Neither of us could bring ourselves to small talk in the car, and for the most part the only sound was that of the wheels upon the road. It was dark by then, and rain began to fall before we’d been on the motorway for very long. When we passed through the first cut in the hillside, I felt the poppies all around us, heads battered down by the falling water. Alice turned to me.
“I did know.”
“How,” I said, trying not to cry, trying to watch what the cars behind me were doing.
“When you said you loved me, you sounded so unhappy.”
I dropped her in town, on the corner where I’d picked her up. She said a few things to help me, to make me feel less bad about what I’d done. Then she walked off around the corner, and I never saw her again.
When I’d parked outside the house I sat for a moment, trying to pull myself together. Nancy would need to see me looking whole and at her disposal. I got out and locked the door, looking around halfheartedly for the cat. It wasn’t there.
Nancy opened the door with a shy smile, and I followed her into the kitchen. As I hugged her and told her everything was all right, I gazed blankly over her shoulder around the room. The kitchen was immaculate, no sign left of the afternoon’s festivities. The rubbish had been taken out, and something was bubbling on the stove. She’d cooked me dinner.
She didn’t eat but sat at the table with me. The chicken was okay, but not up to her usual standard. There was a lot of meat but it was tough, and for once there was a little too much spice. It tasted odd, to be honest. She noticed a look on my face and said she’d gone to a different butcher. We talked a little about her afternoon, but she was feeling much better. She seemed more interested in discussing the way her office reorganization was shaping up.
Afterward she went through into the lounge and turned the television on, and I set about making coffee and washing up, moving woodenly around the kitchen as if on abandoned rails. As Nancy’s favorite inanity boomed out from the living room I looked around for a bin bag to shovel the remains of my dinner into, but she’d obviously used them all. Sighing with a complete lack of feeling, I opened the back door and went downstairs to put it directly into the bin.
There were two sacks by the bin, both tied with Nancy’s distinctive knot. I undid the nearest and opened it a little. Then, just before I pushed the bones off my plate, something in the bag caught my eye. A patch of darkness amid the garish wrappers of high-calorie comfort foods. An oddly shaped piece of thick fabric, perhaps. I pulled the edge of the bag back a little farther to look, and the light from the kitchen window above fell across the contents of the bag.
The darkness changed to a rich chestnut brown flecked with red, and I saw it wasn’t fabric at all.
We moved six months later, after we got engaged. I was glad to move. The flat never felt like home again. Sometimes I go back and stand in that street, remembering the weeks in which I stared out of the window, pointlessly watching the road. I called the courier firm after a couple of days. I was expecting a stonewall and knew it was unlikely they’d give an address. But they denied she’d ever worked there at all.
After a couple of years Nancy and I had our first child, and she’ll be eight this November. She has a sister now. Some evenings I’ll leave them with their mother and go out for a walk. I’ll walk with heavy calm through black streets beneath featureless houses and sometimes go down to the canal. I sit on the bench and close my eyes, and sometimes I think I can see it. Sometimes I think I can feel the way it was when a hill was there and meetings were held in secret.
In the end I always stand up slowly and walk the streets back to the house. The hill has gone and things have changed, and it’s not like that anymore. No matter how long I sit and wait, the cats will never come.
CATCH
Ray Vukcevich
Ray Vukcevich’s fiction has appeared in many magazines including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, SmokeLong Quarterly, Night Train, Polyphony, and Hobart, and has been collected in Meet Me in the Moon Room. He also works as a programmer in a couple of brain labs at the University of Oregon. Read more about him at www.sff.net/people/rayv.
I asked the author how he came up with the preposterous germ of his story and this is what he relates: “The story, I remember, came from a jumble of images. I remembered throwing my son up in the air when he was a baby. He loved it. Those might have been his first giggles. But one time, I nearly missed. It was a close call, he was so slippery for some reason, and I might have dropped him. He might have hit his head on the edge of the coffee table on the way down. It might have been a disaster. My wife was sitting across the room, reading, smiling up at us now and then. She didn’t realize what had happened, and I didn’t tell her, and now it’s too late, but the kid seemed to know, or maybe it was the look on my face. He clutched at my shirt. I hugged him in close rather than go for one more toss.
“Oddly, the other image was of a kitten who had put her paw through a hole in a cardboard box to swat at the turtle inside, and the turtle had grabbed the paw. Much drama. Once I got the cat loose, I tossed her to my wife who caught her neatly.
“The story didn’t come together for more than twenty years after those two incidents.”
Your face, I say, is a wild animal this morning, Lucy, and I’m glad it’s caged. Her scowl is so deep I can’t imagine she’s ever been without it. Her yellow hair is a frumpy halo around her wire mask. My remark doesn’t amuse her.
I know what I did. I just don’t know why it pissed her off, and if I don’t know, insensitive bastard that I am, she certainly isn’t going to tell me.
She lifts the cat over her head and hurls it at me. Hurls it hard. I catch it and underhand it back to her. The cat is gray on top and snowy white below and mostly limp, its eyes rolled back in its head and its coated tongue hanging loose out of one side of its mouth. I know from experience that it will die soon, and its alarm collar will go off, and one of us will toss it into the ditch that runs between us. A fresh angry bundle of teeth and claws will drop from the hatch in the ceiling, and we’ll toss the new cat back and forth between us until our staggered breaks and someone takes our places. The idea is to keep the animals in motion twenty-four hours a day.
In this profession, we wear canvas shirts and gloves and wire cages over our faces. I sometimes dream we’ve lost our jobs, Lucy and me. What a nightmare. What else do we know?
My replacement comes in behind me. He takes up the straw broom and dips it into the water in the ditch that runs through the toss-box and sweeps at the smeared feces and urine staining the floor and walls. A moment later, the buzzer sounds, and he puts the broom back in the corner. I step aside, and Lucy tosses the cat to him. I slip out of the box and into the catacomb for my fifteen-minute break before moving on to the next box.
Lucy and I work an hour on and fifteen minutes off all day long. As we move from toss-box to toss-box, our paths cross and recross. I’ll be out of phase with her for half an hour, probably just long enough for her to work up a real rage.
The catacomb is a labyrinth of wide tunnels dotted with concrete boxes. There is a metal chute running from the roof to the top of each box. The boxes are evenly spaced, and there is a light bulb for every box, but not all the bulbs are alive so there are gaps in the harsh light. The boxes are small rooms, and there is a wooden door on each side so catchers can be replaced without interrupting the tossing. The concrete walls of the tunnels, like the concrete walls of the boxes, are streaked black and white and beaded with moisture. The floors are roughened concrete. Everything smells like wet rocks and dead things.