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The Old Woman’s Zoo
In the land of giants, Sheldon, Tanya, and Penny,
three more members of the species felis catus, made their way through a hostile
maze of feral cats and dogs, unfriendly humans, and sudden and dangerous
turns. So far, in their quest to
survive, they had found an unoccupied crate in an alley to hole up in, but
today, as hunger and thirst plagued them, they had been forced to leave their
haven to find sustenance. Sheldon, of
course, was the first to suggest this.
Penny, who still seemed to be in shock, did not protest. Tanya, who wanted to protest, seemed to be
too exhausted and overwrought to try.
With great trepidation, therefore,
the trio had exited the crate, looking back fondly at this warm refuge, which
the philosophical Sheldon saw as sort of primal womb. As the leader, he was afraid to move too fast least Penny linger
in the shadows and become lost or move to slow and allow the impulsive Tanya to
charge ahead of him into the path of a moving vehicle and be crushed to
death. At this point, barely a half
hour after they had left the crate, Sheldon, who had the greatest challenge of
all the cats, nudged the two females along tirelessly, almost lovingly, moving
back and forth from front to rear in a fashion similar to a dog shepherding sheep.
The safest place for them in the
light of day was not the alley anyway, he had convinced the girls. The alleys of this part of the city were
filled with all sorts of dangers, foremost of which were the crazed derelicts
roaming the streets. Trotting inexhaustibly
back and forth down the boulevard as he coaxed the females along, Sheldon was
at the end of his wits as he listened to Tanya gripe and prevented the
catatonic Penny from walking off by herself.
“I’m tired. . . I’m hungry. . . When
can we stop?” Tanya groaned.
“Come on girls,” he prodded them
gently, “we have to find food and drink.
We should find a restaurant next to an alley where we can rummage
through its garbage. They throw perfectly
good food away at times; we should be able to scrounge up a meal.”
“I told you,” Tanya hissed, “I’m not
eating garbage. I wanna Big Mack. I wanna coke and fries.”
At that point, even the taciturn
Penny looked at Tanya in disbelief.
Sheldon was encouraged by this reaction and nestled her affectionately as
the trio paused on the street. In many
ways, Penny, a sleek and ruddy Abyssinian, personified the deep, inexplicable
mysteries of her breed.
Above them, looming what seemed to
be miles up into the bleak sky, the dark buildings contrasted the bursts of warm
light from the storefronts lining the street.
Pawn shops, liquor stores, and retail stores had begun to sprout up as
they left Skid Row, but so far there were no restaurants sitting next to alleys
or dumpsters that were visible from the street. The sidewalks and gutters were cleaner now and there were fewer
derelicts up here, but there was much more traffic now and consequently more
dangers when they crossed the street.
Several times Sheldon hissed at Tanya for not paying attention to such
threats. At one point, as he looked
ahead and saw a McDonalds on the corner of Eighth and Main, he panicked when
Tanya bolted ahead.
“Stop you stupid woman!” He cried
out in her head. “Wait for the green light.
Don’t you dare run that light!”
“Big Mack, coke, fries!” She replied
in rote.
Looking back at Penny now, he said
simply as if he was talking to his pet Irish Setter “sit!” and raced
frantically toward the scampering cat.
The wide boulevard now teeming with morning traffic was barely a city block
ahead when Sheldon began to gradually gain ground. Penny sat serenely watching him charge ahead, the thought fixed
in the darkness of her brain that she was lost but was among friends who would
feed and protect her. She was going
nowhere. There was nowhere to go. Through the sluggish legs of early morning
shoppers and passed a street lined with noisy cars, Tanya and Sheldon darted in
and out, until on the very threshold of the thoroughfare, Tanya ran squarely
into the legs of a woman pedestrian on the sidewalk. The woman let out a yelp and swiped at her with her cane. Sheldon realized, after seeing the way she
struck out while staring straight ahead, that the woman was blind. This fact helped save the dodging Tanya from
being clubbed to death and allowed Sheldon a chance to get in front of her and
stop her in her tracks, as the woman ambled on her way.
“So help me Tanya, I’ll fight you
before I let you run across the street.”
“It’s green now,” she hissed and
spat, “get out of my way! I’m going to
cross!”
“We’ll wait for Penny,” he
transmitted menacingly. “It’ll turn green again. We’re not leaving Penny behind!”
“I hate Penny,” wailed Tanya. “I
hate that stupid bitch! She’s slowing
us down. This is all her fault!”
“No, listen to me,” Sheldon’s feline
face tried its best to show emotion now, “India Crowley is at fault here, not
poor Penny. She’s not slowing us down, you are by this nonsense. I told her to wait for me back there.” “Now
come on Tanya,” he nudged her with his nose, “I’m worried about Penny. She might wander away in her state of
mind. That will be your fault!”
