The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

THE PARAKEET AND THE CAT Scott Bradfield

Being yourself is never a very easy row to hoe,” Sid said, nibbling sourly at a bit of unidentifiable root or mulch. “Being the only stray parakeet in a drab world filled with cackling hive-minded pigeons, sparrows, black crows and pheromone-splashed finches can be a pretty dismal experience indeed. Especially if you’re all alone. Especially if you re at all like me, and inclined to be pretty morose at the drop of a hat anyway.”

Without a doubt, winter was the hardest season. In winter, even the leaves abandoned you, while all the anxious birds you were just getting to know on the high wires departed precipitously for warm, ancestral climes—places with mythic, irreproachable names like Capistrano, Szechwan, Sao Paulo, Bengal. Other birds never told you where they were going, how long it took to get there, or even invited you along for the ride. They seemed to think that if they had a perfectly nice location picked out for the off-season, every body did.

“It’s sort of like being all dressed up with no place to go,” Sid told the ducks at his local pond. “I mean, my hormones have shifted into superdrive. My blood’s beating with procreation and heat. And not only can’t I find any girl parakeets, I can’t even find the goddamn continent of Australia.” The ducks were an addled, pudgy lot, filled with ambitionless quacks and broad steamy flatulence, fattened by white breads and popcorn dispensed by local children and senior citizens. They sat and jiggled their rumps in sparse blue patches of the partially frozen pond. Snow was everywhere. Winter was pretty indisputable now.

“Goddamn it’s cold,” the ducks honked and chattered. “Jesus fucking Christ it’s cold cold cold. We’re freezing our collective little butts off out here.”

Ducks might be self-involved, Sid thought, but they were still a lot better than no company at all. If you kept close to ducks, you might pick up stray bits of cracker or information now and again, or be alerted by the emergency squawks that proclaimed wolf-peer or weasel-crouch. The winter world was a hazardous and forlorn place, and you could use all the friends you could get. Buses and planes and whirling frisbees and crackling power cables, children with rocks and slingshots and BB guns and pocketknives. The wide world was filled with angular objects that were always rushing toward you without any regard for personal space or decorum. Not to mention the ruder angularities of solitude and exile. Not to mention hunger, sadness, constitutional ennui or even just the bloody weather.

Sid had possessed a home of his own once. A tidy gilded cage with newsprinted linoleum, plastic ladders, bells on wires, bright sexy mirrors and occasional leafy treats of damp lettuce and hard, biteable carrot. Beyond the cage, as ominous as history, stretched a lofty universe of massive walls and furniture and convergent ceilings inhabited by gargantuan creatures with glistening forests of hair and long fat fingers. These gargantuan creatures were always poking these fat fingers at you, and making you sit on them. They whistled and kissed, or made tisky chittering noises, as if they were really the parakeets and you too damn stupid to tell otherwise.

“You think you’re Mister Big Shot when you’ve got it all,” Sid told the ducks, who were nibbling a waterproof, oily substance into their feathers with irritable little huffs and snaps. “Food, water, a warm place to go to the bathroom—that's all you care about. You happily climb the plastic ladder, or happily ping the bell, or happily chat yourself up in the flashing happy mirror all day long and everybody’s happy, because that’s what you’re sup posed to do, that’s the life you’re supposed to live. Happy happy happy days, all the happy goddamn day long, happy little morons just pissing your happy lives away in some stupid cage. I mean, you think you’re living your own life and all, but you're not really. You’re just living the life that’s expected from you. That’s why you’re in a cage, after all. That’s why you’re getting all that free food.”

Sometimes, when Sid was feeling especially bitter and over-reflective, he paced back and forth on a sturdy branch that overlooked the most duck-populous rim of pond. He took quick bites out of the twigs and leaves and flung them hastily over one shoulder, like forsaken illusions. “Then one day you get sick, just a little head cold, and you re not worried. But the gargantuan people outside aren’t so optimistic, and want to know what happens to you then? Want to know where this happy little free ride takes you for a happy spin now? Into the trash can, that’s where. Right into the smelly old happy trash basket, whether you like it or not.”

