him. Come, mausers.”
She peered into the great overgrown garden of her father’s house. Few human people off Harvest knew this word mauser, which was an ancient name for a weapon held
in the hand and directed to the killing of other humans. Fewer still recognized, with an irritated sigh, that this name, too, hid one yet older.
The war cats who stood guard over the rich treasures of Harvest were mausers, true, but mousers as well. Their ancestors, back on fabled Homeland, had been small, fleet creatures with small, fleet minds. Those cats lived and dreamed the hunt for their prey: feathered birds, tracked with furtive slow patient grace until the leap, murderous; and rodents even smaller than themselves, the mouses, for which they, the gray and white and black and tabby and striped mousers, were a mortal terror poised at the wainscoting. So it was with the descendants, the frightful augmented people, the war cats of Harvest.
“Come, my pretties, my lordly hunters, my avengers,” cried mad Ms. Avid. Her words creaked out into the pungent air of the Harvest world, where, beyond the tangled brambles of the house, a hundred fruits still gleamed under an actinic star, where the cereal crops flourished in wind-flowing oceans of gold and royal purple.
“It is time to hunt,” called Glory, to her noble cats, and they came. Not to her bidding, for they were proud and walked alone, but in free recognition of her fiefdom. “Come along, Resolution, Triumphant, Defiant. And wait, now, who are you?” This cat was lean, with a head like a blade. Electricity danced and pranced in his pale blue eyes. She had never seen him before. All cats walk alone, as she knew, but this one seemed destined for some singular isolation. “Your name, sir, I say!”
“My name is Daisy,” said the cat, standing very still in the midst of his brothers. Did they shun him? They did not turn their backs upon him, nor withdraw their heads, and they did not, either, turn in a mass of furious, shrieking repugnance to tear, beat or bite him until his corpse lay bleeding and huddled. That they would have done to a sport, a castback, a cat whose deoxyribonucleic acid was even one codon more seriously warped than Daisy’s. This forbearance, or minimal respect, did not mean they loved him, nor admired his solitude. The mausers put up with him at the margins of their number because he was a son of Courageous and Precious Blue Silk, was sworn, as were they all, to the defense of Harvest and the house.
Gloriana Avid gave one sniggering bark of laughter, to hear that name, and smothered her mouth in billowing sleeves.
“And where are your…sisters?” Every mauser heard the absent words, the missing words, the masked words: your brothers’ other sisters. But a word unspoken yields no clear offense. The ears of the wiry cat went back for an instant only, the deep snarl in his throat chopped off at a cough.
“Come forth, sisters,” he cried in a piercing voice. “The mistress would see you, even though the time is not fitting, her mausers, your brothers, being gathered here together.”
“Oh, no, no,” cried Glory in her shrill, disappointed, wary tones, “that is not what I—”
But here came cat females, from the hard shadows of the star’s brilliant daylight, slinky and sinuous. Here was Summery Justice, and Winter Kills, here was Autumn Falls and Spring Healer, lightly springing, falling like shaded leaves.
The air reeked, abruptly, with lawless pheromones. Everyone except Avid fell into attitudes of alert pugnacity, thrilling with improper desires.
“Go back at once,” cried Boundless Courage, stepping to the fore. “Ignore this one, this fool,” and he cuffed Daisy across the side of the face, hard, claws scrupulously retracted. “Return to your fastness, sisters. This is not the time. This is not the place.” With exquisite attention, Boundless monitored his brother’s stance. Daisy did nothing. His breathing did not quicken, nor his whiskers draw back. (Each mauser could hear the pulse and breath of every cat in the clearing, and more besides.) His teeth set in a baleful grin. In silence he watched his sisters slink back into the shadows, casting glances over their shoulders. Their long lovely vibrissae gleamed in the sunlight, then were gone.
“Bad kitty,” said Glory Avid, all a-twitter.
For a moment, Daisy and Boundless Courage regarded each other. Daisy slipped forward, then, and dropped to his knees, rolled upon his back into supplicant posture, as once, very long ago, his ancestral foe the dog might have rolled in obeisance to an overmastering superior, belly bared. To his own ancestors, as only disdained Daisy knew, this posture held a very different meaning. It blocked an enemy’s approach from behind, while freeing all four muscular limbs and lethal claws to rake and rip.
Boundless nodded, a civilized being in an almost civilized time and place, and raised one foot to deposit it in ceremonial warning and acknowledgment on the defenseless bowels. And Daisy was no longer there. Snarling, he snapped upward, lunging at the senior brother. He tore with his unleashed claws the fabric from Boundless’ loins, sank his sharp teeth instantly into the mauser’s befurrred groin, twisted, keening a battle cry between his clenched teeth, and ripped away all the gristle and flesh and tight double sac.
Blood sprayed. Boundless Courage shrieked, clutching at himself. Aghast, confused, mausers flailed, struck at each other, crying, “Unsporting!” and “How vile, sir!” and “You are no gentleman!” Blood and fear and fury reeked, vibrissae quivering beneath their nostrils.
