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MUST LOVE CATS! EXCERPTS:
A Girl's Best Friend
By Imari Jade
Chapter One
“Everything is going to be alright,”
Vince Carson said to his four-year-old German Shepherd, Butch. “I’ll be
right with you for the whole ordeal.”
The Shepherd looked up at him with big
soulful brown eyes, thankful for the backup. It was his annual physical
and the first one with a new veterinarian. Doc Martin had recently
retired and he recommended Doctor Whelan with great enthusiasm.
Something tipped into the room. It was
the biggest, fattest feline he’d ever seen. Butter-yellow spots on its
beige coat made it look even more menacing. Vince sneezed. He was
seriously allergic to cats since he was a child.
Pandemonium broke loose as soon as the
dogs in the waiting room became aware of its arrival. The cat seemed to
know what its presence was doing and it continued to prance into the
room like it owned the place. Fur, claws, and chairs flew in every
direction as the chase began. Owners stared in shock as their normally
well-behaved dogs succumbed to their natural instincts to hunt and
destroy the cat. Three male clinic orderlies ran into the room once the
frantic receptionist pressed the panic alarm on her desk.
They arrived in time to see the tabby
gracefully hopping from one cabinet to another while dogs in all shapes
and sizes stood on hind legs with their paws against the cabinets trying
to get at the cat. Even Butch who normally was too lazy to chase his own
tail.
Vince grabbed Butch’s leash and tried to
get the fifty-pound dog to obey while other owners tried to control
their pets. The three orderlies tried to catch the cat using strategic
maneuvers but unfortunately, the cat was smarter than all three of them.
It took about ten minutes for them to get everything back in control.
“Mr. Carson, Doctor Whelan is ready for
Butch now.”
Vince rose with leash in hand. He tugged
gently for Butch to follow him but the Shepherd whined like a puppy.
“It’s not going to be that bad.”
The receptionist peered over the counter
at Butch. “Doctor Whalen is an excellent veterinarian. She’s very
gentle.”
Butch rose obviously reassured that the
receptionist knew more than he did about the situation. He sniffed
around for the tabby that had been removed from the room. Satisfied he
pranced toward the back prepared to meet his fate, leading his
well-trained owner. They passed various examination rooms where dogs
barked from inside their kennels. Vince spotted a pretty, dark-haired
young woman standing at the end of the hall, dressed in a pair of white
slacks and a white lab jacket. She walked up to greet them.
“Good morning, I’m Doctor Aubrey Whelan.
You must be Mr. Carson.” She extended her hand and Vince shook it,
surprised at the firm grip.
“Nice to meet you Doctor Whelan. Doctor
Martin spoke very highly of you.”
“Thank you but I’m afraid he’s a bit
biased. I was one of his students.” She went down on her knees in front
of the dog. “My, you’re a big one. Why are you here today?” She patted
Butch under his throat and stroked his coat. Butch panted happily.
“Annual physical,” Vince answered for
the dog.
The doctor rose. “No sweat, boy.”
That was easy for her to say. He was
doing a fair share of sweating and he wasn’t wearing a hair coat. The
doctor was simply lovely, with big green eyes and a peachy complexion.
She wasn’t wearing any makeup, just natural beauty.
“Follow me.”
Vince and Butch followed her into an
examining room. Vince took a seat while the doctor put Butch up on a
scale. “Whoa, you are a big one.”
Vince looked the new doctor over
closely. She was about twenty-five or twenty-six and unmarried. He had
done a quick sweep of her fingers when she wasn’t looking. There was
something useless about building a fantasy in your head over a married
woman. He continued to watch her as she performed a routine examination
on Butch who had stopped whimpering and was panting happily even through
the rectal exam. For a minute, Vince felt envious of his dog.
* * *
Strange Critters
By Mae Powers
To boldly go where few had gone
before—that had been Kara Lassiter’s dream for a long time. One she
finally made into reality. In 2042 she'd finished her seventh mission
for NASA. Now she was at home to stay for a long while, before there
would be another, more permanent trip back into space.
Very few people had the perfect life,
but Kara found life pretty good. She had a great job and a wonderful cat
to come home to. Having the right man to share life with would make it
all perfect for her indeed. But how often did a girl find a man to share
her dreams completely in every way? Perhaps that was her problem, she
wanted too much out of a relationship.
It had been four months since she'd seen
Zany, her space-ballish cat. Her neighbor Lacie Evans, a veterinarian,
and owner of two cats, two parrots, a dog, and a couple of other
unidentifiable critters, watched Zany when she was away. In turn, Kara
took care of Lacie's menagerie when she was home and Lacie had to be
away. Their houses were down a country lane, but they lived in the
Houston area.