When Sid stood at the farthest, thinnest extreme of branch, he could feel the faint vegetable pulse of the tree between his toes, he could see the widest horizons of frosty blue pond and white winter sky. “Boy, I’ll remember that day as long as I live. I’m totally headachy and miserable. I’m coughing up phlegm like it’s going out of style. I’m feeling too weak to keep my perch, see, so I drop down to the bottom of the cage for a few succinct winks. I guess while I was sleeping, the gargantuan people gave the cage a few exploratory thumps—I think I remember that much. But I was too tired to react. I just wanted to take this long nap at the bottom of the cage, and the very next thing I know, bingol I'm digging my way out of a newspaper-padded shoe box in the trash can outdoors. I’m sick as a dog. I’m so pissed off I can’t see straight. I mean, suddenly there’s all this space everywhere, loads and loads of space, fat and white and dense with dimensions I’ve never noticed before. The always. The indescribable. The everything. I just wandered and wandered, and before long I stumble across you guys, and this nice blue pond you’ve got for yourselves. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Though the ducks might sit and listen to Sid for a while, absently preening one another and snapping at fleas, eventually they grew impatient and irascible. They got up and waddled about self-importantly.

“He’s such a bore,” the ducks complained loudly, flapping in Sid's general direction. “Talk talk talk—that’s all he does. And want to know how often the subject of ducks comes up? Zero times, that’s how many. In fact, we’re beginning to suspect this guy doesn’t have any interesting duck stories to tell whatsoever!”

Being as the odds against his ever running across a female of his own species were something like thirteen trillion to one, spring didn’t offer much promise for Sid. This made winters especially hard, especially while the snow fell and icy winds knocked you about. Spring was the sort of dream you had to dream with somebody, and Sid was beginning to feel this particular dream was one he would never successfully dream at all.

“Have you even seen any girl parakeets?” Sid asked whenever he encountered random sparrows or blackbirds. Usually they were strays who had suffered recent illnesses or injuries, their eyes clarified by wild, dispirited memories of flocks that had long abandoned them. “I mean, they don’t even have to be that cute or anything—I don’t mind. And if you haven’t seen any girl parakeets, how about Australia? It’s like this really big vast yellow place—a continent-sized island, in fact. I don’t think it’s the sort of place you’d ever forget about once you’d seen it. I never saw it, and I dream about it every night. ”

Sid’s dreams of Australia were filled with bounding orange prehistoric-looking creatures and black, canny aborigines who hurled hatcheted boomerangs and fired poison darts from blowguns. Brilliant clouds of parakeets swarmed in the bright sky, crying out Sid’s name, wheeling and singing songs about an ever-imminent spring which would surely last forever. Whenever Sid awoke on his cold branch he could still hear those distant parakeets singing. Then he took one glance around the frigid, lens-like pond he knew. It was only the routine squawking of ducks. Ducks and ducks and ducks of them.

“Look at Screwy!” they cried (for the ducks were eternally ragging one another, like old maiden sisters). “He’s trying to eat another gum wrapper!”

“And look—here comes Big Bubba Duck. And boy, does he ever look pissed off at Harriet!”

Raging with secret, genetic industry, Sid spent entire days chewing things up. Branches and leaves and nuts, punching through their knotty, fibrous tissues with his sharp hooked beak.

“This is what I do,” Sid told the ducks, flinging bits of wood and pulp everywhere like a miniature buzz saw. “I’m a wood borer. I bore wood.” When Sid wasn’t talking to the ducks, he was tearing everything within reach into splintery little pieces. Day after day, hour after hour, sometimes even late into the night when he couldn’t sleep.

“I'm a wood borer,” Sid proclaimed edgily, his eyes wide with something like panic. “Wood boring just happens to be one of those things I do really, really well.”

One day, after a particularly dense snowfall, a cat arrived at the pond, bringing with it a murky, hematic odor of cynicism and unease.

“Hey there, you guys,” the cat said, maintaining a polite distance. The cat was gray, and sat itself smugly on a large gray rock. “Boy, are you ever an attractive-looking bunch of ducks! Seriously, I’m really impressed. I never even suspected ducks came as good-looking as you guys, or halfway near as intelligent, either. I guess that just goes to show me, doesn’t it? I guess that just goes to show that I don’t know that much about ducks after all.”

At first, the ducks glided off warily into the cold trembling pond, pretending not to be bothered, but never taking their eyes off the cat for one moment, either.

