033019b

Felix came home to find
mice building some sort of contraption
on the dining room table
power supply and other components
scavenged from appliances
all over the house
"what the hell" he said
then, the mouse with the big head
clicked the remote

black shadow
etched into the wall
power out
in the whole town

mice rule

012418

aerial sharks
squirrels learn to hide
cats and dogs move indoors

121517

Encounter in St. Ives

I almost decided not to tell this story. No one likes to admit he's acted like a fool. Still, I had the best of intentions. Anyway, try not to judge me too harshly. Alma was gone and I was on my own. She was taking care of her mother, who was recovering from a serious injury that resulted from, well, basically forgetting that she was a little old lady with brittle bones. There, it had to be said. At the time this all happened I had been depending on my own cooking and my own company for a couple of weeks.

-----

After successfully concluding a case involving a large number of fowl, egregious food safety violations, and foreign royalty*, I stopped off in a bar to relax. With Alma out of town there was no reason to hurry home. I chose a place I'd never been before, called the Unicorn Cutlet (obviously a story there**). It was a place frequented primarily by locals. Shopkeepers with their dirty aprons and worn shoes pointedly ignored servants and apprentices of various kinds (their clothing in even greater stages of disrepair), and everyone seemed to know each other. Even a gaggle of geese in the corner were on a first name basis with the servers and with the butchers' apprentices at the next table. Perfect!

Now I'm sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and minding my own business, when I overhear a fellow talking about something that happened to him on the St. Ives highway. I missed the beginning of the conversation.

".... So this guy had a whole crowd of women with him. He claimed he'd married them all. And get this, he said each of those women had 40 cats. Well, there is this crazy old woman on my block who has 13 cats, but everybody knows she's crazy. This guy was talking like it's perfectly normal to have more than three dozen cats. That wasn't the half of it! He also said each one of those cats had 40 kittens." At this point he stopped to take a drink and the kid next to him says

"Holy mackerel! That's like 120, what with the wives and livestock and all."

And then Phil, the bartender, chimes in. "How did they carry all these critters around? It's not like cats will stroll along with you. Did they have wagons? And why didn't he count the horses pulling the wagons?"

"No, they didn't have the cats with them, they just said they had them. Right, Mr. P.?" The young man replied, turning to the first speaker for confirmation.

"Course he didn't have them with him. That would be a herd, for which you need a permit. And everybody knows you can't herd cats. Getting a little dry here Phil." Mr. P. took off his battered fedora, ran his fingers through his hair, and pulled the hat firmly back down over his ears again. Phil handed him a fresh beer and he took a deep gulp. "And it wasn't 80 cats, must've been a couple hundred."

"40 and 40, that's 80." The kid says, and he drains his beer. The state of public education these days! It'll be kids like this running things in a few years, and then the whole city will really be going you know where in a basket.

I cleared my throat. "Actually, wives, cats, kits, and all, not counting whatever he keeps the animals in, that's 64,000." This pronouncement met with a stunned silence. "Well that's 40 cubed, don't you know. Nevermind, that's not important now. What is important is that this fellow seems to be guilty of both polygamy and animal cruelty. Where did you say he came from?"

Mr. P. turns to me and looks me up and down under the brim of his hat. "I didn't say. And who are you again?"

"Deadbolt. Hasp Deadbolt. I'm a PI. But that's not important now. What this guy might be doing to cats isn't right and needs to be stopped."

The kid broke in. "Lookit, Mister, no one's paying you to investigate this, so just let it rest. If there's anything to handle, the authorities can do that."

Well, it was true I wasn't involved. I finished my beer and left. But while I stood waiting at the bus stop, I felt a tug on my arm. It was one of the geese. Actually, it was all of the geese. But the one tugging on my arm introduced herself as Petunia.

"I heard what you said about the cats Mr. Deadbolt," she said. "Now I don't like cats any more than the next goose, but mistreatment of sentient beings is wrong. We are in solidarity with oppressed lifeforms everywhere. And were any of those wives underage brides? Forced marriage, feline slavery, this might just be the tip of the iceberg with this egg stealer. This kind of behavior is a natural outgrowth of the depravity of a hierarchical being-owning agrarian oligarchy, and the sheriff here isn't going to do anything. We want to help."

