The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New

by Damien Broderick

  Now that the floor was cleaner, The Boys deigned to investigate. Lord Peter scaled an old steamer trunk, while Archie peered into a clothing barrel. Lovejoy prowled further afield.

  Sarah wondered what was in the trunk. Lord Peter jumped down as she cautiously looked into the trunk. Women’s clothes. She picked up a dress and shook it out. She recognized the style as something quite fashionable thirty some years ago, and realized these must be her mother’s clothes. Who had put them away? Her father? Surely not. He hadn’t spoken of her mother after she left; sometimes it was like the woman hadn’t even existed. All Sarah had of the woman were a few photos she’d found. What could have pulled her away from her husband and little daughter?

  Beneath other dresses Sarah found a purse, some silk scarves, and a cedar box that rattled as she picked it up. In that she found a jumble of rings, earrings, bracelets and necklaces. Her mother’s jewelry. Odd. Her father always claimed her mother took everything with her. And yet here was proof her mom had left something behind. Sarah poked through the stuff and drew out a ring with a marquis diamond.

  Archie had jumped into the trunk and made a nest at one end. “Look at this.” She held the ring out to him; he sniffed the diamond, then yawned. Absolutely no interest. “This looks like an engagement ring.”

  Lovejoy started scratching somewhere, and Sarah waved a vague hand at him. “Knock it off, Love.”

  At the bottom of the box lay a plain gold band. Sarah turned it over and over in her fingers, then slipped it onto her right hand. It fit perfectly. A woman’s ring. Odd, though, that her mother had left these behind. Usually women took their jewelry with them, even their wedding and engagement rings. She selected an oval garnet and pearl brooch. This appeared quite old, like something that might have belonged to a grandparent. Toward the bottom of the trunk Sarah found a pile of baby clothes, handcrafted. Sarah inspected an outfit and knew it had been for her—and that her mother had sewn it. What kind of mother would so lovingly make something for her baby, then abandon her?

  Lovejoy’s scratching became more persistent now, and Sarah looked up. He stood at the door to the third room, and he was determined to get in. “Here, let me.” She turned the knob, but nothing happened. Then she saw the old key that had fallen onto the floor. She picked it up, blew the dust off it, inserted it into the lock, and turned. The door swung open, its hinges creaking loudly.

  Lovejoy padded into the room. Lord Peter followed. This room was quite small and contained only two things: another trunk, pushed up against the far wall, and a plain wooden chair facing that. The dust wasn’t as heavy here as elsewhere in the basement—almost as if the room had been cleaned from time to time.

  Lovejoy jumped onto the trunk, while Lord Peter settled onto the chair, staring at his pal.

  And even before she had taken a step into the room, Sarah knew what was in the trunk. “No,” she said, and the sound was more moan than word. “No.”

  It couldn’t be…she didn’t want it to be…but…she had to know. For sure.

  Gently she nudged Lovejoy aside. She lifted the lid and stared into the trunk’s dark depths. She gave a little cry, then dropped the trunk lid.

  So, night after night, her father had come down here, and he had sat in this chair and watched the trunk, the trunk where he had put her mother’s body. Night after night. And then he had gone on the road, leaving his house, leaving his child, leaving his wife alone here in the dark.

  Sarah started to cry then, and the cats, alarmed, weaved around her feet, brushing against her. She picked up Lovejoy and buried her face in his fur and wept.

  Her mother hadn’t deserted her then. Her mother had loved her. The tightness that had been in her chest all day loosened somewhat, and she rubbed at her eyes.

  But what was she going to do? Call the police? Her father was dead now. Call the relatives? They didn’t care. Or leave her mother in her final resting place?

  She had to go upstairs, at least for a while. “C’mon, guys.” She picked up the flashlight, and waited for the cats to come up the stairs. She whirled around as she heard a key in a lock.

  Brian stepped into the kitchen. Lord Peter made a sound, deep in his throat, and it wasn’t a purr.

  “Brian.” Sarah could scarcely breathe now.

  He smiled shakily. “I couldn’t leave. Not without saying goodbye. Not without talking to you.” He strode across to her and took her in his arms.

  “Don’t ever leave me, okay?” she said. He nodded, his face pressed into her hair. She wanted him to stay with her, no matter what.

  He saw the open cellar door. “You were downstairs?”

