Nargatha’s searching eyes were the color of a cardinal. Scarlet wet strings hung from her mouth. I watched in horror as her head twisted 180 degrees. Then a bone in her neck cracked like the sharp snap of a branch, and her cranium inched its way around to 360 degrees. She looked up at me, drooling blood and her noggin dialed all the way the fuck around like a goddamned barn owl. Nargatha screeched like a desperate raptor, causing three squirrels to silently scatter to safety. Panic squeezed my trilling heart. Squirrels are never silent, those smutty nut-goblins. They are only quiet when their lives depend on it.
Triscuits. Nargatha was eating Triscuits. The next thought I had made me regurgitate a Cheeto®. Nargatha had what Big Jim had. Nargatha was eating Triscuits.
Dennis. I snatched up the plastic bag, pointed homeward bound, and flapped like hell.
Chapter 4
Genghis Cat
A Home in Capitol Hill, Seattle,
Washington, USA
There has been a change in the order of things that I can’t quite put my claw on. My observations:
It’s quieter out there. This makes the game more interesting.
There are no sprinting cars to compete with over squirrels.
There’s a lot more to hunt.
There are plenty more hunters to fight it for. Hunters of all kinds.
There’s decidedly less cheese available.
Perhaps it’s due to a shift in the lunar light, a cosmic spell, or because I have finally mastered my innate feline sorcery. One thing that hasn’t changed—my Mediocre Servants still never seem to leave the home. I believe, if it’s at all possible, that they have devolved. According to my calculations, they now spend 186 percent of their time growling at the wall. But I have always known them to be a lower life-form, no better than slug-tongued, alopecia-stricken bears with epically shitty balance. They are eggs on legs with no discernible senses and the reflexes of a bugle stuffed with brine shrimp.
I have watched, with my unparalleled vision and laser-pointer focus, as my Mediocre Servants jab at the wall repeatedly with their fingers (or what’s left of them). Up to down, up to down. Both are overdue for a thorough grooming, which their own mothers wouldn’t attempt at this point. Today—
WAIT! HOLD EVERYTHING WHILE I GROOM MY INNER THIGH.
Today, my Mediocre Servants—the girl one with the long mane and the girl one with all the skin drawings who both liked to stay at home and talk about chemistry science until the coffee ran out—smell like a microwaved litter box. No longer do they turn on their silver lap boxes, which is characteristically selfish of them because it is a classically renowned nap location. The warm spots—silver lap box; top of tall, cold food house; winter bed blanket; top of their sacred “wine fridge”; Mediocre Servant’s thighs while she’s on the white seat that roars—have been confiscated. They appear to be staging some sort of feeble protest by refusing to replenish my dehydrated niblet stash. I have conducted experiments using techniques that used to be fairly effective—knocking over the French press, unraveling their shoddy knitting, chewing the covers of every book in the library, shitting on pillows, shredding the couch, eating all the Ethernet snakes, and pissing all over bed blanket—but they seem to no longer be concerned. Admittedly, I’m impressed. I respect the negligible number of shits currently being given. Case in point: one of my Mediocre Servants left her arm in the living room, which I believe speaks to their general ineptitude. I played with it momentarily, but found its pungency off-putting and resumed licking my anus. My instincts were always right—they were never to be fully trusted.
For a while, I persisted with this ill-fated relationship by bringing them mice, moles, rats, sparrows, finches, robins, wrens, and chickadees, and something new and exciting: a tuxedo-wearing bastard that called itself a Humboldt penguin before I assassinated it. I presented these offerings to them, as always, to remind them of their inadequacy and rub my hunting prowess in their faces, those dildo-nosed potatoes. But I am not an unreasonable creature; I also share my offerings to ensure the thighs of my Mediocre Servants are adequately padded for my sitting pleasure. When I offered up the black-and-white eggplant of a bird, which was heavy as fuck, by the way, the Mediocre Servant with the skin drawings tried to bite me, ocher nubby fangs narrowly missing my tail. I did what was necessary—bit her back, severing a finger. Then I attempted to bury it in the carpet by covering it up like a rogue turd.
I will no longer bring them offerings, exotic or otherwise. I will not grace them with my presence. Should have known it was all over when they stopped summoning the requisite number of boxes from the Amazon for me to cavort in. No. I made my decision to leave the home. It’s true that I shall miss the toasty laps and the dehydrated fish blobs and ambushing their bulbous toes under the bed blanket and how they used to worship me. Most especially, I will miss the cheese. But not as much as they will miss me. I am incredible.
