Fup. Store Cat.
The Trip to Kahani
Chapter 35
Fup and Ro waited with Penny under a sedan parked close to the park's
fringe. Fifteen or twenty minutes they'd been waiting for Bruno to return
when Penny ducked under the tailpipe to join her daughters near the back
bumper. As she did, smoke from the nearby barbecue grills wafted past,
mingling with the nutty aroma of motor oil from the grimy engine. The
combination brought her back to Maine, powerfully — she might have
been bedded down in dirt beneath the Dyers' front porch, hiding in the
shelter of their overturned, out-of-use canoe while Mr. Dyer barbecued up
on the deck. Penny raised her head expecting to find the canoe's plastic
seats upside-down above her and instead smacked her ear hard on the
tailpipe.
Fup and Ro watched from the shadow of the left rear tire. Neither dared say
a word until Penny finished cursing.
How long would they have to wait for Bruno?
"What are we going to do?" Ro finally asked, but Penny went back to rubbing
her ear, as if maybe it wasn't working right, maybe she couldn't hear. So
Fup answered for her.
"We're going to stow away in the truck with Michigan plates," Fup
announced.
Penny stopped pawing herself and stared at her child. It might have dawned
on her just then that maybe her ear really was ruined. "We are?" she heard
herself respond.
"I'm betting," Fup surmised. "If the driver of the Michigan truck heads
straight back on the interstate, he'll take the Pennsylvania Turnpike past
Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and when he reaches Ohio he'll keep driving
clear across the state, past Cleveland and all the way west to Toledo."
The map on the post office counter. Fup had remembered it all.
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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