by Steve Vernon
Hoarding’d never been my scene. But if it could fill up the hole that was inside me…well, it’d be worth a shot.
I stretched slowly, trying not to look too eager. Rodney already had enough eagerness for four cats.
“Goodie!” he said as I stepped off my sleeping platform. He turned and trotted to the tree trunk. After a second to lick my ears presentable, I followed him.
Heaven’s cat colony shared a lot of giant trees like this. The trunks are thick and delicious to scratch, the branches are sturdy, and at the ends of some of the limbs are wooden-plank platforms (well, mine came with carpet) where a cat can sleep and keep an eye on things.
Even though there’s no roofs on our boxes, the setup reminds me of the treehouse my Damien built for Gina. We used to do a lot of reading up there. Once I was even the special guest at one of her birthday slumber parties. I snuck a lot of dried pizza cheese that night!
My exotic shorthair friend Mel, though, he lives in a super-sized carpeted cat condo between Cat Housing and the human development. And my moggie friend Julia-Goolia lives in a barn.
I greeted my neighbors with tail waves as I backed down the tree after Rodney. Near the bottom, I leapt onto the grass and clawed my own mark into the satisfyingly ragged base of the tree trunk. Then I followed Rodney. I hoped this decorating thing was worth interrupting my nap.
3
In the distance I could see a huge cardboard box, big as a house, but with no roof. Inside, smaller, more reasonably-sized boxes stood at regular intervals. Cats were trotting up to the smaller boxes, reaching in, and grabbing out different objects before leaving the superbox.
A line of them were heading in me and Rodney’s direction, some with decorations in their mouths or wound around their tails.
George the hoarder suddenly appeared on top of the hill with us, heading in our direction. Spotting me, he trotted over. He set the bauble in his mouth down in the grass. At first I thought it was a snowman, since it was white and fuzzy. But then I saw it was a fuzzy toy lamb, a little bigger than a baby bird.
George touched noses with me.
“Gingersnap! I didn’t think you’d come!”
“Yeah, well, Rodney invited me, and you know I can’t say no to that long face.”
George and I chuckled at the joke, but Rodney heard it, so he whapped me in the face with his tail.
“I know you’re jealous of my exotic bone structure,” he said, “but that’s no reason to be catty.”
“What’s that for?” I nodded down at the lamb.
George beamed. “It’s for the Christmas tree outside of the barn in Cleanwhisker. The theme this year is ‘lions and lambs’!”
“Ooh, that’s a GREAT theme!” said Rodney.
I nodded. “Definitely.”
“Here.” He rolled the lamb towards me with his nose. “You can take my lamb up the tree. I’ll go back to the supply box and grab another.”
“Okay,” I said. “But where—” I turned my head, distracted by a sandy-colored queen cat trotting by. Her tail was held high; trailing from it was a narrow banner of lights, floating in midair. Miniature suns, and it was all I could do not to bat at them.
“Yeah!” George trilluped. “Just follow her. Those are for our tree.”
“…Right,” I said. I picked up the lamb in my mouth. Woolly, but not unpleasant.
“Great! See you inna bit!” said George, and he bounded back towards the giant supply box.
“Come on, Gingersnap. We don’t wanna lose her!”
Rodney took off after the queen cat with the lights, and so did I.
She was a straggler following a clump of a dozen cats, some holding fuzzy lambs in their mouths, others miniature (but still very handsome) lion figures. Floating lights drifted off the tips of other upright tails like streamers.
Some people think heaven is made of fluffy white clouds. Maybe it is over in the bird section, but in Cat Housing, the ground is soft green grass (with only some of it grown out tall enough to tickle your belly) and forests…and even a beach, though I’d never felt the need to visit. Sand belongs in a box, if you ask me.