Trotting reluctantly behind Sheldon
after his rebuke, she continued to bristle, emitting an occasional hiss, until
they reached the spot where Penny had been.
A visual line between the legs of advancing pedestrians told him that
Penny was gone.
“Oh my God!” Sheldon lamented. “She
didn’t wait. Look what you’ve finally
done Tanya. She knew you she didn’t
like her. Now she’s gone!”
“I-I didn’t mean to,” Tanya’s snout
quivered, “I’m sorry-”
“Stow it Tanya! It’s too late for that. I don’t have the foggiest notion where she’s
at. I don’t see her up and down the
street. She could be anywhere now!”
“What about this alley?” Tanya
thought desperately. “There’s doors in
back of these buildings. Maybe she ran
into one of them.”
“Well, let’s go find out,” he
retorted, scampering ahead of her, “she couldn’t have gone far.”
******
Sheldon felt great sorrow for Penny
and only anger at the repentant Tanya now.
For several moments the pair ran down the alley, sniffing and looking
each way, hoping that Penny had merely stopped to recline somewhere in her
dulled state of mind. When they reached
a midpoint in the passage, however, both cats were exhausted and nearly out of
their minds with dismay. It seemed to
be an endless alley with nothing but dirty back doors and barred up entries
along the way. There was no sign of a
living soul in this corridor let alone a small Abyssinian cat. When, with much less confidence, Sheldon and
Tanya decided to continue on, they could finally hear, after a few more
moments, a distant telepathic surge: a plaintive cry, that of a cat in
distress, rising in volume in their heads as a sonar blip on a submarine from
an approaching ship.
“Penny!” Sheldon cried.
“What if it’s just another cat?”
Tanya looked ahead with dread.
“No, that’s alarm we feel, Tanya,
human alarm,” Sheldon insisted, scampering ahead toward the source of the
noise.
Tanya followed reluctantly behind,
fearful of the unknown. Seeing Sheldon
dart sharply to the right several meters ahead, almost paralyzed with fear,
Tanya now called out to her protector: “Wait! You’re going to fast!”
No longer in his proximity, Tanya
became immediately disoriented by the in and out, sonar-like, instructions
transmitted.
“Tanya,” came the broken message of
her fiancé, “. . . this corridor. . . Penny’s voice. . . not far ahead!”
“What? You’re breaking up,” she called out frantically to Sheldon.
“Which corridor? . . . Which way did you go?”
Suddenly, one of the denizens who
roamed the boundaries of Skid Row, emerged from a dark corner ahead, reached
down and grabbed Tanya by the nape of her neck, and began to carry her back
into the darkness from wince it came.
The little Siamese spat, clawed, and hissed continually, but to no
avail, as the creature carried her into a small backyard beneath a single
gnarled tree to a cage in the corner of the yard.
There, in what looked to Tanya very
much like one of the rabbit cages her grandfather had kept on his farm, sat
none other than her fiancé Sheldon and Penny Gruber. Swiftly, before the other two could escape, the lid was opened by
the creature, Tanya was dropped in, and the lid was latched quickly shut again. It was only then that Tanya, looking back
with momentary relief, could see the old women walk away into her shadowy
house.
“Now you’ve done it!” She spat at
Penny. “Your little zombie routine has landed us all into a cage!”
“No-No-No!” Sheldon vigorously shook
his head. “Penny was grabbed by that lady on the sidewalk just like you and
me. It might be my fault for leading
you into this trap, but it’s your fault Tanya for getting us into this jam, not
poor Penny’s. This would never have
happened in the first place if you
hadn’t taken off like you did!”
“My fault! My fault?” screeched Tanya. “You run into a trap and it’s my fault?”
The sounds emitted from the cage
sounded typical for angry cats. The old
lady looked out her timeworn door and smiled.
Tanya and Sheldon were both hissing and wagging their tales, whereas
Penny suddenly humped her back up as the old woman approached, indicating
feline alarm.
The old woman was returning with two
dishes in her gnarled hands: cat food and water. She had a kindly face.
Her balding head and ragged dress and coat made her seem like one of the
homeless folks roaming the streets, and yet she obviously had this small shack
to live in and could afford to feed three cats.
Upon opening the lid, Sheldon was
tempted to leap up and out in order to escape these daffy girls. One of them wouldn’t talk and the other one
wouldn’t shut up. Is this how I’m
going to spend eternity? he asked himself, forgetting that the others could
read his thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply now, looking
down at the cat food and bowl of water deposited by the crone. “Let’s eat!”