Kara found the silver tabby Zany late
one night underneath her car as she was leaving a grocery store. She'd
needed to stock up on some items, having just come back from her latest
space mission at the time. She'd actually picked up cat food and things
for Lacie and found it ironic she found the little thing prowling
around.
What had also been strange is that she'd
found him just after a meteorite shower passed by. She'd watched it just
before she'd gone into the store, and when she came out with the
supplies and put them in her SUV, she'd found him. Its silvery blue eyes
stole her heart, and she knew she couldn't leave him alone in the
parking lot.
Five years later the varmint had the run
of her home. It liked Lacie and Lacie's own critters, so Zany knew,
somehow, that it was ok to stay with Kara's neighbor when Kara was away
for any length of time. But that didn't mean that Kara didn't hear
fussing from her little guardian cat whenever she came home.
She always picked up tuna and chicken in
cans for Zany on her way home. He liked those best of all and didn't
like cat food, especially once he'd passed a year old. She loved the
little furball, but sometimes he did the oddest things. Like when she
came home, somehow he'd always get out of Lacie's house and be there
waiting for her on the porch of her small two bedroom home.
If she told people half the things he
did, they might put her away in a loony bin or think she'd ingested some
alien microbe. However, that wasn't the case; Zany was just a peculiar,
long-haired silver tabby with intelligently seductive eyes. She used to
think they were just sweet, alluring eyes, but as he got older, Kara
often felt the cat saw into her soul and more. She felt sure it was just
her odd imagination, of course, but sometimes, the wild little purrrson
had her wondering about him.
Sometimes, when he slept with her at
night and cuddled against her side, she went into a very deep sleep and
had some of the strangest but incredulously sensual dreams. Dreams in
which Zany changed from a cat to a full grown, silver haired man with
glowing silver eyes. A hunk with a body that hypnotized her into the
most lustful needy feeling she'd ever experienced in or out of her
dreams. She shivered with the recall, but as she pulled her SUV into the
large driveway, she banished it from her thoughts.
* * *
Purr
By Ruth J. Hartman
“Now just what have you guys been up to
since I left? Hmmm?” No one answered. Seventy-two eyes stared at her
from half that many faces. Furry faces. And the eyes that stared at her
were of the feline variety. “Have you all got each other’s tongues?”
Roxy never liked being the center of,
well, anything. That’s probably why she chose running a no-kill cat
shelter. No one expected you to be dressed up, or wear makeup, or comb
your hair. She did actually do the third one, and occasionally the
second. Never the first. She was a jeans and Henley-shirt kind of girl.
Another reason for her career choice?
The woman was absolutely, one hundred percent cat-crazy. There was no
denying it. She had been in love with cats since she was in the womb.
Her mother, who was also a cat-person, would hold one of the fluffy
creatures against her stomach when Roxy was on the way. The
womb-enveloped baby would smack, poke and shuffle. Anything to get
closer to that amazing motor-like purr she later discovered was a cat’s
expression of delight.
Her job was her life. Period. There was
no husband, boyfriend, or male anything else. Except of course, about
half of her cat population. That’s not how she wanted it. That’s
just how it was.
“You’re here early, Roxy.”
She looked up to see her assistant,
Teresa Lynn. “Hey, yeah I decided to get an early start on those
adoption forms today. Never can have too many willing pet-parents, now
can we?”
Teresa Lynn smiled. “Exactly.”
The two women went about their morning
duties. Teresa Lynn checked through their huge stack of mail, hoping to
find an elusive donation.
“Found one!” she waved the envelope at
her boss.
“Great!” said Roxy. “See if there’s any
more. We’re coming up short on the mortgage this month. Not that it
hasn’t happened before.”
“I’ll keep looking.” Teresa Lynn
continued to flip through the stack. “Sorry. Just the one.”
“Rats,” Roxy muttered as she made her
way down the narrow corridor between the cages of stray cats. She then
turned her full attention to her charges. “Who’s hungry? Anybody? Raise
your left paw if you want some breakfast.” Every fur-bearing creature in
the place began to pace and howl. Roxy quickly filled bowls with cheap
dry cat food (the only kind they could afford). One by one, cats purred
and pranced, eager for his or her turn to gobble their rations.
Along with breakfast, each cat received
a quick chin-scratch. Later on, they’d be let out of their pens in
stages to frolic and mingle. At that time, Roxy and Teresa Lynn could
give them more individualized petting and attention. During the kitty
“happy hour”, the purr level usually reached the three hundred-decibel
level.