  “Yes. Cleaning.” She smiled. “I’ve found something, too. It’s incredible. You have to see it.” Sarah took her husband by the hand, clasped the heavy flashlight in the other hand, and led him downstairs.

  Lovejoy watched from the top of the stairs, then trotted back into the kitchen. He stood up on his hind legs and pushed at the door. It swung shut with a resounding clap. Then he went to his food dish to sit with Lord Peter and Archie, and wait for their mistress to come back upstairs.

  REVERENCE FOR CATS from THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, by Mark Twain

  Spain chastised the Moors five or six years ago, about a disputed piece of property opposite Gibraltar, and captured the city of Tetouan. She compromised on an augmentation of her territory, twenty million dollars’ indemnity in money, and peace. And then she gave up the city. But she never gave it up until the Spanish soldiers had eaten up all the cats. They would not compromise as long as the cats held out. Spaniards are very fond of cats. On the contrary, the Moors reverence cats as something sacred. So the Spaniards touched them on a tender point that time. Their unfeline conduct in eating up all the Tetouan cats aroused a hatred toward them in the breasts of the Moors, to which even the driving them out of Spain was tame and passionless. Moors and Spaniards are foes forever now. France had a minister here once who embittered the nation against him in the most innocent way. He killed a couple of battalions of cats (Tangier is full of them) and made a parlor carpet out of their hides. He made his carpet in circles—first a circle of old gray tomcats, with their tails all pointing toward the center; then a circle of yellow cats; next a circle of black cats and a circle of white ones; then a circle of all sorts of cats; and, finally, a centerpiece of assorted kittens. It was very beautiful, but the Moors curse his memory to this day.

  “…AND MONGO WAS HIS NAME-O,” by A. R. Morlan

  i.

  “My sorrows will be over when I find companionship in a cat.”

  —Ahmad ibn Faris, Iranian scholar and philologist (d. 1005)

  “One cat just leads to another.”

  —Ernest Hemingway, American author

  ii.

  There still wasn’t enough snow on the ground for her to be able to tell if the smudgy, indistinct footprints clustered around the back entrance to her apartment were feline or from a skunk or a raccoon, but as far as she was concerned, cold-out was cold-out, and no night-roaming creature should have to go hungry, especially in the cold. So she added a bag of cat food, the cheapest kind the store sold, to her list. She was tempted to get the brand Yoda used to like, but she honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d even seen that kind on the shelves—Yoda had been gone for over ten years, and since then, she’d been so careful to avoid doing anything which might unexpectedly invoke his memory, she hardly ever walked down the pet food aisle anymore.

  But the footprints convinced her that whatever it was out there, it might be hungry, and regardless of what sort of a creature it was, it apparently had decided to stick around her part of the house-turned-apartment complex.

  And most small mammals could eat cat food…I’ll just make sure it’s the cheapest kind, she reminded herself, as she added it to the short grocery list written on a die-cut-cat-topped pad of paper with the inscription, “From the paw of…,” under the orange cat’s dangling left paw.

  iii.

  The sm
allest bag of cheap dry food she’d been able to find was still an arm-tiring three-and-a-half pounds, so she’d had to make frequent stops and starts on her way home that evening after work. But it was because of the weight of her cloth bag that she ended up stopping near one of those chips and candy vending machines next to the soda machine outside the hardware store. She vaguely recalled that the spot where the first vending machine now stood used to feature a live bait contraption (something so repulsive to her—living creatures waiting to be somehow scooped up and deposited at the bottom of a chute once some money was fed into the dollar-sucking slot—that she’d usually avoided standing anywhere near the thing), but now there was a new machine in its place…one with a hand-colored sign inserted in the spot where the chips and candy logo used to be.

  “GENUINE ‘TRASH BAGS’—WHY PAY MORE FOR A TRASH BALL WHEN YOU CAN GET A WHOLE BAG???”

  She had heard of trash balls, those small clear plastic spheres filled with tiny tidbits of human offal, some mundane as a stubbed out cigarette, others as exotic as a foreign stamp still attached to picture postcard, or a tightly-folded dropped note found on a sidewalk. Some fellow over in Washington D.C. started selling them back around the turn of the century, and slowly they spread westward—when she and a co-worker from the bank went to St. Paul-Minneapolis for a seminar, she’d seen a trash ball machine outside a dry cleaners. True, she’d received only a folded up cigarette pack for her quarter, but it was a Canadian brand she’d never heard of before, and there were worse ways to blow a quarter.