I guess it figured that socialism would go along with flocking behavior, but I had never encountered it before. "Do you know how to get to St. Ives?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," Petunia said. "Is that near Altoona?"***

"Never mind," I said. "Meet me out by the highway at midnight. We have some investigating to do."

-----

I had not realized that Petunia intended to bring the whole flock. They were not professional sleuths like I am and they were noisy. I ended up sending most of the flock around to the other side of the farm on a fool's errand, looking for some of their wild counterparts, who I assured them wanted to join our cause. Petunia and I ducked under the single strand of barbed wire and went in.

I realized immediately something was wrong. The place was quiet, too quite. Too quiet for a farm that had 64,000 cats living on just a few acres. And there was only one barn. How many cats can fit in a single barn anyway? I'm not a farmer, I don't know the answers to these questions. But I'm certain it isn't 64K. Petunia was no help; she couldn't calculate the volume of a non-cubicle barn with both hands, er, wings. Behind the barn was a pigpen. There was only one pig in there, a young hog wearing a red bandanna around his neck. Before I could stop her, Petunia woke him up.

"Hey you," she hissed, "wake up."

He raised his head, shook it a few times, then staggered to his feet. He trotted over to the fence. "Who are you," he asked. Well, she spilled the whole story, invited him to join the revolution. He shook his head.

"I'm a confirmed capitalist. I think rewards come to those who work. If you gain wealth, it's because you deserve it. There are a few bad apples in the trough, but they are outcompeted by those who work hard, network together, and whose word is bond. But I'm a liberal. Thought about becoming a Unitarian at one time. I believe in your right to pursue your dreams. Of course, what do I know? I'm just a pig. By the way, my name's Freddie."

I was getting impatient. "Look," I said, "I'm getting impatient. We are here to find out if there's anything wrong on this farm. What can you tell us?"

"Wrong? Wrong?! I can tell you plenty that's wrong. Starting with me being stuck in this pen day after day, night after night. Let me out, and I'll help you any way I can." So we did.

"Solidarity," Petunia whispered.

"Enlightened self interest," Freddie whispered back.

"Whatever," I said.

Freddie showed us how to jigger the back door on the barn, and in moments we were inside. We looked around for a few minutes, and then I said "where are the cats?"

"Beats me," the pig replied. "I've seen them around during the day, but I don't know where they sleep. I do know it's somewhere in this barn, because I see them going in here every evening. I don't think I've ever seen 64,000. Maybe two or three hundred at the most."

Just then, Petunia said "look what I found." She was holding a bag over her head. It was about twice as big as she was, and completely stuffed with something. "What do you suppose is in here?" She asked.

"One way to find out." The pig pulled out a pocketknife and reached out to the bag.

"Don't touch that!" I hissed, but I was too late. As soon as the point of the knife touched it the sack ripped apart. Kittens shot everywhere.

Petunia dug herself out from under a pile of sleepy fluff balls. "What did you do that for? You broke the magic bag."

"Magic isn't real," Freddie said angrily, "it's just a fairy tale!"

"Oh yeah!" The goose shot back angrily. "And how do you explain 343 cats in a bag small and light enough for me to hold over my head?"

"How do you know how many there are? Who died and made you an idiot savant?"

"I've got lots of experience counting goslings. Goslings never sit still, you have to learn to count fast and accurately."

"Then that means he only has seven wives," I mused.

"That's right," growled a deep voice, "and what are you doing in my barn in the middle of the night?" A tall man with a big black beard, a pot belly, a t-shirt from the "Cock and Bull Café", and a pair of worn suspender overalls covered us from the front door of the barn with a double barreled shotgun. "And who are you anyway?"

"Sir, I can explain," I began, but Freddie jumped in front of me.

"Farmer Bean," he said, "it's all my fault. I cut the bag. But I don't think it's right for you to keep the cats in there all night. They should have some fresh air every now and then. And what about me? I'm stuck in my pen all the time, don't you think I deserve the opportunity to get out occasionally?"

