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

by Damien Broderick

  THE HUNTER’S MOTHERS, by Mary A. Turzillo [Poem]

  My new mother gave me milk in a bowl,

  groomed me with her large smooth paws,

  held me, not in her mouth like my first mother,

  but in her big lap, where I fell asleep.

  I watched her each day, carefully,

  so she could teach me to groom,

  and hunt, and mate, and do whatever

  was catly for me to perform.

  She cut meat that she had caught

  somewhere, and put it on plates as big as me

  for her other kittens, the large bald ones.

  But she never let me have the knife

  nor let me play with the meat. Was I unworthy?

  I went to the door, thinking she would take me

  out in the grass and teach me to hunt.

  But she said no.

  And when I did go out, she stayed inside

  and taught me nothing of hunting.

  Perhaps I was too small, my claws too blunt

  to catch meat for her and her unfurry kittens.

  With practice, I caught a small meaty thing

  that wriggled until I batted it to stillness.

  Rather than eat it at once, I took it to Mother.

  She screamed and threw it away.

  Was it not large enough?

  Was it not good meat?

  I could not get it out of the big can where she puts

  uninteresting vegetables and bones.

  Later I caught others, but never one she liked much

  So I ate them myself, including

  the ones that could fly, which I knew

  Mother especially did not like.

  I have lived a long time with Mother

  Her two-legged kittens grew up big, and ran away.

  She grooms me when I sit on her lap

  but does not thank me for what I catch.

  I know I am an unworthy hunter

  but how could I learn, when she never taught me?

  Maybe she knew I was not as clever as the big meat

  that she catches to put on the high table.

  So I sleep in a patch of sun

  and dream of my first mother,

  who went away, but first taught me

  I have claws.

  HUNGER, by A. R. Morlan

  When David Farley came to New York City, he was a hungry man. In all ways. The job he landed proof-reading junk mail quelled one form of hunger; David was a small man, anyway, and rice, beans and pasta dishes were his forté since college. And being a careful man, conservative in his tastes and habits, he thrived in his poverty, living cheaply, but proudly. One room, hot plate, bath down the hall.

  With autumn came the chance to apply for a job at a real magazine; sf fiction, major news stand distribution, subscription base, and paid lunch hours. Proofreader, and part-part-time assistant to a senior editor. David applied, and another pang of hunger was silenced. But old hunger was stirred: David’s scant income was cut by a third. He was demoted from hunger to near-starvation. YMCA, roach motels extra.

  Months later, come September, on an afternoon when fall still seemed months, years away, David was hurrying back to work, crossing West 49th at Ninth Avenue, his mind on the miserable toothache throbbing along his left lower jaw, and the fact that he had had to leave the dentist’s office with only an appointment he could never afford to keep, when he almost ran into…her.

  Her stench hit him first; fulsome, squishy-moist, like toes trapped in too-tight sneakers. Yet, there was a vague feminine odor about her, a sour yeasty tang that made David’s mouth fill with bitter saliva. She was coming from the direction of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but David doubted, instantly, with certainty, that she was one of the homeless who camped out around there, hoping to bum money off tourists in exchange for carrying a suitcase from the inside of the terminal to the sidewalk beyond, or sitting huddled in ratty blankets, like fraying cocoons, in the hard plastic seats within.

  The woman—middle-aged, old, eternal? David couldn’t tell and didn’t want to know with any certainty—was too flyblown, too far beyond normal pity or revulsion, for anyone to come near enough to slip her a quarter or let a dollar bill flutter into her cupped palms.

  She might have risen from the streets, pulled from the spit and wrapper and ripped movie-ticket encrusted sidewalks like a heat shimmy, to waver and sway in the sun, all but invisible for her natural camouflage, save for her sick redolence, and save for her fluttering nostrils, her liquid hooded eyes.

  Slowly, she moved in a curious sliding shuffle, a wind-driven pile of sweat-ribboned scraps and debris, clinging slapdash to her undefinable body. Oblivious to David as an empty Styrofoam cup rolling down the broad ribbon of sidewalk, she inched forward, head twitching and bobbing, heavy under the layers of folded and twisted sweaters encircling her filth-encrusted dreadlocks.

