The Second Cat Megapack. George Zebrowski

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kitten blinked a kitty-kiss at her and began purring, as if she’d just said he was the most beautiful animal in the uni­verse.

      The kitten’s capacity for affection wasn’t in keeping with his appearance; not only were his ears way too big, so huge they almost met in the center of his upper head, but his face was all…wrong.

      The too-small green eyes were only the beginning. The kitten’s forehead and nose were all of one line, unbroken by dips, bumps, or anything. Just a straight slope from the too-­close ears down to the nose leather. Arlene’s cats, while not purebreds, were similar to each other in that their noses all dipped down par­allel to their eyes in a pleasing sloping “S” curve. Years ago, Arlene had a cat named Louie who closely resembled an Oriental Shorthair, and even his nose had had a slight dip to it.

      But the kitten’s nose resembled something drawn with a straight-edge. Head-on he looked even worse, for his white face was marred in the middle by an irregular blotch which completely obscured his nose, leather and all. When Arlene glanced at him fast, it, almost seemed that he had no nose at all. And his tiny, slightly bulging eyes didn’t add to his beauty, either.

      Gently pulling back the kitten’s gums, she said, “Just want to check your teeth…good boy.” Wiping off cat spittle onto her smock top, Arlene frowned to herself. This kitten had his canines. Top and bottom, almost fully grown in. Which made him.… “Hum, lemme see—I found Guy-Pie when he was about five months old, and he had his canines” (not to mention over a hundred fleas which Arlene had drowned in a jelly-jar glass) “so you’re pretty close to that age, aren’t you?”

      The kitten purred in agreement. Arlene patted his sides; the ribs stood out like the tines of a serving fork held an inch above a table. Pitiful. The skin was sucked in close to his rump and guts, and his stifle bones felt like marbles under Arlene’s hard fingertips. And his all-black tail resembled a licorice whip.

      Outside, from where they waited in the hallway, the other cats rattled the door by sticking their paws under the jamb, while the dog nails made staccato scrabblings on the linoleum floor. The kitten ignored them, in­tent only on Arlene, who had owned, loved, and buried enough cats to know what that look meant.

      Like it or not, Arlene had a baby on her hands, a baby who had found himself a new Momma.

      Suddenly, the kitten sighed, reached for her hand with one huge-toed white paw, and rested his head against the worn blue toilet tank cover. A smile worked its way onto Arlene’s wrinkled face, and stayed there. Patting the kitten’s flanks, she whispered, “Why do I get the feeling that there’s going to be a lot of jealous animals around the house, hm?”

      The kitten blinked his minuscule eyes in reply, and purred louder than ever.

      * * * *

      Arlene knew from experience never to take an animal in to the vet’s office on a Monday; not that she had much else to fill her days, but she still hated to waste her time sitting in a noisy office full of yippy-yappy hunting dogs and poodles whose nails needed clipping.

      She did call the veterinarian office (“Not another one,” the receptionist had half-joked) to make an appointment for the next day; stool test, full shots, the works. And in be­tween making sure that her other pets were given extra hugs and soft chewy treats, she spent time in the bathroom with the kitten (who had the most indelicate habit of crawling into her lap while she was seated on the toilet; she had to hold him so he wouldn’t fall through to the water in the bowl).

      The more she looked at him, the less offensive his face became to her; by evening he was almost cute. The black parts of his fur glistened with delicate rainbow colors, like the wings of a cowbird or blackbird, or the surface of certain black-red petaled flowers. And the shape of his face reminded her of some­thing…by that night, when his cries pulled her from her bed, and she had to try to show him—again—how to use a litter pan (her efforts were wasted though, since he let his bladder go on the toilet tank cover, and did the other thing after jumping into the sink), Arlene finally realized what the kitten reminded her of.…a tulip. One of those bicolor ones, with the sharp points on the top of the petals, and a narrow base where the flower joined the stem.

      After he finally did his duty, and Arlene scooped the b.m. into an old yogurt cup for tomorrow’s test, she came back into the bath­room and held the kitten for a few minutes before going back to bed herself.

      “Thass all right,” she crooned, hugging the scrawny kitten, “Thass all right, you’re a good boy.” The kitten kneaded her shoulder; there was something odd about the way he did that, but Arlene was too tired to figure it out. She’d have to ask the vet about it tomorrow.

      Morning was only a few hours away, and there was scavenging to do.

      * * * *

      “You know, you ought to set yourself up as an official shelter,” the veterinarian joked as she looked in the kitten’s huge ears, checking for ear mites. “That one passes inspection, let’s see the other one.” The vet’s dark­-rimmed fingers poked in the cavernous depths of the kitten’s left ear. Arlene shuddered; she knew that both the vets had to tend to area cows, and horses, which meant that no matter how often they washed their hands their nails were still stained, but dark nails always gave her pause.

      “I don’t think I could stand working in a shelter. I’d want to keep all the animals,” she finally replied, as the young vet began to pal­pitate the kitten’s abdomen. As her fingers worked their way over the fine white and black fur, Dr. Hraber said, “I thought you did that already, Mrs. Campbell.”

      “Only the ones I find. I don’t think I could cope with ones brought in from all over.” Talk about abandoned animals made Arlene un­easy, bringing back memories of all the cats and dogs she’d either picked up or had wan­dered on her porch. Like Guy-Pie, with his rough pads and way of grabbing whole chunks out of the food bowl and running halfway across the room with them before he’d eat. Big gentle Rowdy, her leather collar stripped of its tags and attached name-tag, just an old yellow hunting dog no one wanted on the hunt anymore. Bubba, huddled shivering next to the Coke machine at the Red Owl, chunks of cow manure stuck in his white fur, his ear tips chewed by God knew what, too beat and broken to even let out a meaow.

      And those were only the animals she had found. Arlene had never answered one of those “Free Kittens” or “Puppies to Give Away” ads in the Ewerton Herald; for her, looking at them all was wanting to take them all home. True, she worried about people from labs or pit bull breeders coming to take the little animals, but as long as she didn’t see them, she wouldn’t let it pain her overmuch. She had her “children” to look after; if God saw fit to put one within her hearing or seeing, that was the animal she would take in. Just as she picked up cans or went rooting for week-­old bread in back of the IGA. There was only so much she could do. Some things, unfortu­nately, were simply out of her hands.

      “—think of a name for him yet?” The vet’s question startled her. Arlene pressed her hands against the kitten’s pathetic hips, and said, “Haven’t given it much thought…nothing much suggests itself, does it?”

      Across the white examining table, Dr. Hraber suggested, “Duke? He looks like a Duke’s mixture—”

      “No, my Don liked John Wayne. The name would make me think of him too much.” (Arlene let the doctor assume that she didn’t want to think of Don because the memory was painful—as it was, she missed the Duke more than she ever missed Don.)

      “Hummm…well, we have to put a name on the vaccination certificate—”

      “Silky?

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