“No!” sobbed Gloriana Avid. She drew back, seeing droplets of red flung upon her white and gray muslin. “Cats, stop! This must not be!”
But she was wrong. It had to be. It was the first public declaration of inevitable war between the Worlds and the detestable cat, the abominable cat, the cat who one day would lay waste the Homeland world itself, after the Death-ferried tattered man had come down to Harvest, the Landgrave who would mend Ms. Avid’s heart at such cost.
* * * *
While the Lords and Ladies of the World sustained a complacent belief in their own superlative knowledge and power, they had not foreseen Daisy’s destiny. His label name was given him by their unwatched machines, which made slips of this kind only one time in ten billion—and yet, when those errors did occur, a blight roared down, nearly always, like a curse upon their World.
Later, the poets singsonged it up:
Here is the caïque Death rowed in the morn,
That ferried the man all tattered and torn,
Who kissed the maiden all foresworn,
Who engendered the cat with the crumpled horn,
The detestable cat,
The abominable cat,
That tore down the Worlds the Lords built.
Some of the ditty has it right, but some is spiteful or misleading gossip. No permanent harm ever came to Daisy’s manly horn; afterward, he sired litter upon litter of bold war cats who took his patronymic haughtily, spitting in the eye of the world. (Not of the Homeland World; that was gone and done, so sorry.) It was not truly Death that fetched the frozen man, Landgrave Ullimus Wong, to the Harvest planet, where he met and woo’d Ms. Avid (the gravid Landgravine, as history would dub her), that wronged woman cruelly betrayed not once but thrice.
Wong met
Wrong;
They made it
Right,
as the cats now howl in their own jamborees.
Daisy’s siblings, his brothers in arms from the litter fathered by Courageous upon their dam, Precious Blue Silk, were fighters all: ruined Boundless Courage, first born of the litter, and Invincible, dark pelted Dominant, sturdy Renown, Defiant, Resolution, and Triumphant. His own fate was sealed in the twist of deoxyribonucleic acid that spelled his demeaning name. A word may be altered, taken back, guarded behind shuttered lips, masked; a genome was forever, inviolate, or mere anarchy might be loosed upon the Worlds.
As it was, even so.
* * * *
“This Landgrave, is he handsome?” asked Summery idly. Flaming virga streamers of high cirrus caught the setting sun and their ice burned the sky.
“And besides, what is a Landgrave?” Autumn was pettish. She could consult the Know but found it beneath her dignity. Ms. Falls was a most particular augmented cat, a professional of disdain. She preened her gleaming whiskers, fire-tinted from the sky.
“A human of h
igh degree,” Spring informed her. She had investigated the matter. “You should learn all this, if you mean to escape our confinement and find a suitable mate in the stars.” It was said of Spring Healing that she knew all the songs of all the heartsick greeting programs men and women sent each other on days and nights of special ardent, amorous import. Sitting by a bay window in their high tower, she looked in the opposite direction from her sister Summery, across fields of produce brazed in the late afternoon glow, and hummed, then sang one of her own:
Oh my darling, oh his darling,
Oh your darling, Healing Spring!
All is lost and gone forever
Nothing lingers, Missy Spring.
Light she was and late he found her,
And her toes were clad in fur,
Healing boxes, curing poxes,
All too late for Glory, her.
“A Landgrave,” Winter Kills told them, gravely, “governs in his own right under the sway of a Lord Emperor. But the Lords and Ladies of the Worlds do not admit the authority of an Emperor above them, nor of a Count, and certainly no Landgraf. And the Harvest planet is never his landgraviate, this jumped-up imposter, whatever patents of nobility he might brandish. Should he do so,” she added, fanning her pale, pale face with a waved hand, claws tucked away within gold thimble gloves, “and I confess to having no familiarity at all with this, nor any considerable interest in pursuing the matter. I am hungry. It is time to dine.”
None of them mentioned the abomination of their eldest brother’s gelding.
Nobody knew what to make of it, nor of the detestable Daisy, who had withdrawn and was not to be found.
But they were all frightened. And these were not timid mausers.
* * * *
Here is why Gloriana did what she did, poor angel.
She was deserted by her mother, Grace Desdemona Merribelle Avid, the loveliest human woman in all the Worlds, dark beauty manifest. To her admirers, Grace Avid was fondly addressed as “Glorious Desdemona” with the stress on the second syllable, not the penultimate: Des-DEM-uh-nuh. And here is the full measure of Desdemona’s desertion of her only daughter: Gloriana was not abandoned instantly, at birth, in the crib, when a mercy of swift forgetfulness might have been balm to ease all but the most abstract pangs and longings of infancy. No, her glorious mother, for whose famous beauty she was named, whose beauty she inherited, whom she idolized and loved with all her strong young heart, fled Harvest when Gloriana Avid was five years old, most vulnerable to the wrenching pangs of loss and abandonment.
The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New Page 5