“There now, doesn’t that feel better?”
Oliver, the orange tabby, practically smiled as Roxy quickly brushed his
long, tangled fur. “You just need a haircut, don’t you, my little man?”
Teresa Lynn giggled as she watched them.
“You talk to them as if they were human.”
“Well, they think they’re people,
so I guess I see them that way, too.” She smiled sheepishly.
Both women looked toward the front door
as someone rattled the doorknob, trying to get in. Roxy stood up and put
Oliver back in his cage. She walked to the door to peer through the
glass. “We don’t open for another two hours. Sorry.”
The boy standing outside the door was
frowning. His navy, hooded sweatshirt was too large for his skinny
frame, and he needed a haircut, badly. Roxy waited for him to leave, but
he stayed planted right where he stood.
She made a second attempt to dissuade
her frumpy visitor. “Um, sorry, but we’re closed. Can you some back at
10:00?”
The boy simply stared through the glass
at her. As she looked closer, she realized he was crying.
“I can’t stand it,” she muttered. “Why
is this kid standing out there using the waterworks?” She unlocked the
door and opened it for her unwelcome guest.
* * *
The Cat in the (Wizard's) Hat
By Carla Cripps
Ashley sat staring
morosely at his cat flap, his purrs turning rapidly to growls of
masculine frustration. ‘Oh, Joy! Merriwen, light-of-my-life, you just
had to lock the latch, didn’t you?’ he thought.
The irritated British
Shorthair sighed inwardly and slunk off to find his human. He could
smell her favorite perfume wafting down the stairs, so he padded
silently up the two shallow flights to her bedroom. The aroma, an eau de
gardenia that he normally thought quite pleasant, only aggravated him
now. ‘All right for some,’ he grizzled to himself. ‘Some
can come and go as they please! Some don’t have to wait at the
beck and call of human whim!’
As Ashley approached the
open bedroom door, he paused. To be fair, if he had to share his house
with someone, Merriwen wasn’t a half-bad tenant. She never failed in her
duty of care: his meals were always on time, as tasty as top-line
commercial cat food could be, and ample in quantity for his moderate
appetite, his litter box was always tidy, as was the rest of the house,
and best of all, she, being single, with no romantic partner, was happy
to spend quality time with him, grooming his luxuriant black-and-grey
coat, or playing with him if he was in the mood.
He did have to pitch a fit
when she considered having him neutered, but it was his own fault he’d
not thought to fake her out that it had already been done. It helped
that she was still dithering about it, her civic responsibility as an
Australian cat custodian weighed against his “rights” as an independent
entity. And far be it from Ashley to try to unduly affect her
conscience.
No, he and Merriwen were
bumping along quite nicely, thank you very much, except for the latest
enviro-rant that caused her to put a lock on the flap. Not that he
blamed her. If he’d been a real cat, who hunted for food or sport, it
would have made sense that she thought she was keeping him inside at
night, so he couldn’t threaten the native wildlife. Cats were an
imported species, didn’t belong running loose in Australia, or “Oz,” as
its justly proud residents sometimes call it.
But although Ash himself
was real, being a cat was just his day job. His true vocation was that
he was a bona fide, practicing wizard, who's ancestors in England went
further back than Merlin. His great-great-great-grandfather had had a
touch of the wanderlust, and came to Australia late in the 19th
Century, and prospered. He took a wife only a few years out from
Ireland, a woman who held to the old ways, though not from a witch
family; they had one daughter, who became a witch, who married a
sympathetic non-wizard. Their son became a wizard, and so on, and so
forth until Ash was born.
He loved everything about
wizardry, became an apt pupil, first at his father’s and grandfather’s
knees, then spent a time in England and Europe, apprenticing to the best
of modern wizards. Then he returned to Adelaide to settle down. He hoped
to find a wife of his own, to continue the dynasty and to pass on his
great skill and knowledge, but it proved harder than he expected, or
maybe he was just pickier, so he passed his time dabbling in property
development and other capital ventures, and continuing his supernatural
practice and study, while feeling keenly the isolation of his single
state.
How he came to be trapped
in his own house in cat form, hoist in his own pet-ard, so to speak,
was, as these things usually are, the result of the dumbest of dumb
ideas: it had been his less-than-well-considered habit, when the agent
was showing the house to a potential renter, to discreetly check out the
person himself. He’d long ago decided that anyone who loved cats tended
to be reliable in other areas and, he was sufficiently cynical not to
take anybody’s word for their position in the matter. So he would morph
into cat form, invite himself inside, pull his worst kitty
stunts, see how the person reacted to him, and generally give them his
personal once-over.
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