Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

“At his age he could get pretty badly beaten up in a fight with another tom,” Dr. Death adds.

Name one! Or even a Dick or Harry who could cream my corn!

Miss Temple regards me in sad perplexity, even her perky red curls drooping.

“I have never seen him injured,” she puts in. “Maybe he is too big to get hurt.”

“Now that you have brought him indoors, he could spray the furniture. Males are messy, you know.”

Here I cannot restrain a snarl. I do not deny that I am a gentleman of the road, but my indoor manners are impeccable. Even outdoors I am a model of civic responsibility, and go out of my way to make my deposits beside, rather than on top of, the flora.

“Spraying...? He has not done that yet,” Miss Temple murmurs in my defense, but her tone is troublingly indecisive.

Clearly, some unmistakable action is required, and I take it. I yowl plaintively and rake my front fingernails across the gray Formica.

This protest shakes my little doll out of her funk. “Just the shots, please,” she says. “I will see about getting some special food on the way out.”

My triumphal self-congratulations prove premature when this Dr. Dolittle doll instructs Miss Temple Barr to “hold him.”

While I squirm, a series of indignities are performed on my posterior with a hypodermic that, while I cannot see it, seems about the size of the previously mentioned knitting needle.

“Does he bite?” this latter-day Madame DeFarge inquires a trifle tardily, removing her needle to pick up another.

Not the hand that feeds him, I think as I restrain my fury. Although, if Miss Temple Barr is planning on switching her current brand to the aforementioned scientific sludge for seniors, I may reconsider that resolve.

2

Electraglide in Black

Temple pulled the aqua Storm into the shade of a spreading oleander bush and paused, her hands clinging to the steering wheel. The Circle Ritz’s condominium and apartment building’s white marble facade looked cool and calm in the blazing July heat.

She eyed the flat Timex watch that almost covered her wrist. Punctuality was essential to Temple’s work. She had no time for fancy, deceptive little watch faces that she couldn’t read accurately at a glance. Good. Only twelve-twenty.

She got out, clicked around to the passenger’s side and finally wrestled Midnight Louie’s carrier through the gaping car door. Her credit card might be a hundred and forty dollars lighter, but she could swear the carrier was heavier than before. Perhaps this was the result of passive resistance; Louie had been silent and ominously still all the way home from the vet’s.

Tilting to balance the carrier’s weight, she struggled toward the condominium’s back gate. Three steps took her into silk-searing sunlight. Temple could feel her hot pink top bleaching and the crown of her red hair fading to pink.