Irregular Creatures Read online

  “I, uhh, the way it happened –“ I stammered.

  “What? Some cat left muddy cat prints all over our cars.”

  “Oh.” Had she not found Cat-Bird? “That’s all?”

  “What do you mean that’s all?”

  I didn’t remember seeing any paw prints last night on my way out to the garage, but it was dark and I wasn’t exactly looking. It must’ve been the winged cat’s prints. Maybe that’s where he landed.

  I shrugged. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” she huffed. “Something. I don’t know.”

  And then, in typical Missy fashion, she froze for a moment, not sure what to say or do except visibly quake. Then she spun heel-to-toe, went back outside, and headed off to work.

  ***

  Our garage is separate from the house. That’s part of why I like it so much – it sits away, disconnected, an island untouched by the homeland. It was my own personal wildlife refuge, and I was the endangered species. Well, me and a freaky feline.

  After Missy left, I decided to head out and inspect the crime scene. Sure enough, dirty cat prints peppered my Honda. Muddy paws on black paint. Either Cat-Bird did a major Waltz all over my car, or she was one of many. Not strange, really; the neighborhood served as home to dozens of strays. I’d seen plenty of cats (mostly black, ratty-looking things) noodling around hedgerows and driveways.

  I thought of Cat-Bird’s scratches. Maybe she really did tussle with a bunch of other cats.

  “I don’t want to think about this,” I said to nobody. Then I went into the garage.

  A part of me expected the cat not to be there. It was late, it might’ve been a dream, winged cats don’t exist – a lot of potential for it to have all been some kind of major brain malfunction. And yet, I was still somehow surprised when I couldn’t find the cat. I wasn’t accustomed to having my expectations met.

  The comforter lay tangled on the workbench. I went over and peeked under it. No cat. I checked by the sheets of scrap metal in the corner, I looked behind my welding kit, I looked under the bench. No cat, winged or otherwise.

  “I have officially lost my mind,” I said, again to nobody.

  “Mrow.”

  I looked up. Cat-Bird was in the rafters.

  “You’re a jerk,” I said to the cat.

  It slinked along the rafters, one languid paw after the next. It still had wings – tabby tiger-striped velvet tucked tight to its sides.

  “You look healthier. Did you fly up there?”

  No response.

  “You can’t even understand me, can you? I’m going to sell you to a Chinese restaurant. You’ll make an exquisite delicacy, General Tso’s Cat-Bird. If that doesn’t work, I might give you to the kid next door. PTA rumors suggest that the little bastard likes to cram firecrackers into unwitting animal butts.”

  The cat peered over the rafter’s edge and hissed at me.

  “Right back atcha,” I mumbled, flipping Cat-Bird my own personal brand of bird.

  I decided I better get to work on cleaning up the garage.

  ***

  A curious thing, work. Did you know that you can work but not make progress? Effort does not necessarily result in any particular outcome. I was supposed to clean out the garage, and I tried that, I really did. I shuffled one pile of scrap here. I moved my tool drawer there. I took the broom and swept up some stuff, only to scatter the dust and debris back to the four corners when I shuffled more junk around the room. In the end, I’d moved things in different places, but I hadn’t actually achieved anything beyond a variance in clutter.

  I didn’t want to let go of anything. A nearby trashcan remained largely unfilled.

  The cat stayed above me most of the time, sometimes sleeping, sometimes pacing the rafters. Occasionally I stubbed a toe or cut my hand, and this would elicit the now-familiar “mrow” from him. Whenever this happened, I gave Cat-Bird another dose of my middle finger.

  Then a little thing happened. A small epiphany.

  I was staring at the pile of scrap metal – in this case, sheets of corrugated tin – and I was trying to figure out what to do with it. Most of them were rectangular pieces, full and untouched. Some had already been pared down, parts and slices taken away for other projects.

  One sheet, near the bottom, looked like something.

  Something that wasn’t just a sheet of tin.

  It was a wing.