Me and Rodney joined the decorators arching into the pine forest, sometimes resisting the urge to pounce on the floating lights; other times spooking as the lights’ movement threw the pine needles’ shapes into crazy shadows. We followed the group until the land opened out again. There was the Cleanwhisker barn, bright red. In front of it, an unleapable pine tree—taller than the barn itself—stood just outside the front door, like it had grown up overnight. Cats of all kinds were crawling over the tree. The rust-orange rump of a tabby cousin disappeared beneath the green limbs. Seconds later, a paw batted out, adjusting the drape of a string of sun-lights.
“Wow! Lookit, Gingersnap!” Rodney leapt into the air. Our traveling partners dove away from his Outside Voice.
I nodded my head. This small little thing in my mouth was supposed to go on such a big tree? Who would ever see it? Near the bottom, noble lion masks—golden, carved by human hands—faced out in every direction.
The sandy queen with the lights streaming from her tail broke into a run. The lights followed like chasing fireflies.
We all ran to keep up with her.
At the base of the tree, everyone seemed to be milling about a tiny tortoiseshell cat.
“You, squirrel level,” she said, tapping a tom with her paw. He strutted out of the group and up the tree.
I sighed through my sheep. It had to be a Tortie.
“I hear ya,” said Rodney, “but hey, the tree does look good.”
I looked up at the tree again. It was true. Even though all the decorations weren’t up, the lion faces shone magnificently in the light, and some, reflecting the barn, turned the chocolate-red color of a Havana brown.
I hustled down the hill and into the circling river of fur surrounding the Tortie. I thought I’d have time to meander with the crowd, but, spotting me, her amber eyes bulged.
“Hey, you! Ginger with the sheep! Yes, you!”
I lashed my tail. Darn.
“That’s the first one,” she said, approaching me. “The first sheep. They’ll be going on the middle part of the tree. You can put it anywhere between blue jay level and cardinal level. No higher than cardinal!” She batted the air for emphasis.
I set the sheep carefully down on my paws. There was no dirt in heaven, but I thought she might split a whisker if I put it on the ground.
“How’s anybody going to see something so small so high up?”
“Because it’s not going to stay small. When you get up there, lick its back, then bop it with your paw, like this!”
She demonstrated on the back of a kitten who just darted by. He put on the brakes and spun around, trying to find the perpetrator, only to be pounced on by his siblings. The Tortie recoiled in surprise.
“Kittens! Out of the way, unless you’re helping!”
One of them looked up, indignant. “We are!”
I left the kitten to argue with her, grabbing my sheep and ducking under the green-needled branches.
Most people don’t know that Heaven is made of light—so much so that even the shadows aren’t truly dark. But beneath the branches everything I saw was tinted piney green and dark purple. I dug my claws into the trunk—past the picture of the button, and began climbing.
Every few tail lengths a picture was attached to the trunk. It wasn’t the tallest tree I’d ever climbed in Heaven—this Christmas tree wasn’t half as big as the tree I lived on—but inside the green tunnel of the tree’s body, it felt like a long time passed before I got anywhere.
“‘Scuze me, going down,” said a calico queen at squirrel level. I scooched aside so she could descend.
“Those masks are heavy!” I heard her say down below my tail. I heard voices behind me as I climbed, but none of them ever tried to push past me, and I didn’t see anyone ahead of me, going up or tryi
ng to go down. If I was the first sheep, maybe I was the first one up to blue jay level? Did the Tortie plan it that way?
Some cats are too smart for their own good.
I kept climbing.
Finally, I saw the blue bird with the pointy head and frowny beak. Blue jay level.
Might as well get off here. I left the trunk and made my way to the end of the branch.
I frowned around my decoration. I could probably find a place to set it down, but if I bopped it, it was going to fall through the branches and get stuck farther down, and the Tortie wouldn’t like that. Worse, it might hit the ground, and she REALLY wouldn’t like that.
Even though cats aren’t mean in Heaven, some are still prone to annoying lectures.
I looked around. The views were good—I thought I could see my home tree, a blueish gray shape in the distance.