"I don't have room for all these cats otherwise. The little women, bless their hearts, love kittens so, but kittens grow up to be cats, and they have more kittens and there are only so many mice to go around. I can't have them eating the geese."

"I have to agree with you there," Petunia put in, "but if you keep the people in chains, or in bags, they will rise up and overthrow you. Or at least, they are within their rights to do so." She had noticed in mid manifesto that most of the kittens had curled up and gone to sleep. Just about every horizontal surface in the barn had two or three sleeping cats on it. There must've been 150 of them on the floor around us. "I guess we jumped to unjustified conclusions," she went on, "is there any way we can make it up to you?"

Farmer Bean rubbed his chin. "Well," he began, "do you know anyone who can lay golden eggs? That would really help my cash flow. Farm equipment has gotten so expensive these days."

"I know somebody who knows somebody," Petunia replied, "but I don't know how she would feel about joining a free-market economy. Let me talk to her."

"I'm wondering about your wives," I put in. "I'd like to speak to at least one or two of them. Just to make sure everything is all right."

Farmer Bean scowled at me. "I resent the implications," he said. "But I'll make allowances, because you're an idiot." I opened my mouth, but shut it again. Maybe I deserved it. Something about being away from Alma for extended periods did something to my brain.

"Maybe not a total idiot," he went on. "They must be just about ready, let's go." He led us out of the barn, across the yard, and into the big house. There, six or seven women, I never did manage a definitive count, were laying out platters of freshly baked cookies and pitchers of milk at a long dining room table. One place had a pile of flowers on the plate, and I assumed that was for Petunia. We all sat down to a delicious home-cooked snack. But just then there was a knock at the door, it opened, and the rest of the geese trooped in. After a short pause to put out some more flowers everybody dug in. I apologized to Farmer Bean, told him that detective services would be his at no charge just for the asking, shook hands with everyone (unless I missed one of the wives), and headed home, dropping the geese off on the way.

I didn't hear from any of them again until a courier delivered a big festively wrapped box at the house the following December. A box with air holes. The label read "Compliments of the Bean family."

"Alma," I called, "what do you think about a kitten?"

The end

Source material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Was_Going_to_St_Ives

Footnotes:

*"Death of a king: fowl play or simply bad hygiene?"

**A horrific tale of love, loss, and cannibalism, for which the world is not yet ready.

***Thanks Walt.

Reprinted from Nursery Rhyme Noir -- https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42875

042717

domestic cats
keep the mockingbirds busy
heavy toll

032017

Only the White Meat

If sharks flew they avoided the mutant forest, where phage-ridden former humans vied with giant pitcher plants for the few morsels that entered there. Out of the forest the river ran red with blood, always, and sometimes you could fish out humanovegetal larvae, drowned and spinose. Yes, the country deteriorated rapidly after the gene factory was hit by free-something terrorists during the early days of the Collapse. Things are better now, and you hardly ever see blood in the river. No one enters the forest still, but aeronautical sharks (if they ever existed) are gone. It’s good they’re gone, and it’s good the humans are gone.

No, I don’t call what lives in the forest human. It’s sessile, for one thing, and reproduces by budding. Not human at all. Me? Why I’m no more human than you. Little hardwood sap in my veins maybe, and the rest pure Felis domesticus. No, they’re all gone, or if they’re not, they as good as are.

What happened to the dogs now, I like that too. It’s fitting that they should now be small, shelled, and six-legged. Eight would be better (more to pull off) but I’m not greedy. If there was a god, that god would be a cat. And that cat would be me.




reprint

020517

The first poem I wrote today for this blog was too good, and I decided to submit it somewhere. That's my dirty little secret. The poems you see here are either reprints or not my best material.

Those dang house finches! Filled the birdfeeder about 15 minutes ago and they are already out there, eating the seeds I really intended for much prettier birds. Sadly, they are smart enough to evade the cats.