  ***

  Objects have things within them. I don’t mean on a physical level—yes, an object is made up of molecules and not everything is some kind of Russian nesting doll. I mean it spiritually. A whittler looks at a block of wood not as a block of wood, but as the thing encased within it. He doesn’t choose this thing, it simply is what it is. Maybe he sees a dragon, an eagle’s head or some geometric abnormality that represents the tense political climate of Cote d’Ivoire. Every item has a potential beyond its form. An artist’s eye is a third eye, and it sees that potential. It draws the ghost out of the matter, spirit from material.

  At least, that’s what I used to tell the ladies to get into their pants. It even worked on Missy once upon a time; moon-eyed was she over my artsy-fartsy fancy.

  Still. My artist’s eye had been spackled shut with sleep boogers for the better part of a year, now. Nothing has been able scrape it clean and let it see. Except here, now, I saw something in that tin that I wouldn’t normally have seen. I felt sick and excited and more than a little dizzy when I realized what I was seeing. My hands were actually shaking as I went to the workbench – as if on auto-pilot – and fetched a pair of tin-snips and a rubber mallet.

  I went to work.

  Real work.

  ***

  “Dad?”

  I jerked my head up, blinking sweat out of my eyes, sodden hair stuck to my forehead. I must’ve looked like Doctor Frankenstein after cobbling together his monster. Time had passed, but I didn’t know how long. It felt like minutes, but if Brian was home… it must’ve been hours.

  My son stood in the doorway to the garage. I looked up at the clock on the wall, forgetting that the damn thing hadn’t worked since two presidents ago.

  I cleared my throat. “Hey, pal. Just, uh, cleaning out the garage.” I said this with a straight face and a pair of bolt-cutters in my hand. In front of me, sitting on a wooden pallet, was a metal monstrosity nearly six feet high. It wasn’t done yet. I’m pretty sure it was a cat with wings. The real cat with wings was up slumbering in the rafters. I saw Cat-Bird open one eye and peer down at my boy.

  “You’re working,” Brian said.

  “Right,” I half-agreed. “Like your mother said.”

  “This isn’t how Mom said.”

  “I’m just taking a break. You know, like you have naptime in school, I have this.”

  “We don’t have naptime anymore. That was like, a lot of years ago.” Hesitantly, Brian approached. He looked at my burgeoning sculpture. “That thing is really cool.”

  In the rafters, Cat-Bird stood, flexing its wings. It perched on the very edge of the cross-beam, and stared down intently at Brian. Its gaze was fixed. I shook my head at the creature. The beast didn’t look my way.

  “Well,” I said, stepping away from the half-finished metal creation. “Mom’ll be home in a few hours, shall we go inside? Peanut butter and jelly? The forbidden treat? How about it?”

  “Mom said this morning that I was supposed to help you.”

  Cat-Bird balanced precariously—wings stretched out as the animal peered over the edge with a long neck. In my head, I pictured hundreds of Cat-Birds dancing on the head of a pin.

  “You can help by joining me in a delicious PB&J sandwich!” I gave him an obsequious smile. “I’ll squirt chocolate on it. Sound yummy?”

  “I won’t tell Mom,” he said.

  And right then, I was reminded that this was my son. The product of my body and soul. My masterful accomplice. I hugged him tight. Above me, I saw the cat watching. “You won’t?”


  “I’ll even tell her I’m helping you while you finish this. But when you finish you gotta show her, okay? Because she’ll be happy when you’re done.”

  “Deal,” I said, unconvinced that he was right. Ahh, the naïveté of children.

  That’s when it happened.

  A flash of movement above my son’s head.

  Cat-Bird was on the move.

  Its wings did not flap so much as stretch lazily out. The little beast had a good span on him – easily three or four feet of kitty wing. The cat circle-surfed the air and landed at Brian’s feet and immediately started to purr.

  I give Brian credit. He didn’t scream. I would’ve, had some mythological feline descended from the sky and landed at my feet. I probably would’ve let out a few drops of pee, too.