  That she was black seemed an afterthought, a mere chance of pigmentation under her patina of grime and dried mucus clinging to the furrows near her nose, her mouth, her heavy-lidded eyes.

  Her clawed hands, the fingers twisting in configurations which spoke to David of alien hieroglyphics, shapes whose meaning was unknowable, unclean, framed palms of chalky white-gray: a sick, bloodless color which was scored with broken lines of embedded dirt, a map of the unknown lands from which she had shambled forth into the late summer sun.

  Appalled, yet stirred by a numbing hunger to see just a little more, to look fully before looking away, David stood close to the curb, watching the progress of the street person as she oozed across the street (no cars whizzed past her; instead they eased far away from her, as if fearing what contact with her might do to their glossy paint jobs, their glittering radio antennas), her reek a live thing in his nostrils, stinging the tender flesh there, and clawing into his brain, touching soft, dark, shuttered places.…

  Only, David stood there a second too long. She turned her massive swathed head, only a degree or so to the left, but enough. Eyes like oily marbles, cloudy with only the memory of dark color locked on his rounded blue ones, and in that second of contact without touch, David saw her; the tatter of pilled lace adorning one side of the Peter Pan collar on one of the layered blouses she wore, the fresh scab clinging to her bitten lower lip, an orange plastic child’s bracelet encircling one greasy wrist, the toes-gone graying sneakers with the tongues lolling across her high-boned insteps.

  And, in that second of seeing, came the feeling of a hunger deeper than the soul, deeper than eye-pupil-blackness, of hips-knees-shins-toes-souls numb from moving, moving from nowhere to anywhere forever, of looking for something for so long that remembrance would be of no help when and if the thing arrived in sight…of wanting.

  The woman’s hand made contact with David’s bare forearm before he could jerk away, step back onto the safety of the curb, and run down the crack-veined sidewalk. And in the second in which David did slide his arm out from under her twisted hand, David sensed (knew) that if he hadn’t moved, the woman would have been all over him, pressing her raggy body against his thin, sport-shirt-and-droopy-tie-covered chest, cradling her massive woggling head in the hollow between his head and collarbones, feeding off of him.

  For the hunger was there, in her gelid eyes and cracked, working lips, and David found himself spinning around so quickly he almost caught his foot on the curb and splayed forward onto the sidewalk; almost, but not quite. From the slight elevated safety of the street itself, David stared down at the woman for a second, before walking a block down West 49th until he could lose the woman in the steadily thickening traffic.

  David hurried back to work, almost running now, his toothache all but forgotten as bitter saliva swirled in his mouth, like acidic fire he couldn’t spit out into the gutter, lest the woman be drawn to the expectoration.…

  Yet, as he walked briskly, jacket draped over his free arm (his clean arm), he kept scrubbing his forearm, the one she’d touched, against his hip, scrubbin
g the flesh until fresh sweat made the skin sting, until he could no longer feel the lingering heat of her fingers there, pressing down on his skin.

  It was his own fault, for waiting, for gawking…but had she any right to linger by him, when he had no offering of money in his hand, and no lure of fancy clothing or assumed wealth?

  Neither of them had had any right in looking, in lingering, yet…the fact that they both had done so niggled at David, as did the persisting sense of want, of need, of hunger, he’d felt rising off the woman like steam from something warm, hidden, suddenly exposed to pitiless cold.

  And with the persistent memory of her, of her smell, of her unwelcome touch, David felt the reluctant opening of something deep and scarred within him, the flying open of shutters, the splintered wood banging against moldy walls of bitter remembrance.…

  Before David came to New York, before he finished college, to be exact, his grandmother had gone crazy over the course of one spring and summer. Just what happened to her already-slow mind was hard to say; when people dropped by to try and talk some sense into her, she’d burrow further into her saggy and worn lavender sweater, pull her hairless, shiny, skinny legs close to the legs of her rocker, and let her frazzled mane of stringy brown and gray hair fall over her greasy face before barking, “Mindyerownbusiness!” in that phlegm-clotted voice of hers. Soon, people learned not to stop by and urge her to see a doctor. Soon people quit coming to the house altogether.