“I’ll tell you something, guys,” the cat continued, in a voice as gentle and intrepid as desire. “I just came from the city, and you don’t have any idea how lucky you’ve got it out here. What a nightmare. What a cesspool of smog and urine and crime and poverty they’ve constructed for themselves in the city, boy. Dog eat dog, cat eat cat, cars running everybody over without so much as a hi or a how-de-do. Bang crash roar crash bang—I’ve had enough city life to last me a few thousand centuries or so. Which brings me, of course, to why I’ve decided to move out here to the woods with you guys. Fresh air, sunshine, plenty of exercise. And of course a strictly monitored vegetarian diet from now on. I’m taking charge of my life, boy, and taking it on the road. Call me an outlaw, if you wish; call me a rebel. But I’m tired of living the life society tells me to live. I’m finally going to live my life for my self, thank you very much. Come hell or high water.”

While his smooth voice wetly purred, the cat licked his stubby, retractile claws and groomed his long twitchy whiskers, as if dressing himself for church. Then, giving the ducks a last fond look over his shoulder, he rested his head on the large gray rock and fell indefensibly asleep.

“Frankly, I don’t think you ducks are exactly the brightest flock of fowl I’ve ever come across in my rude travels,” Sid said, perched high atop a thin, buoyant willow. “We’re talking a fat gray cat now, and that means cat with a capital CAT, and I can’t believe I’m having to actually spell it out to you guys. Cats are what you call notoriously fond of fowl, fowl being you ducks and me both. We’re like this cat’s dream of a main meal, and I don’t care what he says about wildlife solidarity, or karma, or pantheism, or even free will. That cat wants to eat us alive. He wants to chew our flesh and rip our blood vessels into stringy pasta. But he wants to play with us first. He wants to tease us and cut us and watch us die slow. That’s because he's a cat, and we're what you call fowl. Am I going too fast for you guys or what?”

With the arrival of the cat’s sedulous gray voice, a cloud of drift and complacency began to descend over the tiny duck pond. The ducks took longer naps on the bank, and didn’t squawk so much, or flap, or flirt, or battle. They wandered off aimlessly into the high reeds and bushes, snapping up bits of worm and seed, cuddling with their ducklings and gazing up at the slow riot of white, hypnotic clouds and mist. It was as if everyone had suddenly ceased dreaming all at once, Sid thought. It was as if expectation didn’t persist here anymore, or incandescence, or passion, or blood. Across the pond’s cold glaring logic, the only heat was the large gray cat’s heat, the only voice was the large gray cat’s voice, the only burn and lungy whisper and modular red pulse was the cat’s, the cat’s, the cat’s, the cat’s.

“Carpe diem,” the cat said. “Seize the day, live for the moment, enjoy it all while you still can. As long as you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything.” When the cat wasn’t sleeping, he was speaking his low voice across the pond, a voice which the steely surface of water seemed to reflect and amplify, like light or temperature. “Sleep and eat and make love and party, party, party till the cows come home. Why live for tomorrow when tomorrow may never come? History, genetics, philosophy, evolution, teleology and math—that’s the world of the city, pals. That’s the world of machinery, concrete, hypermarts, petroleum and death. We, on the other hand, are in and of nature. We make our own rules, define our own characters and attitudes and laws. You may be ducks, and I may be a cat, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also be really good friends. I’m actually a pretty thoughtful and sincere individual—once you get to know me, that is. Everybody likes me, everybody trusts me. Everybody perhaps with the exception of my little pal, the parakeet. Isn’t that right?” the cat said, peering up into the acute angles of sunlight that intersected the jostling willow like spiritual traffic. “Isn’t that right, little pal?”

That’s right, Sid thought firmly to himself, refusing to allow the cat even a glance or a whisper. He didn’t want to grant the cat any responses that could be woven into luminous spells of innuendo, gossip and misdirection. He didn’t want his best thoughts and intentions to be mistranslated into catlike purposes.

And just to clarify the matter a little more precisely, Sid thought, I don’t happen to trust you one single little bit.

“Did anybody ever tell you that you have really beautiful plumage?” the cat said, and began licking his knobby paws again, his thick tongue snagging every so often against a stray indication of claw.

I know, Sid thought, staring off resolutely at a distant mountain. My plumage is quite exceptionally beautiful indeed.

Just about the time of the first slow thaw, Sid went for a flight around the pond and discovered the partially devoured remains of a duck concealed behind a copse of blueberries. Flies converged there, and an odor of bad meat and disintegration. Initially Sid felt a moment of giddy, electric self-displacement, as if suddenly confronted by his own reflection in some twisted mirror. The sky seemed closer, the wind harder, the ice colder. Then, with an involuntary jolt of panic, Sid leapt flying into the brilliant white sky.

