Free Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies by Martin H. Greenberg

on his lap. “I’m sorry, punkin’. I don’t know what to tell you.” He hugs me close, and I can feel his chest tremble as his voice
catches. “Sometimes these things just . . . happen. It’s not fair.” I can’t say anything because I’m crying too hard.
    His voice picks up again with a slight shake. “I remember when I had this little dog, back when I lived up on the hill. He went everywhere with me, to work, to the barn. Then one day he broke his leg. I think a car must have hit him. I took him to the vet, who fixed him up with a splint and said he was fine. I thought he was going to be okay. He stayed home while he was getting better, and when I got home later in the week, he was dead. I didn’t know why. The vet said maybe it was a blood clot. But I just didn’t understand why. He was fine when I left.”
    I hug him tight. It hurts to see him cry and makes me cry harder, but at the same time I’m somehow glad he’s crying too. It makes me feel less alone, even though the despair still sits like a rock in my stomach. He’s a quiet guy, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him cry. That he’s crying with me over this, over a little black and white cat I’ve had less than two months . . . it makes me warm, somehow.
    After Bernie, it’s a small procession of gray tabbies and black cats, but my luck doesn’t improve. Once I figured out my healing thing—that I can heal with my hands if the conditions are right—you’d think I’d have been all set. Unfortunately, car strikes or simple disappearances don’t respond to hands-on healing. I can’t raise the dead, I can’t heal long distance, and healing ability doesn’t help find something lost.
    It sounds strange, but people don’t have house cats in our neck of the woods. Every cat I know is an outdoor cat. A lot of them are barn cats. It never even occurred to me to keep a cat inside. So it goes over the next couple years . . . Gherkin, Picky, Inky Pool, Felicity, Periwinkle. It gets downright depressing.

    Not to mention? Unfair. I honestly don’t get why schools and adults make such a big deal about kids acting fair, when nothing else is fair.
    Nothing.
    The disappearances are the worst, because I just don’t know . Don’t know whether to hope or give up. Sometimes a cat will be gone two days and show up. So every time I watch for days. Walking up and down the dirt road in front of our place, shaking a box of Meow Mix and trilling, “Here, kitty kitty,” until my throat aches. Waiting.
    My dad knows how to handle these things. He grew up a farmer and spent a lot of time farming before he married my mom and went to work at the lumberyard. He developed that practical approach to animals that farmers get. When you spend your life with a lot of animals, some of which are headed for the table, things happen. You get used to saying goodbye.
    The funny thing is, as practical as he is? He hates it.
    He’s good about my cats. Never tells me not to cry, always hugs me and helps. Builds little wooden boxes to bury the cat if we have a body, encourages me and helps me look if they’re missing.
    So when he finds me sitting on the back steps, staring down over the steep bank in back of the house because that’s where Periwinkle appeared last time, he sits down beside me. We sit silently for a few minutes, before he puts an arm around me.
    “She’d come home if she could.”
    He knows I worry that the cats just don’t want to stay with me for some weird reason, that they desert. I can’t help thinking it. It’s second only to the fear that they’re hurt and unable to come home.
    “Probably a fisher cat got her.”

    It’s the logical conclusion in Vermont, especially when you live in the woods. Which most of Vermont does. I’ve certainly heard it suggested, about my cats and when neighbor cats go AWOL. Just as before, my mind buzzes at the thought of these mysterious beasts. There’s a taste of the weird about them, like stories about wood