If cats had wings

and were trainable

starlings and house finches
would be their prey

and they wouldn't be cats

012817b

So, it's a sunny day in Alabama in the middle of the winter, light pours in the southern windows, creating the kind of sunbeams that cats tell their kittens about, curled up in front of a space heater in the middle of a winter night. Southern windows, the kind of windows you can't find nowadays, but a hundred and three years ago when they were installed in this house, full of bubbles as they are, they were made big. The winter sun warms the wood floors. In the summer, the sun is overhead, and before air-conditioning, you could open those big windows, and get some relief.

Here I am, at my desk, within sight of, but not in, a sunbeam, tabulating Rhysling nomination data. If you are a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, send in your nominations. More than 50 of your friends and like-minded colleagues have already done that.

010517c– And when they do, all heck breaks loose

Pigs flew as cannonballs
dogs and cats as well
when Earth stopped rotating
everything went to Hell

A Hasp Deadbolt murderous nursery rhyme

A Deep Subject

Now, I have nothing against cats. Never have. I don’t own one, but I have friends who do. Still, by all accounts the Green cat was a rough customer. But I should start at the beginning. Hasp Deadbolt’s the name and solving crime’s the game. I work out of a small office in a rundown part of the city, but at least I don’t live there. Anyway, things had been kinda slow for a while, or I wouldn’t have touched a lost-kitty case, but I needed to pay the bills. So when a knock roused me from contemplation of my financial troubles, I called “come in” with more than my usual debonair charm.

The kid who walked in was big, really big. I wasn’t sure my client chair was going to hold him. Apparently, he wasn’t sure either, because he chose to stand.

“What can I do for you, young man,” I asked, giving him the benefit of the doubt, seeing as how I was short on cash. I dropped my feet to the floor and shuffled a few papers I kept on my desk for the purpose.

“I need help, Mr. Deadbolt,” he began, and then seemed at a loss as to how to continue. Anybody who gets my name right can’t be all bad, so I bit my tongue.

“My clients usually do, Mr...?”

“Johnny Stout, Sir. You see, it’s my cat. Well, not really my cat. He’s my neighbor’s cat. But, well, I’m worried.” I could see this was going to take a little time. Time, I had, and I eventually wormed it out of him. It seems his neighbors had a cat that they let roam around loose. It would bum food from everyone in the neighborhood, harassed small animals with little or no provocation, and generally made a nuisance of itself. And it hadn’t been seen for two days.

“I have to ask this, Johnny. It sounds like this Green cat is a pretty unsavory customer. Why are you so worried?” It’s not that I didn’t want the job, but I really was puzzled.

“Mr. Deadbolt,” he replied, “the cat is not the most pleasant creature in the world, but all he ever really did was kill some gangsters who were stealing from his owner.”

“A cat killing gangsters?! Who were these gangsters ... mice?”

“Exactly. The Mus brothers. Killing them was wrong, I know that, but they were robbing the Greens blind.” So, I took the case. I went right down to interview the neighbors and search for clues. Nobody had anything good to say about the cat, which seemed not to have a name. Mrs. Green called it “pussy.” Her son Tommy called it “that damn cat,” which was echoed by most of those I talked to. Pussy was a rough character, all right. He’d been implicated in the murder of Cock Robin earlier that spring, though another songbird had eventually confessed to that crime. “But I still think he had something to do with it,” insisted Mr. Oldersham, the Green’s half-blind next-door neighbor.

I was working my way down the other side of the street when young Johnny Stout came panting up. “I found him!” he gasped, “in the well!”

“Show me,” I said. Sure enough, he’d pulled Pussy out of an old well in the Green’s back yard.

“They don’t use this well anymore because they’re on city water. I don’t know what made me look in there.” He stopped for a minute. “But there he was. Floating!” He shuddered. “Who could have done this? Who?”

“Leave that to me, son.” I had a hunch. I sent the lad home and went around to the front. I’d seen the Green kid watching through the back window, but it was his mother who came to the door. “Mrs. Green? I’d like to speak to your son for a minute.” She invited me in, and I waited in the small and spare living room for a few minutes. When he came in, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Tommy,” I said, “I suppose you have heard that dead men tell no tales.” He nodded. “That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but it’s not always strictly true. Cats, for instance, have nine lives.”