“It was Screwy,” Sid told the other ducks back at the pond. “And just the way I always said it would be. Lungs, kidneys, liver, brains—that cat even chewed the spleen out of him. We got to stick together, now. We got to keep alert, assign guard duties and group leaders. We got to remain calm and, whatever happens, stay the hell out of the high brush. Women—keep your ducklings in line. Guys—sharpen your bills against that sandy rock over there. This is war, this is Jericho, this is the Final Battle. Evil has come to our pond, and it’s snoozing away on that big gray rock over there. Evil has come to our pond in the form of a cat, and that cat wants all of us for its next breakfast. ”

“Evil?” the cat sighed, reaching out with its front paws for a hard, slow stretch. “Isn t that a bit much, really? Aren’t we all part of the same food chain, aren’t we all equal in the eyes of Mother Nature? Don’t go getting all moralistic on me, Mr. Parakeet. Ducks die in this hasty world of ours, and so do cats—that’s the law of flesh. And Screwy, if you remember, was not a particularly astute duck. If you stop and think about it for one moment, you might realize that Screwy could have been eaten by just about any body. So don’t go blaming me because of my species, pal. My species may be feline, but my heart is true, and I only wish all of you—ducks and parakeets alike—nothing but the best health, the longest lives, the happiest dreams. And now, if you don’t mind,” the cat said, resting his chin on his paws, “I think I’ll get back to my own happy dreams for a while.”

“Quack quack,” said the addled ducks, milling about in a dispirited feathery batch. “Screwy is no longer a duck, the cat is no longer a cat. Parakeets and cats disregard ducks altogether, and only talk about abstractions like Evil and Law and Society and War. This is a little too complicated. This is a little too obtuse. Let’s do like the cat does, and take ourselves a nice long nap. Let’s all take a nap and dream of fat, meaty flies in our mouths, and a world filled with nothing but other happy, happy ducks.”

Sid began keeping meticulous census on the extinguishing flock. Fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-four, forty. Thirty-nine, thirty-seven, thirty-one, twenty-five. He couldn’t always locate them after they disappeared, but he could quickly sense the general attitude of cool and unworried disaffection that possessed the pond’s addled survivors like some sort of inoculation. The survivors rarely looked at one another anymore, or exhibited any signs of affection. They allowed their ducklings to wander off unprotected into the high brush, they didn’t eat as much as usual, they grew thin, spotty and slightly diarrheic. Sometimes they slept, or drifted aimlessly on the thawing pond among wide broken platforms of ice, or just strolled aimlessly in circles on the bank, snapping at indistinguishable pebbles and insects. It was as if the ducks had surrendered to a force far greater than themselves, a force which permitted them to nap, disregard, wander, delude, demagnify and concede. The world’s escalating reality was making the ducks more and more conjectural and abstract. Soon the bank and brush surrounding the pond were littered with splintery duck bones, broken duck bills and moist forlorn puddles of bloody duck feathers.

“They don’t listen to a word I say,” Sid complained to himself out loud. “It’s like I’m talking to myself. It’s like we don’t even speak the same language anymore.”

“They do what nature tells them,” the cat said wisely, sharpening his claws against the base of Sid’s willow. “That’s why they’re at peace with themselves, that’s why they can sleep and nap and rest. They realize that the universe is just this big blazing oven, burning entire planets for fuel, driving into the long black spaces all alone without any proper destination in mind. Ducks aren’t smart enough to trouble themselves with things like morality or justice—and that’s where they’re one up on you and me. Heaven’s a dream they’ll dream after this life, and not before. Why don’t you try it yourself, pal? Why don’t you just take it easy and go with the flow? We all die, we all suffer, none of our dreams hold. It’s not necessarily bad, or evil, or tragic, or sad. Just look around you—the ice sparkles, the bare trees sway. Winter’s a pretty beautiful season, if you give it half a chance. As long as you’ve got a nice thick coat to keep you warm.”

Every night, Sid grew feverish with bad dreams and black reflections. He tried to stay awake and watch the cat, who never seemed to abandon the perimeter of gray rock. He could see the cat’s luminous green eyes in the darkness, eyes that watched him while he drifted away into near-deliriums, lulled by the cat’s ceaseless gray voice.