  And then David’s grandmother retreated to her bedroom, off the living room, leaving her door open only wide enough to watch a sharply slanted image of the television set in the opposite corner of the living room. David’s family sometimes heard her cough, or sneeze, or snore loudly and moistly, a sloppy fluttering buzz that all but drowned out the television. (Turn up the volume, though, and she’d mumble sing-songed accusations: “Inconsiderate bastards” “Need some manners around this house” so David’s family just began to edge closer to the set, like guilty moths.)

  And she did things: Broke David’s sister’s little glass carousel, the one she’d received after appearing in the chorus of the college summer musical of the same name; broke the base of the fragile spun glass bauble, then tried to rearrange the shattered fragments next to the base, but Susan knew what had happened, and bawled out loud before saying a few choice words when she saw the damage. That only brought the old lady out of her room with a shuff-shuff of her frowzy blue slippers and shaking of her plush red bathrobe (and this was in July, hot, sticky, muggy July), and with every step the old woman’s mouth was working, working, making the turkey wattle under her chin sway and shiver like the last glob of misshapen gelatin in the bowl.

  And as this thing that had once been David’s grandmother called Susan and the rest of them vipers, bastards, liars and fuckers, David breathed through his mouth; after weeks cooped up in her bedroom (emerging only to sneak food from the kitchen which lay beyond the bathroom which was connected to her room, or to occupy the sole bathroom long enough to cause extreme discomfort for the rest of the family), the old woman stank. The smell was worse than the lingering odor she left behind after she finally flushed prior to vacating the bathroom, more cloying than excrement, yet sweeter, too. Like chicken gone slimy, or old perfume soured by sweat.

  The old woman had been spending less and less time bathing over the past year or so—self-righteously she claimed that since she never sweated, she couldn’t smell bad, even though David’s mother had to wash the old woman’s clothes separately from those of the rest of the family, because of the greasy-sweet bacon reek her garments gave off—so David should have been used to the smell, but he wasn’t.

  David’s grandmother’s hair hung down from under her bandanna in greasy, limp strings, too clotted with dirt to move in the rush of air from the fan in the corner. Idly David wondered what had happened to the woman who’d gone religiously for her permanent every spring and fall when he was a boy. That woman was his Gramma. Not this…creature which bellowed in a throaty croak, shaking a yellow-nailed finger at his sobbing sister. Reflexively backing away, David wondered how anyone could have loved the woman in the red robe long enough to help her conceive David’s own mother. By the fall of that year, David and his sister were back in school, but his parents moved out of the house which his mother and grandmother co-owned. There the old woman puttered about and half-starved herself, even though their town had Meals on Wheels and Kinship for the elderly.

  The old lady alienated every able-bodied man in town who cut lawns, shoveled snow or did any sort of handiwork, until she reached the point where the house was slowly going to rot and David’s folks had to stop by to bring her food and to arrange for the house to be fixed up. And still the old woman used every opportunity to cut down, criticize, and out-and-out insult everyone with whom she came into contact.

  David wouldn’t go to visit her—what Susie did was her own fool business—but a few times he grudgingly spoke on the phone with her. Upon hearing that saccharine warble “Goooodbye!” he’d slam down the receiver with one hand, and whip her an unseen bird with the other. Sometimes he’d mumble “Bitch” for his own benefit. But still…he couldn’t help but feel funny when he opened the card Mom relayed to him from the old lady for his twenty-first birthday. The unsigned card more suitable for a young boy than an adult, with the note written in a shaky, huge hand which was folded around a $100.00 bill:

  “Dear David:

  May you have the ‘Happiest of Birthdays’ every day of the year. To me you have been the joy of my life always.

  Love,

  your Gramma”

  The note made David mad and sad and a little bit exasperated. He couldn’t forgive the old lady for the way she’d been, even before she went out-and-out crazy, but…yet…something inside him told David that he’d been the rotten one, no matter what names she’d called him when he was a teenager, no matter what she’d done to his graduation pictures (sneaking into his room, into his desk, to grub around in his papers for the pictures of her posed with honors-graduate David—so that she could draw huge blue ball-point-pen goggle eyes over her own shut-against-the-flash-glare thin-lashed eyes), no matter that she’d bemoaned the fact that his parents bought Susie a carnation and rosebud corsage when she graduated high school, saying to whomever was within earshot, “We could have bought a loaf of bread for what that flower cost.”

