Fup. Store Cat.
The Trip to Kahani
Chapter 5
For a while the three of them sit quietly on the shady embankment. Cars pull in
and out of the enormous lot beyond the hedge. The sedan that brought them here
has long since disappeared into a glinting band of vehicles ringed around the
mall.
According to Zooey and Bear, the driver had never heard of a hill where great
stories grow. At least not around here. "I believe I've heard of a story-bearing
meadow, learned about it back in school," the man had told them. "But wasn't
it supposed to be in Massachusetts, somewhere back east?"
"But we hardly know the guy," Zooey adds now. "Who knows how much he knows."
Fup stands, stretches, walks a small circle, and flops onto her side. Soft
dirt, green grass, blue sky.
Bear asks, "What do you think, Fup?"
She thinks the mall's landscapers recently applied a heavy chemical treatment
to the lawn because her paws taste like they used to in Toledo when she'd sneak
out with her sisters to flirt with the boys in the courtyard behind the shoe
store. The faintly metallic odor that always gave them away, though it took
months to figure out how their parents always knew where they'd been.
"Cesar's nieces work at the pet store," she says. "Maybe they can
help us."
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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