Fup. Store Cat.
The Trip to Kahani
Chapter 47
None of this happened. How long have they been gone from the store? Wasn't she
the cat who lived in the famous bookstore? Fup's joints ache. They wake up in
the morning at Wiggums's barn in Boring, Oregon, and all Fup wants is to go home,
all she wants is to lie down, all she wants is to keep moving so as to sooner
be back home.
She wants to stop thinking. She wants to lie down. No talking, no words; rather,
several quiet nights to herself in the gray, peaceful hours long after the bookstore
has closed.
They're practically home. They're only approaching the suburbs, it's true,
but in no time at all they'll be home. Before she knows it. For most of the
rest of her life, the trip will exist in the past. As Fup sees it, it's been
over since the mountain lion roared. The rest is just punctuation.
"You didn't even look scared," she tells Zooey for the fifth or sixth time.
They walk and walk, closing in on Gresham, not far away now at all.
Bear adds, "He looked confused."
"There's no way the lion was going to take me on," Zooey doggedly hilariously
insists. "He was just another cat looking for an excuse to back down."
Fup's Picks
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That Cat That Changed My Life: 50 Cats Talk About How They Became Who They Are by Bruce Eric Kaplan

"All these cats lead exciting and varied lives wholly independent of the human
race," notes the editor in his Introduction. Well, duh. Scant attention has
been paid to the role of community in modern cat culture, so what a relief that
here, finally, fifty articulate felines set the record straight. Funny, sad,
occasionally shocking, but never less than true, these brave monologues
reaffirm our interdependency in ways that choreographed public displays such as
Paws Across America never can.
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Unleashed:
Poems by Writers' Dogs
by Amy Hempel

In "Dog Kibble," Tasha Baxter's verse exhibits a brutal economy of
words: "Life is never meaningless," her villanelle announces, "there is
always food." Here and throughout this collection these authors demand
your attention, as if to bark, "You can send me to my room for yelling
at the neighbors but you cannot silence what woofs in my heart!" Among
the selections nominated for Best
American Writing by Pets 2000 are Bob Barker Barry's sordid and hilarious
hallucinogenic escapades with Lynda; a tragic, posthumous prose poem by
Marrow Irving; and Sadie Louise Lamott's "Spoon River Sadie Louise," a
wildly metered exploration of the cross-cultural dynamics within a
household occupied by dogs, cats, birds, and small children. The sheer
intellect of these collected pieces will renew your faith in dogs.
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Is Your Cat Too Fat?
by Bronwen Meredith

Too fat for what? And what business is it of this Meredith person's
anyway? Bronwen sounds like the kind of lady I wouldn't like at all.
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