“That’s an old wives’ tale!” he shouted.

“Now, Tommy,” I said, “who’s the detective here, me or you? All of these old stories have a kernel of truth in them, that’s why people have repeated them all these years. Like henbane? It really does kill hens. Anyway, cats can communicate for a while after they’ve died, at least in some circumstances. They’ve been known to be able to talk for up to nine days after death, which is why we say they have nine lives.” I slammed my fist down on the coffee table. Tommy jumped two feet in the air. “Why did you do it, Tommy!?” I shouted.

He broke down. Confessed he’d been working with the Mus Brothers, skimming grain and anything else that wasn’t nailed down and selling it on the black market.

“So when that damn cat killed my partners and dried up my income, I had to rub him out. I just picked him up and ...” But I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say that little Tommy is now doing 20 years in the rock hockey arena, with the possibility of time off for good behavior.

And Johnny turned out to be Stout in more ways than one; he paid me my full fee, on time.

The end

Buy the book: http://store.albanlake.com/product/nursery-rhyme-noir/

051216

WHEN THE HERMIT CAT GROWS
IT DISCARDS ITS SHELL
THE SOFT FUR LEFT INSIDE THE DISCARDS
OH SO SOFT
HARVESTED, A PRETTY PENNY KNOWS

ESCHEW THE ABOMINATION
RIPPING HERMITS OUT
BEFORE THEIR TIME
HOW THEY SUFFER
AND THEIR FUR
NEVER AGAIN SO SOFT

030816

Thousands were employed

generating static electricity

cats loved it

and the unemployment rate

dropped to historic lows

Poetry Planet

The new Poetry Planet (Diane Severson Mori) is audio poems about animals & other creatures. It includes a poem by me, about my late cat Orpheus, with homage to Fritz Leiber & HPL.

Here is StarShip Sofa (Poetry Planet is near the end)

http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2016/02/17/starshipsofa-no-423-kary-english/

and here is a link to info. about the poets and the poems.

http://divadianes.blogspot.de/2016/02/poetry-planet-no-16-animals-creatures.html

091514

how hard is it to make a lion?


Size and strength
the lidded snoozing eye
the hunt: quick, strategic
hot blood and a licked-clean chin
then, if they had windowsills,
upholstered chairs, screen doors
they'd be you, kitty,
padding into the garden

090414

dogostrophe

too many games
involving furniture
and the frames of doors
tables, food, and cats
who slept through it all
they say

082414

unkinely, Jane says cats -> cattle
imagine what they'd hunt!
nerves of steel they'd quickly rattle
what vet would dare their claws to blunt?

cows are bo-vines, quickly growing
swamping kudzu that we used
to hate, & with their constant lowing
low-flying aircraft are bemooooosed

Dreams and Cats

What He Doesn't Say


I think my cat's been to Ulthar
he visits pretty regularly
he has that "Don't Mess With Ulthar" air
about him in the morning
when he comes in
he's not afraid of ghouls
and I can tell that night gaunts
know his name

The clincher, though:
my neighbor dreamed of a city
full of cats
most of them were black like mine
they seemed to know her
rubbed against her like my cat does
kept her safe; she's sure they chased away
several kinds of hungry things
the city's name? "Uther" she said
"or something"

071814b

While we were visiting family in Kansas, we took a day trip to Lawrence, one of the coolest cities of its size in the country. I visited the Dusty Bookshelf, and was saddened to learn that the old store cat died last spring. The store is even fuller than ever with books, and it is pretty hard to navigate in a wheelchair. I did manage to find a small carousel of vintage paperbacks in plastic bags. In other words, books that came out when I was young! I picked up four volumes I had not previously read for three dollars each. That's at least a dollar cheaper per book than I could get them over the Internet, and I got to browse!

cat ku

these books offend me
off they go

021914

turn around
and I'll scratch the other cheek
kitty religion

070713

Revised:



On Felinia



Cool cats take their jobs very seriously

They keep limber without yoga

Glide with limitless inaudibility

Sleep with one ear open

And, this is the Number One Rule,

Anything that moves

Or might

Must die