by Aimee Bender
This, you see, was the new life. The new life, Karen thought, is a tiny little thing. She never discussed this sentiment with her daughter or her neighbors, but she knew that they agreed: the core of her bones told her so. She set a bucket out on her back porch and retired to a lawn chair beneath the eaves of the house, waiting for her dinner to fall from the sky.
It was Jim Rourke who surprised everyone. Inventing a way to extract water from fish; to separate that liquid as precious as gold from the salty guts and flesh. The news was spread the old fashioned way, through gossip; through leaflets stapled to obsolete telephone poles; through a murmur of electricity, of agitation, that permeated the air.
Karen believed she remembered the name “Jim Rourke.” The letters, the vowels, the composite of the alphabet spelled just that way, sparked a distant memory in her; she would have called it “nostalgia” if she hadn’t already worn out the meaning of that word. She wandered about in a daze for weeks, waiting for her body to spark into excitement, the words “Jim Rourke” escaping her lips haphazardly, an accidental mantra. Finally, she pulled her yearbook from the attic and found his picture, two rows down and to the left of her own. His face, as blank and as indistinguishable as the rest of them.
The next day, she found an announcement flour-pasted to one of the telephone poles. The black lines above hung like old rubber snakes, broken and useless. She eased into her lawn chair, watching the dinner bucket, and thought about Jim’s yearbook portrait, about what had to become of the world before a person like him could ever be a hero.
Karen sat in at the town hall demonstration, swaddled fast between rows upon rows of collapsible metal chairs and sweaty flesh, her tennis shoes rubbing nervously against the high school’s sticky gymnasium floor. Everybody was waiting for something to happen. She craned her head behind her shoulder, eyed the plain white clock that hung just above the closed double doors. Her head realigned itself with the front of her body and her eyes swam to the man in the front of the room. He moved toward the machine.
She watched the fish disappear inside a small box of metal, watched Jim turn the outer dial; the sputtering spigot, the tiny drops of pure, clear water running out into the little glass bowl. This water: this unbearable possibility of life.
When Karen heard the gunshot, she felt her insides shudder with queer relief; with a vague empathy for the assassin. Jim slumped across the stage, his arms flapping like the fins of a fish, blood leaking out from his heart like a faucet. The second bullet sliced clean through Jim’s contraption. Glistening shards of metal and trout swam above the stage in a violent rainbow.
Karen squeezed her eyes shut. In the distance, just beyond the screams and clattering of chairs and the deafening tick of the clock, she could hear trout slapping against the roof of the building.
EAR CAT
CARLTON MELLICK III
Irene’s fingers are wiggly today. They curl in and out of her hand like she is trying to snap all of her fingers at the same time.
“Quit it with the fingers already,” Martin says over the videophone.
Irene paces the living room, straightening pictures of her dead parents on the coffee table, wiggling her fingers, and avoiding the pile of cats in the corner.
“Please,” Martin says. “I need you.”
Irene stops in front of the videophone, but she avoids looking into the screen to Martin’s house. The room he’s in might be dimly lit, decorated with calming earth tones, but it is still too unsettling for her. She faces his video image, but her eyes are locked on a red clay lamp directly above the monitor.
“What if it got lost in the mail?” Irene says.
“I’m sure it will come,” he says. “Be patient.”
Irene has been a member of the Kitty of the Month Club for over six years, and never once has a kitten been delivered this late. Her monthly kitty is the only thing that ever truly calms her down, and it has been several days since the last one expired.
“I can’t be patient without it,” she says.
“You’re making me nervous,” he says. “Calm down.”
Irene realizes her fingers are wiggling, so she clenches them into fists until her knuckles go white. Then she decides to reorganize her antique lamp collection.
“Not the lamps again,” Martin groans. “You just rearranged them this morning.”
Irene’s lamp collection covers every free inch of wall in her living room. Shelves of antique lamps start at the floor and go all the way up to the top of the seventeen-foot-high ceiling, only leaving free space for windows, a couple of couches, the front door, and the fireplace.
Each lamp is a unique work of art. There is a purple mushroom-shaped lamp, a blue porcelain lamp with sparrows painted on the side, a marble lamp shaped like a fat little German boy, a wooden withered tree-shaped lamp, a frog lamp, a shoe lamp, a fishbowl lamp. There are so many varieties of lamps clashing chaotically on her shelves that they are dizzying to the eye; the fact that she absolutely must keep every single lamp turned on at all hours of every day only amplifies this effect.
Martin sneers at Irene’s lamp collection. “Why do you even bother organizing them? They look ugly no matter what order you put them in.”
Irene pulls lamps off the shelves and places them on the floor. A seahorse lamp, a rainbow lamp, a child’s teddy bear lamp. She keeps them all plugged in as she moves them. She can’t handle seeing any of them turned off, even for a minute.
“Last time they were organized by their monetary value, from most expensive to least expensive,” Irene says. “Now I want to organize them by their size from biggest to smallest.”
“But they’re all the same size,” Martin says.
Irene holds a zebra-striped lamp up to a white slinky-shaped lamp. “This one is at least an inch and a half taller than this one.”