******
As Buck and his gang continued their
odyssey across town, Sheldon, Tanya, and Penny sat forlornly in the backyard of
the old lady, looking out of their cage.
“I’m not eating cat food!” Tanya
mentally protested with a pouty little mew.
“It’s not so bad,” Sheldon said
spiritedly. “Come on Tanya and Penny, eat up; we need our strength, so we can
escape.”
“You keep talking about escaping,”
Tanya sneered. “You still haven’t come up with a plan. Come on, mister hot shot, give us a clue!”
“The plan is simple,” he said
patiently. “We wait for the old bitch to reach into our cage and then we
spring!”
“That’s not a plan,” Tanya snorted,
“that’s an act of desperation! That
crazy old woman will club us to death!”
At just that moment, they both
looked back in the cage to catch Penny nibbling at the dish of food.
“Oh my God,” Tanya made a face,
“she’s eating that stuff! She’s must
really be gone!”
“I dunno,” Sheldon pressed in toward
Penny, “she’s got her appetite back.
Maybe that’s a good sign!” “Penny,” he tested, “is that good? Do you really like that shit?”
“It tastes like my mother’s
meatloaf,” Penny relayed mentally, munching thoughtfully on her food.
Sheldon and Tanya rubbed up
excitedly against their companion, surprised and delighted by her response.
“Penny! You’re all right now!” Sheldon exclaimed. “We thought you were
nuts!”
“Oh, I’ve always been nuts,” Penny
said matter-of-factly, ready to shovel more in. “I’ve just had so much on my
mind. My head seemed so crowded when
India turned me into a cat. I guess I
was in shock, but I don’t really mind being a cat.”
“Don’t say that,” Tanya scolded her.
“Shame on you for saying such a thing!”
“Yeah, Penny,” Sheldon agreed. “You
don’t want to wander around scrounging for hand-outs and shelter all your
life. I used to hate cats. Now I realize how special they are and how
mistreated they are, but I don’t want to be one of them. What kind of life would this be, Penny. We got to escape. I need you gals with me on this!”
“Tanya is right,” Penny looked up
from the plate, “the old woman would kill us before she’d let us go.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Sheldon
asked, looking at each female now.
“Yes,” murmured Penny, “as a matter
of fact, I do.”
Walking over to the cage door, she
pointed with her snout, thinking “that’s not the way.”
“Then tell us, already,” Tanya
sneered.
“I think we should play dead,” she
said simply. “People don’t keep dead things around. They throw them away.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing
I’ve ever heard,” Tanya exclaimed in amazement. “She’d probably have us
stuffed.”
“Wait a minute,” Sheldon thought,
nudging Tanya’s head, “that might be a good idea.”
“What?” Tanya started. “You’ve been
a cat too long. Your brains are
addled. Play dead? Are you serious
Sheldon?”
“What is the first thing you’d do if
you found one of your pets lying dead in its cage?” He tried to reason with
her.
“Well,” Tanya considered, “. . . . I
wouldn’t pick it up right away. I’d go
get some newspaper or a rag to pick it up.”
“Precisely,” Sheldon said
enthusiastically, “and what else would you do or shall I say not do?”
“Shut the door!” cried Penny. “Oh, I
like his mind,” She turned for agreement to Tanya then.
“Back off, woman.” snarled Tanya. “I
liked you better when you were mute!”
“This is no time for petty
jealousies,” Sheldon chided her now. “I think this might work. We’ll wait until we hear the squeak of her
back door, and then we’ll get in freaky positions.”
“Freaky? I’m not sure what you mean?” Tanya rubbed up against him coyly.
“You sure you don’t mean kinky? I know
what kinky means.”
“You sure are stupid,” Penny
thought, shaking her head.
“Tanya knows what freaky means too,”
Sheldon tried to smile. “It’s like in road-kill. Come on, girls, you’ve seen dead things before.”
“Ooooh yick,” Tanya shuddered, “I
ignore sure horrors.”
“Here’s an example,” Sheldon dropped
down, rolling over on his back and sticking out his paws.”
“And like this,” Penny, dropped to
her side and stuck out her tongue.
“I can do that,” Tanya said
petulantly. “Watch this!”
Tanya rolled onto her side too,
stuck out her paws rigidly as had Sheldon and let her tongue hang out of her
mouth, similar to Penny’s pose.
Clearly, Tanya’s pose was the best.
“Well, we know one thing for sure,”
Sheldon observed. “There’s only so many positions a dead cat can take. I think our basic positions will do.”
“Now that this is settled,” sighed
Penny, “let’s eat. I’m famished!”
“Move over,” Sheldon joined her at
the dish.
“Yuck,” gagged Tanya, “I’d rather starve!”