months for those who donated money to the organization. And the city paper eventually reprinted that piece, along with some still pictures of the Feeding Dance, and single-frame images of the walking cats themselves. Donations for The Friends of Feral Cats went up after the original piece ran in the newsletter, and they poured in once the story was reprinted, then virtually threatened to clog our P. O. Box to the point where the Postmaster tried to make us rent a bigger box once one of the national news organizations picked up the story.
As I waited for a red light to change at an intersection two blocks away from the hospital where Areille’s body had been taken that morning, after she’d been found mugged and apparently whacked on the head with some blunt object—her empty bags gone, but her wallet untouched, which the organ-vulture at the hospital told me led the police to consider this some sort of anti-animal hate crime—I found myself remembering what Areille had said about all the attention my article had brought her.
“The money people give to the shop owners to give to me is fine, but you’d think they’d want to take the cats home, give them someplace good to live. In a garage, or a barn. Now if these guys were special, like that bald cat that was born at that farm, the one they bred into the Sphinx breed, or those mutant kitties with the short legs people breed on purpose now, people would be coming here in droves to trap them and take them home. But all they do is beg for their supper…and once one of them let me dance with him, the others just started to do it, too. Now if they did it for everyone, then they’d find homes—”
The light turned, and I finished the trek to the hospital. There was paperwork to sign, and luckily I didn’t have to talk to Organ Vulture Woman, but some male resident, and a beat cop who’d been one of the first to find Areille Quies’ body. Since she’d been getting on in years, Areille had been sure to mention FoFC in her will, even though she had next to nothing in terms of property to leave us, but her main reason for leaving that pittance to us was so that I’d be sure to carry out her final wishes…which I was careful not to spell out to the resident or the officer I spoke to that day. All they knew was that her body was to be taken to a local funeral home for cremation. It was something she was adamant about; she feared that her infected blood might somehow make its way into the groundwater, or the water supply itself, if she was to be embalmed, and given the toxic state of her tissues, a green, no-embalming burial was also out of the question for her. But cremation…that was thorough, and sanitary. Once she was ashes, her gradually-acquired fear of tainting other living beings was a moot point.
“I was wondering…when they’re developed, could I please see the photos of the crime scene? I knew Ms. Quies for a few years, and I’d just like to know what happened—”
The cop stopped to scratch his close-cropped head under his hat, and began shaking his head no, but did say, “We think it was a pipe, or maybe a bat which was used. But at least she wasn’t bloody…judging from the paw prints all around her, the cats must’ve licked off all the blood. Probably hungry, although why they didn’t bite her, I dunno—”
A small spidery shiver or remembrance, as ethereal as walking into a cobweb and feeling it lightly pull-then-release against my skin, rippled through me, as I recalled one of the many mostly one-sided conversations I’d had with Areille (her doing most of the talking, as was her wont—if it didn’t have to do with cats, she just zoned out), when she was telling me about her Toxo diagnosis, and what she found out about it on her own:
“I read in a newspaper, or maybe it was a magazine, about something the Center for Disease Control and Prevention said about people who contracted Toxo—we’re more likely to be eaten by cats than other people. The article or blurb or whatever it was I read said that over 60 million people have it, too…you’d need a lot of cats to get busy eating if what they said is true. The cat food companies would go out of business for sure. But I suppose they meant that we’re more likely to have a bunch of cats, so if we die in the house, and can’t feed them, well, they’ll take matters into their own paws. Or maybe we smell better to cats, on account of having the Toxo. They say that the lifespan of the Toxo parasite starts in the cat, then it makes its way to the human or animal, then it’s supposed to get back to the cat to survive, which means the parasite has to go to the brain, so that the cat can eat it…which sounds crazier than the crazy cat lady disease, but that’s what I read, anyhow. In some magazine or something.”
Wishing I’d known her before the Toxo began to erode her mind at the edges, leaving her thoughts as vaguely connected as strands of thread in a lace doily, I’d nodded, and started to try to change the subject when she’d added, while cutting up the kosher hot dogs one of the butchers on the avenue used to give to her into small bite-sized chunks on an old wooden cutting board shaped like a whale, “After I’m cremated, I don’t want my ashes put in an jar, or scattered in the wind…I want them mixed in with the cat’s food, for one last meal—a goodbye dinner, with me as the main course. Remember the end of that science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land? When that man who was raised on Mars dies, and they all eat his ashes in a meal? I read that in college. My professor, he was a Catholic and didn’t approve, but I thought it was so perfect. Beats getting flying ash in your eyes—remember The Big Lebowski? His friend Donny in the coffee can—”
Remembering that scene in the film Areille had spoken about that day, and visualizing Jeff Bridges’ The Dude covered in cremains out on that windswept ocean-side dune, I began giggling, but the cop and the doctor only took my reaction as a natural one to the horror of Areille’s last minutes in the alley, with her body covered with cats, all jockeying to get a taste of her blood, and nodded sympathetically at me, before patting me on the shoulder, and telling me how sorry they were for my loss.
I nodded without saying anything, all the while thinking that I’d need to go out really early in the morning after the cremation, just in case this same cop caught me feeding human cremains to the animals.…
* * * *
By the time I’d authorized the release of her remains to the designated funeral home for the prepaid cremation, the afternoon edition of the paper was out, and in the Local News section, there was a short piece about Areille’s death, which referenced my article for pull quotes. They used one of the archive images of her dancing with the cats, and the reporter who wrote the piece mentioned that the cats would go hungry until someone else took over for her, and finished with the line:
“Their dance cards no longer full, the feral cats of Asad Alley will be sitting out not only this dance, but all the dances to come.”
Not bad, given the short notice, but as I continued to read the rest of the paper, while waiting in the lobby of the funeral home, I told myself, I don’t know if they’ll like their new partner, but my dance card’s empty.…
* * * *
Once I was in the alley the next morning, having done a limbo duck-and-slide under the yellow crime scene tape still fluttering in the cold pre-dawn wind, I found myself doing what Areille had done each morning—dropping clean pie tins on the snowy ground, then peering for cat tracks along the walls of the alley. On the spot where she had been hit and injured, someone—one of the Muslims, perhaps?—had placed some cold-withered flowers wrapped in butcher paper. But there was no blood staining the snow…just an overlapping mash of cat and human footprints. Not expecting that the feral cats would come running out for me, I began scooping out huge globs of cat food mixed with cat lady ashes onto the plates—Areille wasn’t a very big woman, but there were still so many cremains that I ended up leaving about a dozen plates in that alley, each topped with a mound of canned cat food (which I’d bought the evening before) and Areille. Telling myself that it was what she specifically wanted, even if it was bizarre beyond even crazy cat-lady crazy, I hurried for the mouth of the alley, eager to quit that narrow dark space before the cats either attacked the food (something I really didn’t want to see or hear) or attacked me, but as I was bending over to slide under the flapping
