Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“And how come you were elected to take him?”

“George tricked me into it.”

“What did he do, tell you the Poodle Factory was infested with mice?”

“No, he used some pretty outrageous emotional blackmail on me. Anyway, it worked. The next thing I knew I had a Third Cat.”

“How did Archie and Ubi feel about it?”

“They didn’t actually say anything, but their body language translated into something along the lines of, ‘There goes the neighborhood.’ I don’t think it broke their hearts yesterday when I packed him up and took him out of there.”

“But in the meantime he spent three months in your apartment and you never said a word.”

“I was planning on telling you, Bern.”

“When?”

“Sooner or later. But I was afraid.”

“Of what I would think?”

“Not only that. Afraid of what the Third Cat signified.” She heaved a sigh. “All those Women With Cats,” she said. “They didn’t plan on it, Bern. They got a first cat, they got a second cat, they got a third cat, and all of a sudden they were gone.”

“You don’t think they might have been the least bit odd to begin with?”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t. Oh, once in a while, maybe, you get a slightly wacko lady, and next thing you know she’s up to her armpits in cats. But most of the Cat Ladies start out normal. By the time you get to the end of the story they’re nuts, all right, but having thirty or forty cats’ll do that to you. It sneaks up on you, and before you know it you’re over the edge.”

“And the Third Cat’s the charm, huh?”

“No question. Bern, there are primitive cultures that don’t really have numbers, not in the sense that we do. They have a word that means ‘one,’ and other words for ‘two’ and ‘three,’ and after that there’s a word that just means ‘more than three.’ And that’s how it is in our culture with cats. You can have one cat, you can have two cats, you can even have three cats, but after that you’ve got ‘more than three.’”

“And you’re a Woman With Cats.”

“You got it.”

“I’ve got it, all right. I’ve got your third cat. Is that the real reason you never mentioned it? Because you were planning all along to palm the little bugger off on me?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Swear to God, Bern. A couple of times over the years the subject of a dog or cat has come up, and you’ve always said you didn’t want a pet. Did I ever once press you?”

“No.”

“I took you at your word. It sometimes crossed my mind that you might have a better time in life if you had an animal to love, but I managed to keep it to myself. It never even occurred to me that you could use a working cat. And then when I found out about your rodent problem—”

“You knew just how to solve it.”

“Well, sure. And it’s a great solution, isn’t it? Admit it, Bern. Didn’t it do your heart good this morning to have Raffles there to greet you?”

“It was all right,” I admitted. “At least he was still alive. I had visions of him lying there dead with his paws in the air, and the mice forming a great circle around his body.”

“See? You’re concerned about him, Bern. Before you know it you’re going to fall in love with the little guy.”

“Don’t hold your breath. Carolyn? What was his name before it was Raffles.”

“Oh, forget it. It was a stupid name.”

“Tell me.”

“Do I have to?” She sighed. “Well, it was Andro.”

“Andrew? What’s so stupid about that? Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Carnegie—they all did okay with it.”

“Not Andrew, Bern. An dro .”

“Andrew Mellon, Andrew Gardner… not Andrew? Andro?”

“Right.”

“What’s that, Greek for Andrew?”

She shook her head. “It’s short for Androgenous.”

“Oh.”

“The idea being that his surgery had left the cat somewhat uncertain from a sexual standpoint.”

“Oh.”

“Which I gather was also the case for Patrick, although I don’t believe surgery had anything to do with it.”

“Oh.”

“I never called him ‘Andro’ myself,” she said. “Actually, I didn’t call him anything. I didn’t want to give him a new name because that would mean I was leaning toward keeping him, and—”

“I understand.”

“And then on the way over to the bookstore it just came to me in a flash. Raffles.”

“As in raffling off a car to raise money for a church, I think you said.”

“Don’t hate me, Bern.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“It’s been no picnic, living a lie for the past three months. Believe me.”

“I guess it’ll be easier for everybody now that Raffles is out of the closet.”

“I know it will. Bern, I didn’t want to trick you into taking the cat.”

“Of course you did.”

“No, I didn’t. I just wanted to make it as easy as possible for you and the cat to start off on the right foot. I knew you’d be crazy about him once you got to know him, and I thought anything I could do to get you over the first hurdle, any minor deception I might have to practice—”

“Like lying your head off.”

“It was in a good cause. I had only your best interests at heart, Bern. Yours and the cat’s.”

“And your own.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, and flashed a winning smile. “But it worked out, didn’t it? Bern, you’ve got to admit it worked out.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and respected writers in the United States today. Oates has written fiction in almost every genre and medium. Her keen interest in the Gothic and psychological horror has spurred her to write dark suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith, to write enough stories in the genre to have published five collections of dark fiction, the most recent being The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense and Wild Nights!: Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway , and to edit American Gothic Tales . Oates’s short novel Zombie won the Bram Stoker Award, and she has been honored with the Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers Association.

Oates’s most recent novels are Blood Mask , The Gravedigger’s Daughter and My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike . She teaches creative writing at Princeton and with her late husband, Raymond J. Smith, ran the small press and literary magazine The Ontario Review for many years.

Oates is a cat lover and has written several dark stories about cats. This one could be seen as the inverse of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.”

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife’s white Persian cat.

His hatred for the cat was all the more ironic, and puzzling, in that he himself had given the cat to his wife as a kitten, years ago, when they were first married. And he himself had named her Miranda—after his favorite Shakespearean heroine.

It was ironic, too, in that he was hardly a man given to irrational sweeps of emotion. Except for his wife (whom he’d married late—his first marriage, her second) he did not love anyone very much, and would have thought it beneath his dignity to hate anyone. For whom should he take that seriously? Being a gentleman of independent means allowed him that independence of spirit unknown to the majority of men.