  But whoever bought this old snack machine and re-purposed it as a trash bag vendor had gone the traditional trash ball machines one better—s/he had affixed bits of paper to the outside of each bag (with said bags being recycled themselves, some from fast food joints, others from established stores), which gave a teasing indication of what might be inside. Most were standard emoti-cons, ranging from smiles followed by question marks, to clowns, what looked to be an Elvis, a Pope-icon, and even LOL’s…but one was far more intricate, and specific, than the rest:

  (“–“-/”).__. .—‘ ‘” -._.

  6_ 6 ) -. ) -. -. ____.)

  .. (_ Y_;) ’..---/ /-- ’ ! ; -..--- ’

  ( i i), -’’ -- ( i i) , ’ (( ! . – ’

  Plus whatever was inside was covered by a bag from one of those Big Box pet-food/supplies only places, which was crudely stapled shut along the folded-over top. The bag was positioned behind a marker labeled

  “C-9”—she appreciated the additional association (“C” for cat, “9” for nine lives), and reflexively dug around in the coin pocket of her Burberry plaid wallet for a couple of quarters.…

  iv.

  Once she found an old plastic margarine container which wasn’t too high, she poured out a couple of cups worth of the “X”-shaped dry food into it, then placed it partway under the decrepit back deck attached to the house where she lived—the people who’d built it had done a half-assed job, and most of the lattice work around the base of the deck was either missing or badly weather-damaged, so she was able to shove the makeshift bowl of food about half a foot under the deck. Just so whatever it was that was coming around could eat under the cover of the deck floor, rather than out in the open. It might have been easier to use one of Yoda’s old cat dishes, but she’d buried his favorite one with him, and the others she’d given away to the animal shelter, along with his bleach-sanitized litter pan and bedding. His toys, she’d kept, save for the pink-and-green bizzy ball she’d also placed in his box, next to his body, the one whose little silver bell was gone.

  She did consider taking her big blue 9-volt battery flashlight outside, to peer under the dirt-floored expanse of the deck, but if the creature leaving the footprints was a skunk, she didn’t way to scare it by shining a light in its half-awake face. So she simply shoved the bowl of crunchy food under the deck, and made her way back inside her quarter of the subdivided house.

  v.

  Once her groceries were put away, and the bag of cat food placed under her sink, she finally allowed herself to open the cat-decorated bag she’d impulsively bought on the way home. It was heavy, and had something rectangular inside, that much she could tell from the feel of it once it had plopped down the vending machine chute, and landed in the chrome glass-shielded bottom receptacle. Now sitting on her counter next to the sink, under the clear bright light from that we energies gift box of energy-savings supplies (insulating tape, a water-sav’r shower head, and a couple of coiled bulbs), the bag’s pet store logo shone garish, yet vibrant, in the dull, weathered confines of her paint-peeling-cabinets-and stained-formica kitchen, as if it somehow belonged in another newer place.

  Telling herself, Don’t go getting excited about a bag full of cast-off junk from some Dumpster, she nonetheless found herself peeling apart the stapled top of the bag with the same sort of anticipatory excitement she used to associate with birthday and Christmas gifts. Once the top was open, she could see the glint of something metal and glass inside, as well as numerous other small, oddly-shaped items—

  —but she made sure she emptied the bag before actually taking stock of what was inside, not looking too closely at the things she laid out neatly across her gold-flecked white countertop until everything was positioned before her:

  An empty frame, tarnished silver, but deeply embossed with a design of fish bones, small balls of yarn, and cat silhouettes, with a deep blue velveteen backing piece behind the smudged glass insert.