  My son just stared, eyes as big as plates. His lips worked, but no sound came out. Cat-Bird tucked its wings back once again and then stropped up against his shin. The animal’s purring sounded like a lawnmower off in the distance.

  “Dad,” Brian said in that uncertain way, like when a boy finds himself surrounded by bumblebees or discovers a garter snake at his feet. I reached out and patted him on the shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Bri. That’s… well. That’s Cat-Bird.”

  “This is weird.”

  “I know. It’s a cat. And it flies. I understand.”

  The shock began to dissipate. When it did, Brian’s open jaw turned to a smile. He turned to me and whispered, “This is kind of cool.”

  The smile was contagious. “I know. But you can’t tell your Mom. Remember how she reacted when I bought you that hamster?”

  “She called it a rat and made me give it away at school.”

  “Right. Imagine what she’ll do when she finds out I’m stashing a biologically unlikely winged feline in the garage.”

  “I won’t tell,” he said, nodding. He knelt down by the cat and ran his hand gently along her back. “She’s soft. What are all these cuts and scratches?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure, exactly. But I’ll tell you what, that’s one way you can help me.” I stepped over a bundle of dowel rods and a toolbox, and grabbed the hydrogen peroxide and cotton balls. “While I work, do you mind playing cat doctor?”

  ***

  A week later, Brian and I were turning in a great performance masquerading like good little worker bees. We threw out stuff I knew I wouldn’t need, piling it all up outside like offerings to the garbage gods. Meanwhile, Brian stood watch as I continued to work on my metal monstrosity, which had now left the realm of existing as a single winged cat, and was now a flock of them. Perhaps a gaggle, passel, or herd. Not sure what a group of Cat-Birds should be called—a clutter? a parliament? an orchestra?—but it didn’t matter. It was like a metal vortex of bat-cats reaching for the sky, massing upward in a funnel of impossible feline flight. It had nearly reached the ceiling of the garage. Soon, it’d be ready for some color.

  Cat-Bird – or CB, as we had taken to calling him – wasn’t a him at all. He was a she. Brian was thoughtful enough to look (whereas I respected the animal’s privacy).

  Whatever its gender, CB was Brian’s new best buddy. She mostly napped and slinked about the shadows while I worked – but when Brian came home from school, it was like someone stuffed the boy’s clothes full of catnip. Cat-Bird twisted herself in and around his legs, purring like a maniac, rubbing her head under his chin. Brian seemed taken with her, too. The two of them played endlessly with some kite string I found in the corner. I tied it to the end of a Veryfine juice bottle and the cat batted it around. Most surprising was when she batted it into the air, took flight, and batted it back to the ground. From then on, she took to jumping around, flopping this way and that, performing aerial stunts with those velvety wings. Her cuts were healing, too – now, they were pink lines, puckered and hairless. Soon, I figured the orange Morris hair would grow back and she’d be as good as new. Better, even.

  Oh, and I wasn’t banished to the itchy couch anymore. Apparently, my work in the garage (or the illusion thereof) convinced Missy that I wasn’t a completely indolent fool. I had to duck and weave a few times, telling her that I didn’t want her to see the garage until I was all done. She let me have that, which thrilled me—though the fear lurked in the back of my head. What would she say when she discovered my treachery? My banishment, I feared, would be eternal.

  Regardless, I took what was offered and I took it without question or hesitation. I found that while yes, I missed the bed, I missed sleeping on Missy’s shoulder and smelling her hair far more.

  Things were looking up.

  Of course, just as things go up, they must always come down. So goes the law in Joeworld, Population Joe.

  ***

  Missy returned home from the grocery store and handed me a long slip of paper—I caught a glimpse of a spreadsheet grid. I knew what it was, it was her grocery list.

  “Tuna,” she said. One word, nothing else. And I knew what she was getting at, because I had put it on the list.

  “Yes,” I said. “Did you get some?”