“Come down out of the tree,” the cat whispered. “Come down and take a bath in the pond. It’s not so painful once you know, it’s not so scary once you’re taken by its teeth. It can even be a very sensual experience, or at least so I’ve heard. You won’t be lonely anymore. You won’t suffer. You won’t live dreams that always disappoint, you won’t feel hope that always flees, you won’t know love that always lies.”

Sid began to lose his formidable appetite; he stopped trying to rally the ducks into assuming tactical deployments and responsibilities; he even stopped boring wood. He sat in the high willow all day long simply trying to stay awake, drifting into reveries and naps, awakening with a galvanic thrill whenever he smelled the cat in the tree and looked down.

“I just thought I’d come up and visit for a little while,” the cat said, attached to the willow’s trunk by four alert paws. “Do you mind if I come up just a little further? Oh, okay. But maybe later? Maybe later in the week?” And then, with a casual glance over his shoulder, the cat retreated backwards down the trunk of the tree again, his long tail twitching, his fat rump writhing with a slow, almost erotic beat.

What could you count on in life? Sid wondered. Loneliness, predation, crepuscular scurryings, agony and death and the cold comfort of abstractions? The ducks in the pond continued to dwindle and nap. Twenty-three, nineteen, eighteen, twelve. Winter, Sid thought. Cold and very white.

What s it all about? Sid asked himself out loud, half asleep, nearly submerged by his own watery dejection. “What’s it all mean?”

“Nothing,” the cat whispered. “Or at least nothing that matters.”

“Who really cares?” Sid asked. “Who’s there to hold you in the night, or hear you cry? Who’s there to tell you it’ll all be better in the morning?”

“Nobody,” the cat whispered. “Nobody, nowhere.”

“Why’s it worth doing, then? Why should I struggle? Why should I even try anymore?”

“You shouldn’t,” the cat whispered, out there in the darkness. “You shouldn’t struggle, you shouldn’t try. Just come down out of the tree, pal. Come down here with me and III take care of you. We’re similar sorts of people, you and me. We're different from everybody else. We belong together.”

At night now Sid could hear the cat boldly taking the ducks and unashamedly eating them. The ducks hardly made any fuss at all anymore, or emitted any sounds. There was just the rushed guttural purr of the cat, and the wet sound of meat in his throat.

Night and annihilation were everywhere. All day long the fat gray cat slept on the large gray rock.

Sid knew he couldn't last; he knew he'd have to surrender eventually.

“First rule: I don’t want to be cut,” Sid said. “I don’t want to be bitten, or tortured, or flayed. I want to go with dignity. Then, afterwards, I don't care what happens. That’s just my material substance, that’s not my me. But I know I can’t do it alone. I’m too scared. I know I’ll chicken out at the last moment. That’s why I need you.”

“Don’t be frightened,” the cat said, gazing placidly at Sid in the high branches. “Of course I’ll do anything I can to help. ”

They embarked one morning after a cold rain. The high dark clouds were just beginning to break apart. On the bank, a small remaining band of thin, desultory ducks slept together fitfully in the shadow of the large gray rock, wheezing and dreaming. First, the cat waded alone into the pond and winced.

“The water’s pretty cold,” the cat said. “But I’ve got a nice thick coat, so I don’t mind.”

As the cat began to paddle, Sid leapt weakly from the willow and landed on the cat’s fat behind.

“I want to go out there,” Sid said. “To the island.”

The island contained a few leafless trees and one broken, abandoned children’s fortress cobbled together with planks of wood and old orange crates. Everything seemed misty and uncertain to Sid that morning. He had not slept properly in weeks. He couldn’t keep his meals down. He knew what he had to do, but he didn’t feel any desperation about it, or sadness, or urgency. He simply knew he was too tired to go on living with the way things were. He had to get it over with while he still had the strength.

“Anywhere you’d like,” the cat said agreeably, looking at Sid over his shoulder, his body coiled and alert beneath the water like an assumption.

“I always thought drowning was the best way to go,” Sid said distantly, watching the island approach, counting his reflections in the rippled water. “I always thought it would be just like falling asleep.”

“I’m sure it’s very peaceful,” the cat said. “I mean, but in the long run, of course, it doesn’t really matter how you go, does it?” The cat’s eyes were sly half-crescents, void and messageless, like signals from outer space. “It just matters that you go, and with as little pain as possible—that’s my philosophy. I mean, the only people death really affects are the loved ones left behind—and you’re not exactly leaving the world very crowded in those departments, pal. Or are you?”