  Bits of cut-out photographs, from the 1970s or so, since she hadn’t seen that type of developing—one square white-rimmed picture to the right, roughly three-by-three inches, plus an extra bit of paper to the left; a rectangle marked with the words “One Picture to Keep, One to Share” over a scored smaller picture, more wallet-sized than the first—since she was in high school, back in the mid-70s. All the smaller pictures were gone, with just the slightly tufted remains of the two scored edges to indicate that something had been torn away, and each of the bigger pictures had had the central images cut out, leaving tantalizing outside corners still bearing shiny bits of faded color. The remaining images were indoor shots, hinting at stuffed animals (all cats, from what she could make out), bedding, pillow corners, and only fragments of the wall-papered walls beyond (some sort of flowered pattern). The cut-out shapes varied—some were circles, others rounded-cornered rectangles, and one was a heart…and on the inside edges of the round part of the two halves of the heart-shape, she saw the remains of something black and triangular, very close to the inner cleft of the heart. From their position relative to each other, she finally figured out what had been left out of the heart-shaped picture—the tips of the cat’s ears. Whoever owned these pictures had been cutting out pictures to fit in tiny frames, one of the heart-shaped. Perhaps it was a locket. Or one of those refrigerator magnet-frames. All the other images had been cut so as to include all of the cat, but the tips of the ears just wouldn’t fit inside the heart.

  Cat toys, well-batted and chewed: A quartet of bizzy-balls, minus the inner silvery bells, which had slipped out through a couple of broken slats in the over-all lattice-work shape of the balls; a rabbit-fur-covered mouse, dyed vivid purple, with a half-chewed-off tail; half of a snap-together catnip toy, in the shape of a fuchsia heart; and a beat-up hand-sewn toy cat, crafted of black-and-white material, with a flat face decorated with a magic-marker-drawn pair of eyes, nose, and five whiskers per side over a smiling mouth.

  An old blue-lined pad of paper with a spiral binding, covered with random jottings on every other page or so—grocery lists, reminders to pay bills, and, toward the end, a self-penned song, which was to be “sung to the tune of ‘B-I-N-G-O’,” which ended with the ear-worn refrain:

  “—and Mongo was his name-o:

  M!

  O!

  N!

  GO!

  And Mongo was his name-o!”

  The handwriting was fluid, feminine, and slightly old-fashioned, with capital letters far more
ornate than anything she’d learned in grade school.

  Seventies photo developing, and a cat’s name gleaned from a classic 1974 comedy, Blazing Saddles. Which told her that this cat had to have been 1) male, and 2) probably very big. And he had black ears.

  Plus, since almost forty years had passed since the pictures were taken (then carefully cut apart), and the toys were chewed, Mongo was as long gone as her Yoda.

  Telling herself that she could use toothpaste to clean up the little silver frame, and maybe put a picture of Yoda in it, she swept the other things off the counter back into the bag, then re-folded the top, and set it next to the bag of cheap cat food under her sink.

  Time to start making her supper.…

  vi.

  Although she hadn’t dreamed of it in many years, not since she’d had that same dream two nights in a row—something which had never before or since happened to her—about a reborn Yoda, who was now living in some high rise apartment in New York City, with a middle-aged couple who obviously weren’t rich, but were comfortable enough to afford a carpeted cat tree for him, plus a nice self-standing metal cage in the middle of the living room, and even though the cat who was telling her silently in the dream that he was, indeed Yoda, wasn’t a silvery gray stripe with disproportionately big ears, but instead a marmalade tomcat with relatively smallish ears, she didn’t believe him at first, which was why she ended up dreaming exactly the same dream once again, tonight she had an even older dream, the passed-on-cats dream, one of the ones which used to feature Yoda, plus all the other cats she’d had during her life.

  The setting was always the same, even if the cats who came to her changed: A grassy field, endless rolling ground with the hint of undulations under the thick verdant Kelly green grass, dotted with dozens upon dozens of cats, a multi-hued and shaped cloud of rolling, lying, kitty-yoga-licking, jumping and hunkering cats. Some of them were recognizable to her, others new, but between her and the cats was this thick brick wall, dark-chocolate-brown brick, with slightly weathered, going-to-powder mousse-brown mortar between the bricks, which were set about a dozen bricks thick across the top, and perhaps two dozen high. Just enough to keep her from comfortably climbing on top of the thick barrier, but not enough to prevent her from leaning close to the wall. And as she came closer, one or more of her former cats would jump up on the wall, and let her pet them. Once it was Brutus, he of the huge round cheeks and daintily scalloped white “shoes” along the bottoms of his front paws. Another time, pale tiger-striped Jezebel, and her brother Tigger. The last time she’d been there, it was Yoda, no longer crippled by that virus he’d caught in kitten-hood, no longer wiggling that undulating, back-and-forth wobbling walk, but as perfect as he was born to be, but his hoarse cry was the same.