Martin groans and turns off the visual on his videophone.
“What did you do that for?” she asks the blank screen where the image of Martin used to be.
His voice comes out of the speakers on the side of the monitor. “Sorry, I can’t take it anymore. Everything’s so busy at your house.”
“But you’re supposed to be helping me,” she says.
“And you’re supposed to be helping me,” he says. “But all you do is make me nervous.”
She wiggles her fingers at the black screen. “But we had only twenty minutes left to go. Now Dr. Ash is going to make us do it all over again tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I hate redoing these phone sessions as much as you do, but you drove me to it.”
“Fine,” she says.
Irene shifts her weight back and forth in front of the screen for a few minutes. Martin remains quiet.
“Well, we might as well just cancel our conversation for the day,” she says. “If we have to redo it again tomorrow, there’s no point in talking anymore today.”
“Sounds good,” Martin says.
He disconnects before she has a chance to say goodbye.
Irene pinches the chunk of skin above the bridge of her nose. A lot of tension builds up in this area of her face, so pinching it often relieves a bit of stress. She calls this area of her face her tickle, because it often tickles if she goes without pinching it for too long.
She holds her tickle, her facial muscles slowly relaxing, as she sways toward her collection of previous Kitties of the Month piled sloppily on the brown-checkered carpeting.
Although the cats were once living, they are now more like stuffed animals. Gen-cats always revert to stuffed animals immediately upon expiration; their innards expel themselves out of various orifices and they can be filled with cotton fluff. That’s the way they were designed.
Irene picks up an ex-cat with red and tan swirls, and snuggles it against her chin. It was last January’s kitty, which they called a cinnamon cat. Remembering back to that time, the cinnamon cat was a frisky playful kitten that freshened her house with a nice cinnamon smell all month long.
Each kitten in the Kitty of the Month Club is bio-engineered by scientists that are referred to as Kitty Artists. Their job is to invent new varieties of cats. So far, Irene has received an orange basketball kitty that bounced when it hit the ground, a unicorn kitty that had a long horn growing from its white forehead, a plushy kitty that was like an animated cat-shaped plush toy, a raspberry blue kitty, an avocado kitty, a circus clown kitty, a helicopter kitty.
They seem to have an endless variety of bio-engineered cats. So far, Irene has loved every single one of them. And once dead, they have all made great additions to her stuffed animal collection.
Normally, Irene keeps her stuffed kitties displayed on shelves in her bedroom, but whenever she is feeling lonely she likes to take them all downstairs and pile them in the living room. That way, they can be at-hand just in case she needs comfort from them.
The Kitty of the Month Club has a motto:
Comforting, High-Quality Companions, Guaranteed.
Dr. Ash refuses to call Irene on the videophone during their therapy sessions. He always insists on seeing her in person. Irene never lets him inside, so he speaks to her through a crack in the doorway. When they speak, she holds a limp goldilocks cat in her arms, with her back to the door. She doesn’t want to catch even the smallest glimpse of the miserable world outside, which looks more like a long-abandoned construction site than a neighborhood street.
“You have been avoiding again,” Dr. Ash says with a miniature smile. “The more you avoid, the harder it will be to confront.”
Irene sticks her finger in her nose. She hates Dr. Ash. She hates that he is only twenty-two and thinks he knows everything just because he’s part of the 3.5 percent of the population that isn’t agoraphobic.
“I want a different therapy partner,” Irene says.
Dr. Ash rubs out the wrinkles in his electric blue suit.
“What’s wrong with Martin?” he says.
“He’s impossible,” she says.
“You said that about your last eleven therapy partners,” he says.
“I’m sick of seeing him on my phone,” she says. “I’m sick of talking about stupid things with stupid people just because you think it will help me.”
“It will help you,” Dr. Ash says.
His eyebrows tighten to his eyelids to show her how genuinely concerned he is.
“What if I don’t want to be helped?” Irene strokes the long golden locks hanging from the stuffed kitten on her lap.
“Don’t you?” Dr. Ash says. “Don’t you want to be able to go outside again?”
Dr. Ash flips through pages in a notebook. “Don’t you want to go to the beach? Go out with friends? Travel to other cities, to other countries?”
She hugs the cat to her chest with all her strength. Then she pinches her tickle.
“No,” she says. “I don’t need any of that. What’s the point in going out anymore? I’ve got everything I need right here. If I’ve got to talk to anybody, I’ve got email. When it’s time to go to work, I log online. If I need to buy something, I shop at an online store and have it delivered. If I want to see anything interesting, the internet has millions of pictures of places that a single person could never visit in a lifetime.”
“Doesn’t that sound like you’re just making excuses?” says Dr. Ash. “I’ve got dozens of other patients who say exactly the same thing.”
“Whatever,” Irene says, stretching her fingers out as far as she can until they begin to hurt.
“I’m going to keep you with Martin,” says Dr. Ash. “I want you to stick with the same therapy partner for at least three months. The more you talk to him the more comfortable you will feel around him. Just stick with it and stop avoiding. It will get easier.”
