Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

His mother was not pleased.

“Look, Mom. I know it’s humongous for a kitten, but that’s all it is. Pet it?”

She refused to touch it. “I don’t care what it is, I don’t want it in my house.”

“Listen, they’ll kill it if I take it back. It’s cute, see?” He held it to his chest to minimize her view of the monstrous head. Its fur was rough, not silky like a kitten’s. But it was warm and happy to snuggle.

“Cute? Kevin, I’ll show you cute. I know you stole it from Frankenlab. It’ll probably get up in the night and suck our blood.”

“Shit, mom. It eats milk, not blood. You can’t just kick it out on the street like a—like a broken TV.”

“Kevin, get a job. And get that thing out of my house.”

But Kevin’s mother was too tired to put her foot down.

The cub’s teeth started coming in. On a diet of ground meat that Kevin got from dumpster-diving, it had loads of energy. It used the energy stalking Kevin and shredding everything in Kevin’s room.

The eye teeth erupted. And erupted. And erupted. Not domestic cat teeth. Long as the fishing knife the cops had taken away from him when he was caught with the pot.

He woke up one morning to find the monster sitting on his chest, hungry or affectionate, as if you could tell even with a tame cat.

“Man,” said Kevin, peering closer. “Your mom should have sued your orthodontist.”

The cub did not laugh.

Not a vampire, but those sharp, sharp teeth—

And then his mind chewed through a bunch of information and farted out the truth. Rumors of ice age frozen flesh? Cloning? Bingo.

The damn thing, scrutinizing him with gold-green eyes, opening its huge mouth in a silent howl, was a sabertooth tiger.

“Woo, dude. I thought you were trouble before.”

It would need lots more meat.

At first he bought cheap cuts, then when he realized his money from mowing lawns wasn’t cutting it, he abstracted food from his own meals and from the refrigerator. And dumpster-dove the local supermarket.

One day, he found his mother in the kitchen, her hand bandaged. He hoped the bite was from Rosebud, but if Rosebud had bitten her, she’d probably be a mangled corpse.

He sank into a chair, while the sabertooth attacked the stinky mess he’d brought home for it.

“That’s it, Kevin. You’re my only son, the light of my life, a good smart boy although way too trusting, but that cat is out by tonight or I call the cops.” She blew her nose on a crumpled tissue. “I know where he came from.”

Kevin didn’t blame her. She was tired from overwork, just wanted to be left alone and sleep more than five hours at a time. They’d been moderately affluent before Kevin’s dad left. But Dad had a really good lawyer. The measly child support had stopped when Kevin turned eighteen. Dad still sent birthday cards with a two-dollar bill in each.

“If the boy wants a college education, a job will make him appreciate it more.”

Jobs, yeah, well. Jobs for twenty-one year old guys who’ve done even a little time aren’t easy to come by. Odd jobs, maybe shoveling walks in winter. Kevin wasn’t a drinker, so he didn’t have AA networking to fall back on.

Also, the damn cub was too mischievous to leave alone for long.

The week before the cat nipped Mom, he’d come home from helping a neighbor get her hay in and found the cub playing with a large rat. When the sabertooth saw him, she grabbed the rat in her mouth and tried to run away. Thank God it had been a rat and not those ratty-looking poodles the Parks owned.

So Mom was right. The cat needed a home

Sara. Their beginning romance had aborted, but he ran into to her sometimes at the feed store. She’d understood Kevin didn’t know about the pot. But she always said, “It’s not a good time,” if he wanted to come over to the farm, or ask her out, not that he had much money for dates.

Guess she didn’t want to be with a loser.

But, hell, he could rise again. Many great men, millionaires, politicians, had a shady past.

Sara didn’t hate him.

He put the cub in an appliance carton (it whimpered, but complied), wrapped it with pink and ivory paper and gold ribbon, and lugged it to the Pinto. The cub thrashed around inside the box on his front seat, while he drove like a maniac to Sara’s farm. Sara’s parents hadn’t really worked the family farm much since her granddad died, just kept geese and a big garden, and when they moved south to escape the winters, Sara kept the farm. Kevin used to help out, before he went to jail.

He lost his nerve and left the gyrating package on her paint-peeled porch.

The phone was ringing when he got back.

“Kevin, what is this? It nearly took my arm off.”

He breathed slowly. He’d enrolled in an anger management class while in jail, not because he had problems with anger, but because the textbook looked interesting, and he found the breathing helped calm him. “Sara, it’s a sabertooth tiger.”

“They’re extinct.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, so’s the Bill of Rights. But this thing is a clone. From frozen meat.”

“And this concerns me how?”

“It’s, uh—”

“Look, Kevin, I remember the Maine Coon kittens you gave me. I love those cats. But this is different, no? You must have stolen this thing from the college. And that’s not all. It’s going to grow up and be really aggressive. And, well, also—”

“Sorry. I’ll come and get her back. Don’t let her out, though. I’m not sure she knows how to defend herself.”

When he got to the farm, Sara acted nervous, but she kissed him, and they sat on the couch and talked, about Ed, about jail. They didn’t have sex, but he got his hopes up they could reconnect. Jonesy, meantime, tried to shred everything in her living room. She had put out a bowl of hamburger, otherwise the cub might have started shredding their clothes.

“It’s not exactly cute ,” she said.

Jonesy’s whiskers were almost as amazing as her teeth. Long and delicate. She stalked everything in the room, even shadows.

Kevin watched. The cub would hunker down and wriggle her backside, then dart forward and roll upside down. The hunker/wriggle part looked like any cat, but he’d never seen an animal do a half roll while attacking. Did that have anything to do with the sword-like canines?

“Kevin, you know I love animals.”

Kevin said nothing. Their shoulders touched, and he put his hand on hers.

She left it there. “Okay. Until you get a place of your own. Don’t come visiting without calling, though.” She withdrew her hand.

Somebody was living with her. Of course.

The arrangement lasted three weeks.

When he drove over in answer to her phone call, Sara was crying. Jonesy had killed one of her geese, a real achievement, since even Rosebud was loathe to fool with the geese. But when Kevin opened the door, he boggled at how much the sabertooth had grown. Jonesy had to weigh as much Rosebud now.

Oops. What if Jonesy had attacked Sara?

“I let her run,” she said. “You can’t keep an animal like this cooped up. And it killed Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson was one of her geese. She named her geese after women poets.

“What have you been feeding her? “He felt shame that he hadn’t offered to pay for Jonesy’s food. As if he could. He had a sudden panic over the welfare of the two Maine Coon cats, but they were dozing on the sofa. The sofa was shredded, but the cats were fine.