Free The Cat's Job by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Page A

court,
there was -- movement.
    From up-court came Mom and Sasquatch;
from down-court, Brandee and Sandy. Taffy and Jazz drifted down the
hill across and Blue pussyfooted in from somewhere and sat next to
the cedar tree, tail wrapped around his toes.
    The Siamese cut off in mid-curse and looked around him. The
rest of the cats kept moving, slowly and purposefully, even
Snowball-called-Avalanche, who
never
left her patio, until they had made a
circle, with the Siamese in the center.
    The Siamese yawned. He got up and
headed for the gap between Jazz and Taffy. The cats moved closer
together as he approached. Somebody growled. The Siamese backed
up.
    After a minute, he chose another direction, this one toward
the cedar tree. He started to growl as he got closer and puffed
himself up. But Pirate screamed back and made
himself
even bigger and Blue said something that was
perhaps not quite polite.
    The Siamese slunk back to the center
of the circle and sat, carefully, down.
    Which was when Ginger left his place
in the ring and walked forward.
    Immediately, the Siamese was on his
feet, fur every-which-way, swearing like a ship full of
sailors.
    The circle of cats drew a little
closer together. Ginger kept moving forward.
    The Siamese flattened his belly to the
tarmac and his ears to his head and swore he was the master of
every cat there and a black belt in seventeen secret martial arts,
besides.
    Ginger kept coming.
    The Siamese yelled for his
mommy.
    Ginger reached out and smacked him
upside the head, none-too-gently. The Siamese babbled and
wailed.
    Ginger smacked him again, a little
harder, but not nearly as hard as the Siamese had hit
Jazz.
    The Siamese stopped screaming. V-e-r-y
slowly, he sat up. Even more slowly, he got his ears back into
position. He licked his lips. Ginger sat down, utterly at ease, and
began to bathe. All around, the cat circle waited.
    They held that tableau for
half-an-hour, I guess, then, one-by-one, the cats in the circle
drifted away, back to their usual rounds. Ginger, spotlessly clean,
left last, saving only the Siamese, who waited another four or five
minutes, blue eyes darting this way and that. When he was certain
he was unobserved, he got up and headed for home.
    I never heard another ill word out of
him, from that day until we moved.
     
     
     

 
Feline Fancy
     
The Big Ice
by Sharon Lee
    The rain stopped.
    Agnes Pelletier sat up in the feather
bed she and Jakey had shared for forty-two years before his dying,
startled wide awake by the absence of sound.
    It'd been raining steady, the last
three days, the mercury sitting just above 32. The air was too warm
to freeze the water as it fell, according to the weather fella on
the radio. So they had rain instead of a regular Maine January
snowstorm. Some towns, there'd been floods. Up on the Interstate,
the radio told her, cars and trucks slid off a roadway sheeted in
ice, for the rain froze where it struck.
    Down on the Wimsy Neck Road, at Pelletier's farm, Agnes
slipped and damn' near broke her leg walking down the drive to the
mailbox day before yesterday. Yesterday, there'd been a special
announcement on the radio: The Post Office had canceled rural route
delivery, due to conditions. Agnes had already decided not to risk
another walk to the mailbox.
Fine time to take a
fall
,
she'd told herself;
the way that rain's coming down, you'd be froze
flat to the drive in a second.
    But the rain had stopped; and there
was a rosy glow showing around the edges of the shuttered window.
Agnes pushed back the quilts and eased out of the feather bed.
Sunshine! Now, there was a welcome difference.
    #
    In the kitchen, she added wood to the
stove, then hauled on a pair of heavy work boots and laced them up.
She squinted at the mercury reading as she zipped Jakey's old
barncoat over her sweaters. Thirty-two and windless -- she could do
without the watch cap. She pulled on the mittens she'd knitted for
herself and went over to unlatch the door.
    She hesitated