“I don’t want to talk to him anymore this week,” she says. “At least not until I get this month’s cat.”
“I want you to talk to him tomorrow afternoon for two hours,” he says. “Even without the cat.”
“But I can’t think straight without one.”
“The cat doesn’t matter,” he says.
“But you’re the one who said I should get a pet,” she says.
“I said you should get a pet,” he says. “There’s a big difference between getting a pet and signing up for the Kitty of the Month Club.”
“What difference is that?”
“Just stop worrying about the cat,” he says. “I’m sure it will come later in the day.”
“It better come,” she says, wiggling her fingers.
Irene logs onto the Kitty of the Month Club website to see if there is any mention of a delay in shipping this month. The front page of the site has the Kitty of the Month logo in sparkling glitter letters with cartoon kitties hopping and dancing to accordion music.
The site hasn’t been updated in over a week. The This Month’s Selection page is still an advertisement for last month’s kitten, which was a Cheshire Kitty based on the cat from Alice in Wonderland, complete with a wide toothy grin.
After clicking on all the different pages, even checking the message board for recent announcement posts, Irene gives up. There is no mention of a delay. There is no information on what the new cat is going to be like. She begins to wonder if the company has gone out of business.
“What if there aren’t any more coming?” she says to her lamp collection. “What if I’ll never get another one?”
She tries not to think about it and goes to a different website that sells brass instruments. Irene is a collector of horns. Hanging on the wall in her cellar, she has a fine collection of French horns, Vienna horns, double horns, and other brass instruments that Irene likes to call curly horns.
Although Irene has no idea how to play any of the instruments she owns, she likes to try. All that ever comes out when she plays are loud obnoxious noises, but there is something relaxing about feeling her lips vibrate against a mouthpiece. It’s not really playing the instruments that appeals to Irene. She just likes the look of her collection on the wall.
Irene loves collecting things. She has her horn collection, her lamp collection, her cat collection; these things are important to her. They are the only friends she needs.
Since she hasn’t gotten her Kitty of the Month selection, Irene decides to order a new French horn. She pays to have it shipped overnight. If she doesn’t get her Kitty of the Month selection, at least she will get a new horn as a kind of consolation.
The delivery machine arrives at her front door with smoke drizzling out of its faceless spherical head, its body trembling and making a loud clanking sound. Irene spies out her window at the caterpillar-shaped device as it reaches into its hollow body with rubber-coated limbs. Irene’s lower lip flickers as she sees the condition of her package. The rickety delivery bot drops it out of its chest, leaving it lopsided on her doorstep. The box is wrinkled and wet, one of its sides is completely smashed inward.
“You piece of junk!” Irene yells through the door.
The machine turns around and sputters toward the next house on the gray, muddy suburban street.
Irene waits for the delivery machine to get out of sight before making her move. As she opens the door, she focuses her eyes on the package. She steps out of the doorway with only one foot, keeping the other safely inside. Her arms stretch out to their limit and seize the edge of the package. In one jerking motion, she pulls the package inside and slams the door.
“Crappy delivery machines,” Irene says, staring down at the dilapidated box.
The Kitty of the Month Club logo is scraped down to the cardboard, as if the package had been dragged across asphalt for thirty yards.
“If anything happened to it I’m going to... ”
The package moves. Something is alive inside. The kitten was not destroyed during transport.
Irene smiles so wide that her lips crack. She frantically cuts the packaging tape with her front door key. It is the only thing her door key is good for anymore. While cutting, she wonders what kind o
f cat it will be. She thinks, will it be a rainbow-colored cat? Will it be a flying cat? Will it be a ninja cat that hides in shadows and sneak-attacks your toes when you least expect it?
When she opens the box, her smile fades away. There is something hideous inside. She’s not quite sure what it is. All she can see are... ears.
The cat jumps out of the box and stretches against the carpeting, giving Irene a good look at it. The kitten doesn’t have any hair. Instead of fur, the kitten has ears. It has a coat of human ears of all different sizes and shapes, sewn together in a sort of ear-kitty Frankenstein way.
Irene backs away from the cat. She isn’t sure how such a monstrosity got into her Kitty of the Month Club box. She is sure that the company made a mistake. She is sure the Kitty Artists accidentally sent a failed experimental cat instead of the real one. Her hand reaches for the box. Each monthly cat comes with an introduction card explaining its unique characteristics. She is sure there will be a different cat listed on the card.
As her hand digs through the litter in the box, the thing turns its head and looks at Irene. The cat’s face is like a tiny person’s face, with a human’s mouth, nose, and eyes.
“Meow,” says the cat.
The thing doesn’t meow like a cat; it says meow in the way that a person might say it.
Irene wonders if the thing has the intelligence of a human.
“Meow,” says the cat, glaring at her with tiny blue human eyes.
The card says that it is an Ear Cat. It wasn’t a mistake. This mutant animal is the right Kitty of the Month selection they sent out to everyone.
“What the hell were they thinking?” Irene says to the ear cat as it licks the lobe of an ear on its hip.
Normally, the card will give a paragraph-long story about the unique personality and physical attributes of the monthly cat, but this time all the card says is:
