Series Starters Box Set, page 35
Still, my stomach was rumbling. I hadn’t felt this way for a good long while—not since I first moved in and trained my human up.
I’d been born out on the streets, you see. I wasn’t one of your pampered house pets, getting its own way from the day it’s born. No. I had to cut my distinct path from life and find my own human before I could settle down. There were a lot of dud houses I poked my nose into before I tracked down this one. As soon as I peeked in through the back door—a gap left wide open on a summer’s day as an invite—I knew this was the one.
My human took a little bit more convincing.
At first, I’d saunter into the kitchen while he was making dinner and stalk in circles around his legs. Back then, he’d given a laugh of surprise every time I entered. He playacted as though he wasn’t expecting me, though he’d obviously left the door open for that exact purpose.
It took a week to wear him down. Once I’d done that, I had to undergo a trial that I never speak of. The horror of the memory alone makes me shudder. Still, we ended up together, and that’s how things are meant to be.
To be hungry when I was exactly where I was meant to be doing exactly what I should was a travesty.
The bowl couldn’t fill itself, and my human didn’t seem concerned. Without access to the pantry, the fourth shelf, a can opener, and the thumbs to work it, I wouldn’t be able to cure the first ill by myself. Making my human care, though? That could be arranged.
Time to mount a full auxiliary attack of cuteness.
I’m not as small as I was the first time I wandered into this house and realized it was mine. Not that I’m flabby, far from it. But I was just a kitten back then. Nowadays, my legs fit my paws, if you know what I mean.
The wide-eyed-chase-anything-that-dangles-in-front-of-me cuteness stage might be long gone, but that doesn’t mean I’m powerless. If I pull down my shoulders a bit and tuck in my hind legs, I can make myself look smaller. Then I tilt my head to the side—just so—and display those big ears for all they’re worth.
Who can resist a little cat with big ears? Nobody.
My human wasn’t paying a lot of attention, though. I rattled the bowl across the kitchen floor and back again, but he barely glanced my way. As soon as one phone call was finished, another would begin. I loathe that stupid handset, though not as much as the little square device it keeps in its pocketses. THAT was the devil’s work.
No matter how much I’d tried to stop him using it, the weak human kept getting hypnotized by the screen. Sometimes for hours. If you wanted to see what a world populated by the living dead looked like, try handing them all one of those devices and you’d come pretty close.
The pantry, then. I might have other challenges awaiting me inside, but at least if I got the door open, my human might remember that I still hadn’t eaten. He doesn’t like me going in there alone—so I respect his wishes and don’t—but today was a special occasion. Today I was beginning to get very hungry indeed.
My stomach gave a resounding rumble of encouragement as I went to work, clawing the door.
There’s a handle up above my head, but even at full stretch, I’m an arm-length short on snagging it. Down the bottom, I know that I can get the magnetized catch to open, but I have to embed my claws almost down to the fur to do it.
That takes work. That takes dedication.
Luckily, my empty stomach growled at me in motivation, so I was set on that score. Nothing could distract me from the task.
The trick to embedding my claws deep enough was to gently apply greater force while ignoring how the pressure turned to pain. I’d Zen out at moments like that. My body would curl into as tight a ball as I could get it and then I used its weight as an aid to dig in deeper.
Mm. Deeper and deeper. There is no pain, there is only the goal.
If I let my claws get stuck too far in, of course, then I’d never manage to drag them back out. There was a skill and a trick to everything in life, and I wasn’t sure I’d mastered this one yet.
I wriggled my shoulders and waggled my tail as though chasing prey. I was, too, just in a different way.
Try it now!
I heaved my body back while arching my paw, enabling my claws to stay at the needed angle. The door resisted, the magnet was intense, it seemed I was doomed to fail.
Then it released. Triumph.
I wedged my body in between the wooden-slatted doors of the pantry. There was no way that after such an accomplishment, I’d let it go to waste by allowing the door to swing closed.
I might have dug my claws in a bit too hard, though. For a few moments, I struggled to extract them, imagining an entire life stretching out ahead with me fastened to a door.
Nope. Phew. My claws popped out just as I thought I couldn’t take the strain any longer. Sure, I’d have an ache that settled in until I could rest my body with sleep, but I’d accomplished my goal.
One pantry open. Hint, hint, human!
With the work half done for him, I expected that he’d soon get to work in filling up my bowl. For the longest time, though, he just paced back and forth, still whining over the phone.
The call went on for so long I stared down at my paws to check I hadn’t turned invisible.
If my human wasn’t going to obey the simple command for food, my life would suddenly take a very wrong turn. The shelves stretched high into the air above me, a siren call that I wasn’t sure I could heed.
Once upon a time, I’d gotten into the pantry and tried to rearrange the supplies sensibly. Shelf by shelf, I’d pushed off each item so that it lay—handily within reach—on the floor.
My human took one look at the masterpiece of work that had taken me the entire day and dismissed it out of hand. Not only that, he’d shoved me outside while yelling, a sure sign that someone had upset him.
I wasn’t thick. It only took me a few more goes to understand that my human didn’t comprehend the sense of stacking everything within paw’s reach. My masterful arrangement went unappreciated. I stopped trying when it became clear it could only end in tears.
So, if I attempt to clamber up the nonsensically high shelves to retrieve my food, there’s a chance I’ll undo all the goodwill I’ve gained by providing him with a treat. After risking a quick foray out of the pantry to see what’s up, I had to scurry back in the most undignified way to stop the door from slowly swinging shut.
Come on! What’s so important that it takes precedence over feeding me?
The thought was so exhausting that I lay down with my head on my paws and fell asleep.
I woke to a loud bang. My human had just slammed the phone down in its holder. Or, what used to be its holder and was now just a few jagged bits of plastic that he switched off at the wall.
I positioned myself again for maximum cuteness, and this time it worked. My human picked me up and held me to his chest, stroking my back while he muttered into my fur. Something about clients and stock market downturns. To be honest, I tried to pay attention when he rambled on, but half the time I didn’t know what he was talking about. It might have seemed rude but, to be fair, my human never bothered to listen much to me.
Humans as a whole were a bit slow when it came to language skills. For all the time we’d been together, mine still couldn’t differentiate between a mew and a blood-curdling meow.
Now, I turned my head, distracted from his one-sided conversation by the glint of a can catching the corner of my eye. In horror, I surveyed the fourth shelf—the one where my food had always been stored—and came to a shocking realization.
Not only had my human opened a can of the wrong food that morning, but more of the same was sitting on that shelf. Wrong brand. Wrong label. Wrong breed of cat pictured on the side.
When my human let me down and picked up another can of the wrong food, I didn’t bother to wait for him to open it.
Something had gone terribly wrong with our routine. I’d need to do more than open a pantry door if I wanted to sort this mess out.
Chapter Two
As soon as my human left the house for the morning—something he did for a longer period each day—I began my investigation. First off, I jumped onto the tallboy in his bedroom and teased open the top drawer with my paw. That was where my human always stored his receipts.
The horror just kept piling on. If this impawsible situation continued for much longer, it would drive me around the bend. Not only had my human purchased the wrong brand of food, but he’d also bought it from the wrong shop.
Hanmer Springs wasn’t the biggest town in the country, so I’ve heard. Adventuresome cats who had traveled here over the years—some staying, some departing—had informed me of larger, bustling metropolises where you couldn’t venture onto the road for fear of being hit by a car.
When I’d once asked, imagining that they were joking, whether cats were invisible to the metal beasts, the speaker replied in all seriousness that in the bigger cities they were not only blinder to trouble but harder of hearing and a bit stupid besides.
Here in my township, the metal beasts prowled the roads slowly, always on the lookout for cats crossing or humans who liked to ignore the painted signs dictating where they should go. Cats don’t have to follow the same convention—nobody would put up a sign for us to cross—but those humans are a tad dimwitted. That, or rebelling against the herd.
Anyway, we had two shops here in town that were of any note. One was the superette that carried an extensive supply of many things—all of them bland and tasteless. I didn’t know how they did it, myself. I was quite sure achieving the boring level of sameness in every foodstuff took a great deal of training, indeed.
The other shop—to be fair, the only store worth talking about—was a small dairy wedged between a coffee house and a fish ‘n’ chip outlet. If those glorious scents weren’t enough to tempt you through the door, then the waiting stock of manna from heaven in a can would surely beckon you inside.
It was hard to explain how different everything inside the dairy was. How much better it tasted, how it appealed more to a refined palate such as mine. I mean, if I were starving and had to make a hard call, perhaps some of the superette food would make it down my gullet, but aside from direst need—nope. Just the thought of touching it made me shiver.
Old Man Jack and his wife Agnes ran the dairy. On the rare occasions when I had deigned to shop with him, they always greeted my human with the widest of smiles. While they caught up with their strangely unimportant news, I would prowl to the back of the store and wait patiently for my human to fetch my cans.
Even the smell of the worn tiles beneath my paws was intoxicating, comprised of the best odors in the world. A multitude of foot traffic couldn’t ever hide the scent where a whole smoked salmon was once laid down to leak through its newspaper sheath. Nor could it disguise the hot grease in which a hundred chickens had been fried.
Mm. Just the thought of that shop was enough to send me reeling.
But the receipts in the drawer weren’t from Old Man Jack’s dairy. They weren’t scrawled on a slip of notepaper and added up by hand.
They were the sterile lists of the superette—a concoction of ink and plastic-scented paper. A machine was the only thing to touch them, and even it spat the slips out in disgust.
I also couldn’t say with any certainty what the inside of the superette smelled like. The one time that my human had attempted to carry me in there, he got short shrift from the owner. Back to the car I went, left on the seat where any passing tom could have stared in to tease me.
Nope. This wasn’t right. More to the point, my human knew this wasn’t right as well, yet he’d still committed the travesty and shopped at the wrong outlet.