But I can’t go home without dropping off this silly sheep!
I sat down and began searching the branches below me. From time to time heads and paws pushed through the needles as cats attached ornaments—somehow!—to the tree.
My tail lashed. The Tortie could have given me better instructions.
“Hey!”
“Careful!”
“Slow down!”
Cats in the tree below me began shouting, and branches rustled, the disturbance preceding the giggles of young kittens.
Oh, brother. I hurried back to the trunk and dug my claws in. Kittens were OK, but I didn’t need their rambunctiousness knocking me out of the tree. It would be undignified.
I watched the branches shiver. I heard the giggles growing closer. And I even thought I heard the Tortie yowling up the tree.
Sure enough, the squirm of kittens made it to blue jay level. They chased each other through the pine’s undergrowth, so close to one another that they might as well have been a single ribbon of fur and stripes. One’s white foot thwacked me in the nose as he flew by. I flinched, but didn’t drop the sheep.
“Sorry!” said the kitten. Then, he dropped out of the careening chase and landed in front of me, on a different branch connected to the trunk. It was the kitten from down below, all white except for a triangular patch growing between his ears, and a little gray saddle on his back that turned his tail gray, too.
“What’s up?” he said. “You haven’t put your ornament on.”
I turned around in a circle.
“Oh, you don’t know how?” he said. “It’s easy, I’ll show you.”
He stepped onto my branch and brushed past me.
Things in Heaven aren’t as solid as they are back on Earth. While I can feel the tree limb underfoot, there’s something not-quite-the-same about it. Like, the surface of it isn’t as solid as my foot-whiskers tell me it should be. And even though I can feel, say, Rodney’s tongue when he gives me a friendly lick, the texture’s just not quite there.
But when the kitten brushed by, he felt like a dream—or like a thin covering of fur over a cloud.
Why, he hasn’t been born yet!
I wanted to ask him a question—he was the first cat I’d met who hadn’t been to Earth already—but he was at the end of the branch, looking over his shoulder at me. I walked out to him. He scooped his paw under the branch and when he brought it back up, there was a metal ball in it, the same color as the lion heads, big as a Main Coon’s paw.
“Okay, so these are on every branch,” he said. Now that he’d pointed them out to me, I saw them above me, too, dangling from the branch the next level up.
“If you hold your ornament against it for a few seconds, it’ll float there when you let go. Though I don’t see how anyone’s gonna see your drooly woolly all the way up here!”
Just wait, kit.
I sat up on my haunches and pulled one of the balls above me towards my face. I stuck my neck out and felt the sheep push against the metal ball. I froze in place for a slow blink, then s-l-o-o-o-w-ly relaxed my jaws.
To my relief, the lamb didn’t fall! It floated below the metal ball, a toe’s length of space around it.
Heaven! Go figure.
I batted the lamb with my paw. It swung as though attached to the ball with a string.
“Thanks, kit. How does it come off?”
His tail crooked. “Dunno. That’s for the takedown crew. ‘Many paws make light work’, and all.”
“Got it.”
I sat up again, licked the lamb’s back, then gave it a good paw-bop.
POUF!
It exploded like popcorn popping and me and the kit both dove for cover by the trunk. Then, after my tail had smoothed back down to its normal size, we clambered back out on the limb to see what had happened.
What had been the size of a mouse in my mouth was now twice the size of a lion mask, a trio of sheep looked to be sleeping in a pile.
“Cool!” said the kitten. “Did you know it was going to do that?”
“Just following orders,” I said.
Giggling made our ears twitch upwards. His future siblings zoomed down the branches behind us.
“Gotta go!” said the white-and-gray kitten, and he leapt to join the ribbon of hyperactivity. I was out on a limb alone again.
That wasn’t too bad.
I went back to the trunk. Time to get another ornament.
The kitten’s comment wasn’t the first time I’d heard many paws make light work. Having not really done much work on Earth, I finally asked Sammy about it, and he explained that it meant if a group of animals did a big job together instead of alone, it usually got done faster and easier.
