In Loving Memory
Fup. Store Cat.
1988 — 2007
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Fup watercolor courtesy of reader Linda McDougall. Click here for a larger view.
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Oreo calls from outside the window.
Fup stirs. "Does he not sleep?"
"He must be locked out of his house."
Of course Oreo knows that Lisa or Ryan — someone — will arrive to open the store later this morning, but he suspects that Fup and Bear are inside. He waits two minutes and calls again.
"Let him in," Fup groans. The cat door around back is latched.
"Must... not... open... my... eyes," Bear replies.
Time to escalate, Oreo figures. They hear his paws work the window pane. When they fail to react, Oreo counters with his signature strategy: Wait just long enough to lull them back to sleep, and then call even louder than before.
"I let him in last time," Fup says, but to Bear it sounds like, "I let him win Pastime" — it's hard to make out the words over Oreo's scratching.
What's Pastime? Some game Bear's forgotten? He pictures dapper old cats in sepia tones, walking canes and monocles, and horse-drawn buggies rolling past lush milk ponds. In the middle of the pasture, a large dog wearing dentures barks at the sky, where — listen — hundreds of seagulls squawk in thick Latin accents...
But then Oreo calls again, and Bear wakes from his dream.
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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