Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“Jill, what are you doing ? What the hell are you doing , Jill?”

Her hands flutter to her ears as though she’s trying to bat away a fly or a mosquito and she blinks rapidly but the man doesn’t see that at all. The man is focused on my cat who remains focused on me , when she should be watching the man, when she should be seeing the cat-carrier, she knows damn well what they mean for godsakes, she’s going somewhere, somewhere she won’t like.

“Zoey! Go! Get out of here! Run !”

I clap my hands. They make no sound. But she hears the alarm in my voice and sees the expression I must be wearing and at the last instant turns toward the man just as he reaches for her, reaches down to the couch and snatches her up and shoves her head-first inside the carrier. Closes it. Engages the double-latches.

He’s fast. He’s efficient.

My cat is trapped inside.

The man smiles. He doesn’t quite pull it off.

“That wasn’t too bad,” he says.

“No. You’re lucky. She bites. She’ll put up a hell of a fight sometimes.”

“You lying bitch,” I tell her.

I’ve moved up directly behind her by now. I’m saying this into her ear. I can feel her heart pumping with adrenalin and I don’t know if it’s me who’s scaring her or what she’s just done or allowed to happen that’s scaring her but she’s all actress now, she won’t acknowledge me at all. I’ve never felt so angry or useless in my life.

“You sure you want to do this, ma’am?” he says. “We could put her up for adoption for a while. We don’t have to euthanize her. ’Course, she’s not a kitten anymore. But you never know. Some family…”

“I told you,” my wife of six years says. “ She bites .”

And now she’s calm and cold as ice.

Zoey has begun meowing. My heart’s begun to break. Dying was easy compared to this.

Our eyes meet. There’s a saying that the soul of a cat is seen through its eyes and I believe it. I reach inside the carrier. My hand passes through the carrier. I can’t see my hand but she can. She moves her head up to nuzzle it. And the puzzled expression isn’t there anymore. It’s as though this time she can actually feel me, feel my hand and my touch. I wish I could feel her too. I petted her just this way when she was only a kitten, a street-waif, scared of every horn and siren. And I was all alone. She begins to purr. I find something out. Ghosts can cry.

The man leaves with my cat and I’m here with my wife.

I can’t follow. Somehow I know that.

You can’t begin to understand how that makes me feel. I’d give anything in the world to follow.

My wife continues to drink and for the next three hours or so I do nothing but scream at her, tear at her. Oh, she can hear me, all right. I’m putting her through every torment as I can muster, reminding her of every evil she’s ever done to me or anybody, reminding her over and over of what she’s done today and I think, so this is my purpose, this is why I’m back, the reason I’m here is to get this bitch to end herself, end her miserable fucking life and I think of my cat and how Jill never really cared for her, cared for her wine-stained furniture more than my cat and I urge her toward the scissors, I urge her toward the window and the seven-story drop, toward the knives in the kitchen and she’s crying, she’s screaming, too bad the neighbors are all at work, they’d at least have her arrested. And she’s hardly able to walk or even stand and I think, heart attack maybe, maybe stroke and I stalk my wife and urge her to die, die until it’s almost one o’clock and something begins to happen.

She’s calmer.

Like she’s not hearing me as clearly.

I’m losing something.

Some power drifting slowly away like a battery running down.

I begin to panic. I don’t understand. I’m not done yet .

Then I feel it. I feel it reach out to me from blocks and blocks away far across the city. I feel the breathing slow. I feel the heart stopping. I feel the quiet end of her. I feel it more clearly than I felt my own end.

I feel it grab my own heart and squeeze .

I look at my wife, pacing, drinking. And I realize something. And suddenly it’s not so bad anymore. It still hurts, but in a different way.

I haven’t come back to torment Jill. Not to tear her apart or to shame her for what she’s done. She’s tearing herself apart. She doesn’t need me for that. She’d have done this terrible thing anyway, with or without my being here. She’d planned it. It was in motion. My being here didn’t stop her. My being here afterwards didn’t change things. Zoey was mine. And given who and what Jill was, what she’d done was inevitable.

And I think, to hell with Jill. Jill doesn’t matter a bit. Not one bit . Jill is zero .

It was Zoey I was here for. Zoey all along. That awful moment.

I was here for my cat.

That last touch of comfort inside the cage. The nuzzle and purr. Reminding us both of all those nights she’d comforted me and I her. The fragile brush of souls.

That was what it was about.

That was what we needed.

The last and the best of me’s gone now.

And I begin to fade.

Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. His biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998 . Besides plays and his novel Virtue in Danger, his publications include four volumes of stories: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini , The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler , Masques of Satan , and Madder Mysteries . An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is forthcoming from Centipede Press. His stories have been published in Strange Tales , Shades of Darkness , Exotic Gothic , The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror , The Black Book of Horror , and the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.

Oliver says: “As with all of my stories, there are elements of autobiography and personal experience woven into the fabric of ‘Puss-Cat,’ though I am definitely not Godfrey in the story. He is older and much drunker than I am. On the other hand I am an actor, have worked on tour and in the West End, and did once understudy a famous theatrical knight who used to… But that would be giving the plot away.

“As for the cats, when I married my wife who is also an actress, I enthusiastically adopted her love of these wonderful animals. I am particularly interested in the way they are as attached to places as they are to people, perhaps more so. Every self-respecting theatre has its cat who is as vital to its well-being as the stage doorman or the box office manager. The theatre cat’s sense of proprietorship is quite remarkable. I remember one at a seaside repertory theatre I worked in who used to regularly saunter casually on stage during a performance, usually through the unglazed frame of a French Window; then, just as insouciantly, he would exit through the fireplace. A warm round of applause from the audience always greeted this feat. You will meet several theatre cats in this story, and one who is not quite a theatre cat.”

So, you want to know about Sir Roderick Bentley, do you? Well, you’ve come to the right department, as they say. Thank you, I’ll have a large Bell’s Whisky, if I may. Plenty of soda. Ice? Good God, no! Yes, Roddy and I went back a long way, to the Old Vic days just after the war. No. No resentment. Roddy was always destined for great things, me for the supporting roles.