I’d filed the explanation away and hadn’t thought about it since then. But when I saw the clowder of cats at the foot of the tree after putting up my lambs, the phrase floated through my head again. But there was still a question mark at the end of the saying until my third trip from the supply box.
I stood on the hill looking at the tree. It looked done already! The lions still gleamed at the bottom, and fuzzy sheep families peppered the tree like bits of oversized fuzz. Near the top, a pair of ragdoll cats were unwinding a blue ribbon with a scene of lions and sheep napping together. The tip-top of the tree was coned with a lion wearing a starred crown.
Suddenly, the blue shiny I was carrying didn’t seem all that important. I would have left it there on the hill, except I didn’t need the Tortie grousing at me. When I took it to her, there were only three cats around her. The rest were padding off to the barn loft to admire their work.
The Tortie saw my shiny. “Find an empty spot in button row and stick it in. It’s looking a little bare through there.”
Of course, you didn’t have to climb the tree at all to reach button level; it was the lowest level of branches. I circled the tree until I found a single spot open on a branch, facing the barn. I stuck the shiny on.
I stepped back a ways and sat down, wrapping my tail around my paws. Among limbs packed with lights, lions, and shinies, my blue shiny had made little difference. But I’d put on other things—the lambs, and an extra floating thing. Those had made a difference, hadn’t they?
Tail-tip wagging, I went up to the barn loft to join the other cats.
4
The hay in the loft was clean, what little of it I could see between the paws of the different cats. The walls were warm-wood brown and a square window let in bright light, framing the Christmas tree outside. The resident cats called down to their friends from their specially-built perches up above in the rafters. But from the scent of them, most of the cats pushing towards the square window were from other places, come down to decorate.
“Gingersnap! Over here!”
My ear twitched, and then my eyes followed the voice. George sat on his haunches so I could see his round face above the crowd.
“‘Scuze me,” I said, and darted through the mass of excited cats. Just as I got to George, Rodney popped up next to him, blue eyes wide with excitement. He sniffed the air over the clowder.
“You s
een the tree yet, Gingersnap?” asked George.
“No, I just got inside,” I said.
“We’ll help you get through,” said Rodney. “OUTTA THE WAY! OFFICIAL DECORATORS COMIN’ THROUGH!” He continued yelling as we pushed our way towards the window. Cats rolled their eyes at his brash cries (I thought I heard someone say, “We’re ALL decorators!”) but moved aside.
I blinked hard in the dazzling light. The window was level with some fuzzy lambs and paw-print-shaped shinies. My sheep pile might have been on this level, but even if it was, it was on the opposite side of the tree.
“Aw, wow! Wow!” said Rodney. George’s tail swirled through the air, pleased.
“Yeah, isn’t it a great theme? Those paw shapes are from real lions over in Big Cat Housing!”
“How’d they make them?” I asked. I’d seen my paws make tracks in mud before, but these were shiny and smooth.
George shrugged. “Dunno. Humans and…molds? But not, like, yucky molds.” His tail covered his face in distaste.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. And it was, but looking at it made me feel alone, even sitting with my friends. Our Christmas tree had been small, plastic, but full of bright lights that changed color every few seconds. But it wasn’t the tree so much. There’d be wrapping to play in Christmas morning in Heaven, but no Gina there to dangle the ribbon. No Damien to offer me a shoe or slipper box. No Marie to take flashing pictures with her hand rectangle. That’s what I missed.
Come on, Gingersnap. It’s the season to celebrate the Lord’s birthday, not mope around about things you can’t change.
I put on a better smile and turned to my friends. A glance passed between them—but I didn’t catch what kind. “Yeah. I like it. It’s real nice.”
That night at my tree, I settled in to my box. From here I could just make out the glow of Cleanwhisker barn’s Christmas tree. But I couldn’t sleep.