So once I’d systematically eaten all the contents of Aquarium, I left through the Flap Of Cat to the great outside, never to return to the home. Besides, I’d yarfed on every square inch of the place. There was nothing more to decorate. Before I left, I made sure I’d unrolled all the toilet paper.
Life on the outside is unpredictable, requiring vigilance and innate brilliance, both qualities I possess in numbers higher than I can count. I hunt and prowl and observe and fuck with shit. Also, my collection is growing. So far I have infiltrated four hundred homes and pillaged every sock I can find. I cannot explain my fascination with these delightful foot blankets, I can only tell you that it pleases me to carry them around while yowling like my fur is on fire.
Something of interest: Yesterday, I was minding my own highly important business around one of my territories—my newly acquired mosque. It’s enormous and gold, sublimely spiritual with rainbow windows that let those rascally light beams in. I was busy chasing a light beam that had no business running up my damn wall when, out of nowhere, this asshole walks in. To my mosque! My urine smells stronger than hydrofluoric acid; I’m not sure how my territory could be made any clearer. Who doesn’t respect boundaries like that? You know who? A gigantic piliferous orange, that’s who. He just waltzes in like some big shot. I let out a viperous hiss, warning him that I collect femur bones. He seemed startled and then I asked him what the fuck he was because he didn’t seem like a local Seattleite, and he said he was looking for his home, and then I’d just about had it with this mouthy tool running off his mouth, so I chased him out of my mosque. I was all talon and bite; I was a tricksy light beam of silver and brown and black, the power of the sun in motion if it were more kickass. He got the message alright. He loped off, not sure how to comprehend such an omnipotent ninja. But I’m worried he’ll be back because he caught a glimpse of my sock stash, or perhaps the eggs I’ve collected from the nest raids, and I’m marginally concerned that he’ll plan an ambush. It is a legitimate worry since he’s the size of a wine fridge.
I can’t complain. I’m living the good life. I’ve hunted and pillaged and fathered 130 kittens—that I know of—with twenty-six different mousers and none of this shit interferes with my sixteen hours of daily sleep.
You can fuck off now. I have nothing more to say to you.
Chapter 5
S.T.
the Small Craftsman Home in Ravenna, Seattle, Washington, USA
I burst through the kitchen window, dropping the plastic bag at the last second. The bottles containing Big Jim’s life sustenance bounced off the window ledge, rolling onto the grass below. I dove through the kitchen, the living room, and shot down the concrete stairs to the basement, forgetting to inhale. Big Jim was up close to the wall where I’d left him, swaying as he dragged his nub of a finger. He’d have to replace that when he felt better. Relief rippled through me. No sign of Dennis. I took off in search of that lumpish codpiece.
Dennis was in the laundry room. He was lying on a pile of Big Jim’s soiled boxers, head on black-padded teddy bear paws. The copious copper skinfolds o
f his forehead hung low, obscuring his eyes, facial wrinkles splayed on the laundry room floor. His hideous turkey-neck wattle, which normally looks like a water buffalo’s testicles, now resembled a discarded pancake. Dennis lifted an eyebrow and a mountain of skin, exposing the melancholiest of melancholy chestnut eyes, then resumed his carpet impression with a chesty sigh. He pretty much stayed that way for days. And then Dennis stopped eating. This signified another major change in our already topsy-turvy lives. I’d known Dennis since he was a rumpled dumpling who tripped over his own ears, back when he still had hope of mental evolution and keeping his balls. He’d always been a clay-brained barnacle, but I’d never seen him like this. I suspected that even a visitation from the UPS man—the sworn enemy of canines everywhere and Dennis’s archnemesis—couldn’t have roused him. Dennis had succumbed to his own ailment. He’d been ambushed by an invisible assassin, which had blown into his body uninvited and was slowly eating his heart from the inside out. It drank his hope and anesthetized his feelings. Depression.
When you’re depressed, where do you want to go? Nowhere.
Who do you feel like seeing? No one.
Depression hurts in so many ways. Sadness, loss of interest, anxiety. Cymbalta can help.
Big Jim listened to that commercial on repeat one day whilst downing Malibu and Coke before he drunk dialed his best friend’s wife, shit his pants, and passed out on the lawn. I recall that we made two separate trips to Walgreens for Pepto-Bismol the next day.
