of Light, avatar of Bast, in the dark of each cycle we await the return of your power.
THE CAT-TRACKER LADY OF ASAD ALLEY, by A. R. Morlan
Because she had no human relatives, the Cat-Tracker Lady of Asad Alley had listed me as her “next of kin” on the tiny bi-fold business card from one of the local funeral homes, which she kept in her wallet next to her green Wisconsin Non-Driver ID, the one which firmly stated that she was not an organ donor, nor did she wish to make any sort of anatomical donation after her death.
By the time the hospital where she was taken after she was found lying face down near one of the Dumpsters which lined Asad Alley called me, the organ donor vultures had come and gone, sans their little foam coolers filled with dry ice and human carrion. The nurse-receptionist-whatever who called me actually managed to insert that into her conversation with me that morning, “—and what’s really sad is that Ms. Quies wasn’t an organ donor, what with her being found alive…she seemed healthy otherwise…just such a shame—”
“You don’t know who she was, do you?” I snapped, while trying to remove the snap-on plastic lid from my latté one-handed, and cradling the office phone against my ear with the other hand. Over four bucks for a cup of coffee, and they forget to put enough sweetener in there—even as the reality of Areille Quies’ death bloomed in my mind like a slow-spreading stain on a napkin placed over a spill of java on a countertop, I found myself stubbornly clinging to the personal, the mundane, the ever-so-slightly annoying problem of a latté that just wasn’t sweet enough…anything to make the news stay at bay, even for a few more seconds—
“Well, she only came in a couple of hours ago, and we just found the card with your contact info on it, but her name is on—”
“Areille Quies was the Cat-Tracker Lady…or didn’t anyone notice the cat fur all over her coat? Do you ever read the papers, check out the Internet? She was all over the news…she had Toxoplasma gondil in her system. That’s why she couldn’t donate her organs, or sell blood. Her blood was infected, and so were her organs—”
“She wasn’t wearing a Medic-Alert bracelet, so we didn’t—”
“I don’t think they sell them for toxo—besides, did you notice her age? She was a little past organ donating age—”
“Oh, we take organs from people older than she was…they’re considered high-risk, but some people are willing—”
The lid on my cup wasn’t budging, and that perky twerp on the other end of the phone wasn’t about to even consider the possibility that anyone who came into the hospital with a pulse but no brainwaves wasn’t prime organ procurement material. No wonder people got rabies and HIV from homeless donors. Taking a less-than-sweet sip, I mentally counted to five, and said, “Forget about the organ donation…do you know when I can collect her remains? Ms. Quies had very specific funeral arrangements planned in advance with us—”
“Oh she did?” I could picture the disappointed flap and downward flutter of the vulture’s wings as yet another chance at the dead body was denied. “Usually in a case like this, the body is donated to science, y’know, for dissection—”
“What-time-can-I-pick-her-up?”
“Oh, any time after the doctor signs off on her…we’ve been busy here, and—”
“I will be there—and she better be there, too. In one piece,” I snarled, before putting down the receiver with a hollow plastic clatter. Around me, the other volunteers at Friends of Feral Cats sat motionless behind their small desks, hands poised over keyboards, necks craned my way. Finally, that intern from the veterinary college, Ursula Something Or Other, said softly, “Don’t tell me that Areille’s—”
“I don’t have to tell you then,” I said through a sudden welling of phlegm and tears in my throat, before picking up my purse and slinging it over my shoulder, and exiting the Feral Cat Rescue and Rehabilitation Society’s headquarters, leaving my half-consumed latté on my desk. Behind me, I heard the others speaking softly and a couple of people started crying, but I couldn’t pay attention to them, not if I wanted to drive myself to the hospital a couple of miles away, in the downtown section of the city.
Areille had gone out that morning on the same mission which consumed her life for the past thirty-some years—to feed her feral cats, in that alleyway behind Asad Avenue, where all the Muslim shops and restaurants were located in the loosely-configured Middle Eastern conclave in the southeast part of the city. The businessmen there welcomed her presence; being part of a religion whose founder was an ardent cat-lover, they helped her buy the food she lugged to the alleyway each morning in two stained and slightly smelly cream-colored cloth shopping bags, and since she claimed that a well-fed cat was a better mouser/ratter than a starving animal, no one who frequented the numerous establishments fronting Asad Avenue ever had reason to complain about rodent droppings in their food, or heat-seeking rats rubbing against their legs while they waited for their ride at the open-fronted bus stop in front of The Emerald Crescent Bookstore.
And since all the restaurants donated their left-overs to either a homeless shelter or a farmer’s co-op (the latter took the scrappy-scraps, for animal feed for chickens and pigs, even though the latter was a forbidden food among devout Muslims—Areille once told me that she figured the restaurateurs got around this by rationalizing that their donations to the local porcine population was a way of “giving back” after all the bad feelings over 9-11; Areille was like that, making slightly paranoid remarks about just about everything…she was the one who used to call the organ procurement folks “vultures” toting “human carrion” in their little BioHazard foam coolers), that left nothing for the feral cats to eat besides the mice and rats which just might be contaminated with poison. Or so Areille often said, as she’d put out the fresh aluminum pie pans on the ground near the center-most cluster of Dumpsters, then wait for her feral friends to come running out of their hidey-holes all along the alley, before pouring her special mixture of dry cat food, chopped up hot dogs, and—once a month only—wormer paste mixed with people-tuna, onto the round pans. Working for an agency which supported the care and population control of feral cats throughout the Midwest, I was used to seeing people who fed alley cats, but there was something about Areille Quies which was just a bit different. No one else was able to make the cats literally dance for their dinner. That was what brought her to the attention of Friends of Feral Cats in the first place; some Dumpster diver looking for aluminum cans happened to catch the dinner matinée, and made a video of the event on his camera phone, which was seen by someone who had access to YouTube, and one it was downloaded onto the Internet, people started sharing it and, eventually, someone emailed me and said:
U—Must—check this out!!
Everyone in the office who saw the clip thought it had to be photo-shopped—there was this older woman in a dirty-looking red-and-black parka, standing there in an alley next to a chained-shut Dumpster, surrounded by cats…all of whom were standing on their hind legs, front paws paddling the air before them, like feline sleepwalkers, and one by one, she’d hold their paws and sway in place with them, in a lurching two-step, then another cat would gingerly trot forward, to repeat the pattern.
People started to leave messages on the boards when the clip was shown, and eventually someone wrote that this was “—NOT—a fake, I’ve seen this woman myself, BTW” and then another person left a message consisting of a time and a location, and the next morning, I was there, waiting in the chilly February slush of snow and tire-plowed grime at the mouth of the alley behind Asad Avenue. The woman in the grimy parka nodded at me as she shuffled into the alley, shoulders bent low as she lugged the cloth bags filled with something obviously heavy and round-shaped into the alley proper. Up close, I realized that she was at