  For she was his grandmother, even if she stank, even if she was a balding, wattled, greasy bloated whathaveyou by the time she finally died of ovarian cancer. He’d had to take the word of his family about her bullet-hard bloated belly under the greasy robe, and the other physical changes. He’d refused to come to the funeral, knowing that he’d smell the lingering odor of her flesh over any flowers in the church.…

  Just as he knew that buying the bouquet of flowers from the vendor near the Museum of Modem Art (he had no appetite for the wares of the hot dog and cold pop vendor also camped out near the broad front steps of the museum) was his way of trying to tell himself it was all right that he’d stopped to gawk at the street person, that he deserved a little something beautiful and sweet smelling and fragile-alive to comfort himself, something to stop the hunger he felt within himself for human contact, for time spent without the need for money to exchange hands—even as the lingering memory of the foul woman’s touch burned his skin from within, and a nagging hungry voice whispered within him, What she was offering you wasn’t wrapped around a $100.00 bill.…

  David Farley’s hunger diminished when he was offered a promotion at his sf magazine after a year of diligent, uncomplaining work. Assistant Editor, a permanent desk, and no more missed appointments at the dentist. Good-bye YMCA, and left-behind roach motels. One room plus kitchenette, and half bath on the lower west side. He no longer walked anywhere near the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  A scant five months later, a second promotion; editorship of a sister publication of his sf magazine, an experimental soft sf/fantasy venture David didn’t expect t
o last six issues, but the money meant good cooked meals at home. Recipes which didn’t call for rice, beans, or anything but the fanciest Italian pasta.

  The (temporary, he assumed) editor’s chair meant that David had suddenly, magically, reached what he considered the inner circle. During the annual party thrown by the parent publishing firm, he was sought out by toadying would-be writers, and treated with some measure of respect by established figures in the genre. Other editors called him, and sometimes agents would take him to lunch, sometimes buy him drinks. Nothing cheaper than white wine, nothing consisting mainly of beans.

  When an agent for a well-known but recently luckless sf writer (the supposed bestseller wasn’t, no matter how well it had amassed votes in the Nebulas) offered to take David to lunch in order to sell David on the un-bestselling writer’s latest novella, for serialization, David (who had already half-made up his mind to buy the novella anyhow) feigned indecision and accepted the invitation. Anything to escape the ever-growing mound of subs piled on and next to his desk.

  The bar near Broadway and Fifth wasn’t crowded as David and the agent waited for their drinks, but the man in the cheap tie with the stripes going the wrong way insisted on standing right next to David. While the agent was present, playing up his client, the wrong-tie man was easy to ignore, but the agent was wearing one of those clip-on beepers; when a call came through from the agency, the agent downed his Manhattan, bid David a hasty, temporary farewell and trotted off in search of the nearest pay phone. David smiled slightly over his Tom Collins; the lapels on the agent’s plaid jacket didn’t line up right. That secret nubbin of superiority David had gained over the agent was sure to mean that he’d get the novella for what he was offering, not what he was being asked to pay.

  David was still bent over his drink, waiting for the agent, nursing the last few sips of liquor, when the backwards-tie man spoke up. Shimmering circles of ghosts of the glasses already downed ringed the man’s folded hands resting on the bar. In a far corner of the wall, the brackets-mounted TV was tuned to CNN Headline NEWS (stock market listings scrolled across the bottom of the screen, a busy ribbon of blue); the volume was too low to hear, but some report about the on-going shuttle problems at NASA was on. File footage of the Challenger appeared; as it mushroomed into white mist and oblivion, then did it again in slow motion, Mr. Wrong-tie said slowly, solemnly, “Know what I was thinking…when it happened? Not now, but the first time?” David sipped his drink, not letting on that he could hear anything, least of all the man beside him.