For a while after the eyeball incident, Dennis had taken up redecorating the house, and against all odds, I found myself missing his demolition days, like when he tore the linoleum out of the kitchen and the time he helped himself to a jumbo bag of prunes from the pantry. This was only marginally less messy than when he drank a gallon of oil and yarfed up an Exxon Valdez–sized spill on the dining table.
Now Dennis—like Big Jim—was in crisis. He missed Big Jim so much it was killing him. I got to work immediately, pushing pills as close to Big Jim as I could without him sampling my thighs. I attempted dive-bys, launching individual tablets into his mouth midair, but the all-important swallowing part never happened and he just drooled out my precious pills in thick globs of blood. I launched heartworm chews and coffee and Snickers bars, I offered him old issues of Big Butts™ magazine and the photo of him with sunburnt knees when we caught the big Chinook salmon—still nothing. I Summer’s Eve’d the crap out of him, sifting the white powder all over his twisted joints and ganja-colored skin. None of it seemed to help.
The sadness started to get to me too. And listen, I’m an eternal optimist; “plucky” is how I’m often described and I won’t argue with it. Big Jim says that I’m a smart aleck, too brainy for my own good and a “fucking opportunist” (he grossly underestimated my love for coinage). I am well-read, have watched countless hours of educational and, thanks to Big Jim, reality television, and I tend to see the good in things. Generally, I believe the best is yet to come, but this? This was hard. A sadness crept under my skin like an army of termites, nibbling away at my resolve. At times, my heart felt like the fruit that shriveled and grew fur on the kitchen counter, bruised and rotting, fodder for flies. It made my legs feel heavy, made flight a chore. But while my sadness was temporary and healable—the makings of a scar—I knew, sure as I molt, that Dennis’s was terminal. He was dying from sadness.
So yours truly embarked on two projects. Project Wellness and Project Happiness. I started using what I’d learned as a fledgling from Big Jim, when he first took me into his home, when the treat training was so successful that I began to resemble a monster truck tire and he had to mitigate the rate of reward. But Dennis’s hunger strike was legitimate. Even when I brought him kibble, piece by piece, he wouldn’t leave the laundry room or Big Jim’s rancid skivvies. So, I was forced to bring in the big guns: Cheetos®, those delectable, radioactive poofs. Using my beak, I broke them into small chunks and placed a piece just out of Dennis’s reach. I watched his spongy nose twitch and a forehead fold lift to expose an inquisitive eye. He sniffed again and unrolled a carpet of pink tongue to lasso the Cheeto®. As Big Jim had done when I was a chick, I placed the Cheeto® lures just out of Dennis’s sight. At first I got more sniffs. Then a twitch of the paw. Then—eureka!—I got a tail wag. Finally, Dennis lifted his hulking mass of skin off the butt huggers, drove his snuffer to the ground, and snarfed up my lures like a champ.
I thought about the Cymbalta commercial. Since I didn’t have any Cymbalta and wasn’t willing to risk another foray to Walgreens—for your info, none of the medications there work anyway, they did diddly-jack for Big Jim—I thought about what the people and the dog that looks like a homeless Sammy Hagar were doing in the commercial. They were frolicking. That’s exactly what Dennis needed: a frolic. Exercise. So, I implemented playtime, where I’d yank his tail and he’d chase me across the yard. I cached Cheetos® and Funyuns® and kibble and beef jerky and chunks of Hungry-Man frozen dinners around the house and yard, watching Dennis and his uncanny schnoz track down every last morsel. Against all odds, I enjoyed it. I worked on perfecting my whistle and replicating how Big Jim called for Dennis, “ZzzzZZZt! Dennis! Here, boy!” rewarding Dennis for answering my calls. I practiced the words in my best Big Jim from the back of my throat, “Dennis! Sit!” and marveled as Dennis parked his keister on the grass below my branch, waiting for me to toss him a bright yellow Peep. And would you believe it, the old Dennis started to come back. There he was with his rudder of a tail, plodding perkiness, that lumbering bloodhound bulk with more wrinkles than a cat’s ass, and dare I say it, when I mimicked Big Jim’s throaty calls of “Good boy!” I even saw Dennis smile, puffing clouds of salmon jerky into the night air. I like to think he believed I was just like Big Jim. That I was a MoFo.