“No,” Sid said. “I guess not.”

“Death’s pretty much overrated, when you get right down to it,” the cat said, his voice expanding across the pond with a curt gray clarity. “I don’t think death’s any more inscrutable than life, really. It’s not destination, or conclusion, or loss. I think of it more as translation—a reintegration of the furious self into the selfless, eternally mundane process of living, grinding on and on and on. Not truth. Not justice. Not morality or law. And certainly not individuals like us, pal. Individuals don’t mean very much compared to the eternal burning engines of the night. Space and planetary explosions and famine and floods and madness and war. I guess I’m what you’d have to call a pantheistic sort of cat, being as I believe—oh my.”

They were only a few yards from the brink of the island, and the cat had come to an abrupt halt in the water.

“What’s that?”

There was something brittle about the cat’s voice now, something tentative and uncatlike.

“What’s what?” Sid asked and, with a succinct flurry of wings, transferred himself to a gnarl of a drifting branch.

The cat was squinting with concentration, his chin partially submerged beneath the lid of water. “I seem to have one of my feet caught in something. ”

“Reach down with your other foot,” Sid said. Sid was feeling dreamy and sad. Nothing broke the corrugated surface of the pond except the earnest, conspiratorial figures of parakeet and cat.

“Yes,” the cat said. “If I just . . . Oh, that’s not it. Now I’ve got my other foot caught, too.”

“They’re what the ducks call slipweeds,” Sid said, “because they never give you the slip. I realize it doesn’t make sense calling them slipweeds—but then, go figure ducks. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but ducks never swim near this island. Ducks keep to the other side of the pond entirely.”

“Oh my,” the cat said. The cat’s eyes were suddenly wider. He spat out trickles of water that rilled into his mouth. “This is a bit dire, isn’t it?”

“Maybe for you,” Sid said.

“Listen,” the cat said, “maybe if you came over here a little closer ...”

“Fat chance,” Sid said. “A snowball’s chance in hell.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” The cat was beginning to struggle and kick a little, like a fish on a line. “I think you’re being very unfair. For a cat, you know, I’m actually a pretty nice guy.”

“I’m sure you are,” Sid said, his own voice enveloping him like a dream. He was trying to keep his eyes open. He was trying not to fall asleep. “I’m sure you’re a perfect saint—for a cat, that is.”

“Oh hell,” the cat said, and then, with a sudden twist and a plash, his round black snout vanished beneath the surface of water like a midnight vision overcome by harsh, irrefutable sunlight.

Sid was too exhausted to fly. He floated on the knobby branch for hours, hearing the secret rhythm of waves, the moist interior warmth of planets, pausing occasionally to take a sweet sip of water, or ponder his own imponderable reflection in the brightly lidded pond.

“Maybe the cat was right about destinations,” Sid thought, drifting in and out of sleep as the branch rocked, rocked him. “Maybe, in fact, destinations are places we never get to. Love, home, safety, death. Heaven and marriage and family and hell. Maybe they’re just notions of permanence we’ve invented in order to protect ourselves from the general impermanence of life itself. Maybe the universe is an oven. Maybe life really is without meaning. But maybe, just maybe, these aren’t reasons to give up life, but only reasons to enjoy and appreciate it more. Maybe we don’t ever get anywhere, or find what we want, or know anything utterly. But maybe that means we can stop punishing ourselves so much, too. Just getting up every day and doing the best job we can—maybe that’s the most we can ever expect from life. Doing the best job we can every day, and then being kind to ourselves afterwards.”

By the time Sid’s branch reached shore it was late afternoon, and Sid took himself a little bath. He nibbled damp neglected crumbs from the sand, and felt a tiny kernel of strength blossom in his heart and face. Everything about the waning sunlight seemed slightly richer, warmer, bluer and more real than it had that morning. In the shade of the large gray rock, even the frazzled ducks were beginning to stir a little. Sid couldn’t help feeling momentarily pleased with himself.

“Hey, cat!” Sid called out over his shoulder, brushing the water from his wings with a little swagger.

As if in response, a few trembling bubbles surfaced from the blue pond.

“Screw you, pall” Sid said, and then, just as suddenly, he realized.

Completely out of the blue, Spring had begun.