As far as I could see from the receipts, it wasn’t to save himself any money, either. Though Old Man Jack didn’t allow any specials—he was special enough already, he’d tell anybody who asked—his goods were reasonably priced. The superette had a set markup that might waver according to the mood of the conglomerate that ran them, but they didn’t work out much different when all was said and done.
A horrid thought struck me.
What if Old Man Jack had shut up shop? He hadn’t taken a holiday as far back as I knew him, but that didn’t mean a holiday was out of the question. If that was the case, I might be subjected to this inferior food for as long as he wanted to sun himself on a beach.
No, siree. That wasn’t right. Though, if anybody deserved a break, it was probably Jack.
Only one way to know for sure. I had to get out of my comfort zone and stroll the streets that I once knew all too well. If I was quick, I could be there and back before my human even realized I was missing. If I found out there was no good reason for him not to shop at Jack’s, then woe betide him when he returned.
I had tipped the bowl out this morning to indicate my displeasure but there were a thousand worse things still left to try. I had once been a street cat, after all.
Full of energy and empty of food, I trotted down to the front garden. I can’t see Old Man Jack’s from home, but I looked in the direction in case that offered any clues. Nothing immediate sprang into my eyeline. No plumes of smoke rising or telltale rivulets of water to indicate a flood.
Old Man Jack might have a fair excuse to shut up shop, but none that was visible to me.
I traced out the route in my mind. It had been a while since I was out on the road, fending for myself. If there had been some new construction going up since then I might have to rely on my internal compass to head the right way.
Certain the route I’d traced out in my memory would lead me directly there, I set off down the driveway. I was almost at the edge of the property when I felt the tingle in my collar. I pulled up sharpish, a sense of dismay leaking through my body as I remembered the heavy weight I had to bear.
My collar was electrified. I couldn’t walk out of the front gate without setting a thousand volts jolting through my body.
How on earth could I have forgotten that?
Chapter Three
My human was a nice man. That was the summation I came to the first time I visited. On the following night and then the next, the opinion solidified further in my mind. There was that one incident that shall not be referred to, where we went on a visit to a vet’s office and not all of me came back, but aside from that, it had all been pretty smooth sailing.
Once I’d decided that I would stay, he had just one requirement. No matter how hard I fought it, my human put his foot down in that regard.
So now I have this infernal collar around my neck.
On the mean streets of Hanmer Springs, the cat population was staked against each other in a long-standing tradition of gang warfare. I was a middling-sized beast, capable of holding my own if necessary. However, my beautiful coat and large ears were like a red flag to a bull in some situations. If I’d stayed out on the roads, living by my own rules, I wouldn’t be nearly so pretty as I am.
When it came down to it, I’d aligned forces with my human to ensure that I kept my beautiful body in one piece, but that came with some restrictions. My human liked to know where I was and that I was safe at all times. Pretty annoying behavior when you’re used to going it alone, but I suppose it showed he cared.
One of those measures was the collar around my neck. Another was an electric beam that triggered an explosion of pain if I wandered too far across it.
Cats can’t usually be contained. I remember when I first moved in, there was another tom in the neighborhood who would merrily walk through my cat door. When my human put his foot down and decided he meant business, I ended up with a chip in my collar, and the door had a matching receipt.
Magic.
No tom could now wander through the cat-flap—not without taking my collar from me, and any cat in the neighborhood brave enough to try that tomfoolery would end up with the scars to remind them of their failure.
My door was my door. The downside? More things around the property could be chipped.
I understood it was to keep me safe. The council’s animal controllers can get a bit trigger happy from time to time. If I’d been caught visiting my old haunts once too often, then chances were good they’d toss me in the back of the van and haul me to maximum security. That would cause my owner more sleepless nights than he had time for.
There were other, more threatening measures I’d heard on the grapevine over the last few months too. Talk about poison being laid—for possums not for cats—but just as deadly. It’s not as though a lump of toxic paste knows what’s eating it.
The world was a dangerous place for a cat in Hanmer Springs these days. I’d chosen my human, and I’d picked well—if that led to restrictions, then I accepted it came along with the territory.
None of which was a help to me now.
The beam had a controller, but it was attached to my human’s keyring. He could press it to turn it on and off, but unless I tackled him for it when he got home, that wasn’t a solution for me today.
Tackling him, when I was already weak from skipping a meal, would be a difficult conundrum. One that needed a full stomach and a clear head before I could generate a wise solution.
I walked the edge of the property, wondering if I could trace the buzz in my collar back to the source. I have a mean set of claws and an even more savage mouth of teeth on me. If I could just find the location of the death ray, then I might be able to thwart it and escape.
As the morning sun turned into midday heat, I had to admit my first failure. I’d wandered close enough to the invisible fence line to buzz my fur a hundred times over but never caught even a glimpse of what might be the cause.
There was nothing else for it. I needed to get that collar off my neck, or I wouldn’t be leaving the property. Not today.
I circled the property again. This time, instead of searching for the zapper, I searched for something that would aid me in removing the collar. My paws are nimble, I’d place them up against the best in the feline world, but dexterity wasn’t ever going to be a replacement for a thumb.