When I wasn’t working on Dennis’s disposition for Project Happiness, I was in the basement, spitting pills down Big Jim’s gullet. How long did this go on for? Can’t say for sure—I’ve never fully grasped the concept of time—but I can tell you that I tried to follow Big Jim’s Big Boobs Hot German Girls calendar and that we got through one month (two whole German boobs). I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I leave our home, fly out beyond our Ravenna neighborhood in search of help and medical assistance? Your question is valid and only slightly annoying. I made a choice, you see. I chose to stay close to Big Jim and keep to the nest because of the noises. During our forays into the yard, Dennis and I would hear sounds, sounds that were like fireworks and gunfire but louder. For a time, the sky was empty of birds like during war or the Fourth of July. We heard haunting shrieks we’d never heard before. Worst of all, we heard screaming. One evening, a crane fly—all gangly legs and drunken flight—landed on top of our fence. After catching his breath and stabilizing the quiver in his diaphanous wings, he called out to me.
“Stay inside!” he warned in a voice like the brittle rubbing of sticks. I ignored him as I’d always ignored insects and the constant babble of Aura. “Listen! Listen! Ghubari says you must stay inside!”
My skin pebbled into hard bumps. Ghubari. Ghubari knew I didn’t listen to Aura. He had sent a warning anyway. I trusted Ghubari. It was enough for me. Dennis and I both now knew something very big was happening and I wasn’t willing to throw us into whatever it was that ripped apart a silent night, toward whatever it was that snapped an evergreen in half. Call me naive or a coward and I’ll show you a crow who is here to tell you the goddamned story. After all, the best way is always to look out for numero uno. Despite my efforts, Big Jim stayed in the basement, wearing down much of his arm against the concrete wall while smelling like a keg of sautéed cat pee, but whenever I started to feel sorry for myself, I thought of Triscuits.
In the middle of our Project Happiness month, the first tenacious buds began to kiss the air around them and the strange sounds finally stopped. Dennis and I celebrated by spending more time in the yard, chasing one another and working very hard at our happiness. Dennis even chased off
taunting college crows and the salacious squirrels intent on tea-bagging the garden gnome. Some nights, Dennis would run to the fence, barking himself into a slobbering frenzy, smacking the panic button. As he’d raise his rubbery lips to the sky to let out a hound’s bellow, I’d summon him inside.
“ZzzzZZZt! Dennis! Come inside and have a Twinkie!” It was my best attempt at instilling a sense of preservation in Dennis, and I’d lecture him from Big Jim’s armchair about how in order to better one’s survival odds, one should never be a hero, while he lay on the couch and licked his peeper. Confession time: I stored the Twinkie pieces in the cookie jar and may or may have not accidentally treated Dennis to Big Jim’s eyeball. I have apologized to Big Jim profusely but honestly, he doesn’t seem to miss it. Anyway, mea culpa.
Dennis’s kibble ran out, but thanks to Big Jim’s ursine appetite and predilection for a bargain, there were enough pantry staples to keep Dennis’s heart afloat and his bowels permanently volcanic. This meant that I got to stay close to my nest and, apart from the odd recon flight, steer clear of the great unknown, of predators and meese and the den of horror that is Walgreens.
And then one morning, I found Big Jim’s cell phone. I was hunting for Dennis’s KONG and discovered it underneath Big Jim’s camouflage-duvet bed where he must have left it before the eyeball incident. A rush buzzed through me. Big Jim’s cell phone! This would surely perk him up; he loved that thing. Yes! An opportunity to call for help! 911! I pressed on the power button and miraculously, the cell phone lit up, bright screen aglow with a welcoming chirp. A chiming melody.
And then hell broke from its fucking chains again.
An unearthly scream ripped through the house. Dennis hit the panic button, coughing out distress in booming barks. The scream stopped. Breakneck crashing of footsteps shook the house. Big Jim was fucking leaving the basement. The footsteps thundered up the stairs at lightning pace, full tilt, and I knew—a corvus knowing—he was coming straight for me. My eyes darted around his bedroom, looking for somewhere to hide. Half open closet? Drawer of the clothing cupboard? Could I open the ammo trunk? No, he’d find me. The phone chimed again—fucking software update alert—and the house filled up with a dreadful, skull-splintering scream. My god! Where was Dennis? Where did I see him last? Where did I leave him? I thought of Triscuits and shook my head, trying to use up the last few seconds before sick Big Jim found me. I had to keep the phone, it was my only hope, a chance to help Big Jim. Furious footsteps shook the ground. Think, S.T. Think.
Hollow Kingdom Page 3
