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Fup. Store Cat.
The Trip to Kahani
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Bear
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Zooey
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Zooey manages to steer out of the faster current, but his momentum carries him and Bear straight into the dam, loosing logs and breaking branches in a clumsy, noisy crash. They grab for hold on the wet bark, breaking the dam further in the process.
"Hooligans!" a beaver shouts. Another rushes out from the bank. "Home wreckers!" Bear scampers to safety along the top of the dam while Zooey pushes himself back into the water and swims the last ten feet to shore.
"Wait!" Fup tells the beavers, racing through the ferns and grasses along the riverbank. "It's my fault! He was carrying Bear across the river to help us get to Kahani!" Much apologizing follows, but why should they forgive her? She begins to tell the beavers her story: About sleeping under a postal truck that second night her family spent in Philadelphia, their first night without Clara. Fup explains, "It hadn't really occurred to me before, but we'd never spent a night apart."
The previous night, they'd slept inside Warren's truck. Bruno and Penny shared the passenger's seat up front, as had become the couple's habit, while Fup slept with Ro and Clara in the bed they'd made from empty mailbags wedged between the back door and the metal grate meant to keep packages from sliding out. But that was before Warren left them stranded.
In the abutting park, leaves rustled; voices rose and fell with people's passing. Cars idled at the streetlight by the hotel entrance, ominous and low. Harrumphing trucks and phlegmy buses rumbled past. Shortly after dark, a crowd of Saturday drinkers exited the bar up the block chanting, "Hoagies! Hoagies! Hoagies!"
For hours Penny and Bruno talked, feigning composure for the sake of Fup and Ro. "Mr. Warren will send Clara to meet us in Ohio," they insisted, and Fup believed them: Clara would be fine. They would all be fine. This was really no big deal, except the noise and the pebbly, oily pavement. Fup burrowed her head into Ro's stomach to quiet the noises around her. Soon enough she drifted off to sleep.
"Sometime later," Fup tells the beavers, "a siren woke me up. I opened my eyes, and swirling orange light was coloring the ground on the street-side of the van. Ro lay still on the other side of me, wide awake. It wasn't cold out, but she was shivering, which seemed strange. The orange light disappeared and suddenly it got very dark. When the sound of the siren faded, that's when I heard Penny crying."
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That Cat That Changed My Life: 50 Cats Talk About How They Became Who They Are
Unleashed:
Poems by Writers' Dogs