  “You hate fish.”

  “True.”

  She paused. “Then why am I getting tuna?”

  “Heart health.” I patted my chest. I was getting pretty good at this lying thing. “They say fish is good for the ol’ ticker.”

  “Tuna makes you gag.”

  “Also true. Did you get some?”

  “A dozen cans, like the list mysteriously says.”

  I kissed her on the cheek, and went back to the garage.

  ***

  During dinner, thunder rumbled outside. Weather forecast said a big storm was blowing in from the coast. Brian was excited; he wasn’t a kid who got freaked out by that stuff. He liked to go outside during those first storms of spring and watch the lightning, splash in puddles, squash the earthworms.

  Earlier, he asked if CB would be okay out there during the storm. I said she was safe in the garage and that we didn’t have anything to worry about.

  As we finished eating (meatloaf, green beans, noodles from a box), Missy got that look again. She was trying to figure something out – her brain was unraveling knots. It was a look I knew well, and was wise to fear it.

  “The tuna,” she said.

  “Mm. Tuna. Delicious,” I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin.

  “It’s gone.”

  Brian shot me a panicked look. I had taken it all out into the garage. Cat-Bird was probably finishing up a can as we spoke.

  “Sure is,” I said, hoping that my unswerving answer was enough to squash the line of inquiry. It wasn’t.

  “Where did it go?”

  Brian interjected. “We ate it. Dad and I eat tuna sandwiches in the garage. They’re good.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, but I gave him points for trying. Missy’s look of suspicion deepened. Her brows scrunched.

  “I just bought that tuna yesterday. You ate all of it? Already?”

  “Silly Brian!” I said, mussing his hair. “We didn’t eat it all. We just ate some of it. Like, a can or two.”

  “There’s no bread missing,” Missy said.

  “Goddamnit, Missy. What are you, a kitchen detective? Sherlock Holmes for the culinary set?” I asked.

  “You both hate tuna.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “I didn’t used to like peas,” Brian said. “But now I do.”

  He had a good point. I gave him credit. When he was little, he used to fling peas away like they were spiders or little turds (or maybe spider turds), shrieking anytime someone dared to put one within three feet of his mouth. Then one day about a year ago, he ate them without complaint. Just like that, a sea change. Or a pea change.

  “Fine,” she conceded.

  “Really?” I asked. “I mean, good.”

  She stood up and started collecting plates. “I’m going to go do the dishes.”

  “Thanks, hon.”

  “Thanks, Mom!”

  And then, plates in
hand, she turned the corner toward the kitchen. Brian gave me a nervous look.

  “Good job,” I whispered. “We covered our butts.”

  “Mom’s kind of scary sometimes.”

  “She just gets a little wound up. But it’s fine, now. We’re safe.”

  Except –

  I turned my ears to listen. Something was missing.

  I didn’t hear the water running. Washing dishes required water. Missy didn’t wash them with magic. She used the faucet, and then the dishwasher. Both made noise, which I now didn’t hear.

  Then I heard the front door open and close.

  My heart sank.

  “Why did your mother just go outside?”

  “Taking the trash out?”

  I swallowed hard. “It’s not trash day.”

  ***

  Missy is a good wife and a great mother. Without her, Brian and I would be living in our own filth, eating Ramen noodles dry out of the package. We’d be licking the fake chicken dust out of those little packets as if our lives depended on it. We’d probably be wearing the couch cushions as clothes, too. Still, she’s been less… accommodating over the years. My behavior hasn’t changed much, not even after having Brian. Hers, though? Like a slowly falling portcullis, I watch her personality come down inch by inch, day by day, the doorway forever closing. She used to be footloose and fancy-free. We used to drink wine under the moon and skinny-dip in the neighbors’ pool while they slept. These days, I’m lucky to get her to smile.

  ***

  I came busting through the side door of the garage. I forgot that I had piled up some of pine boards near the doorway. I hit them, tripped, and landed palms-down on the concrete. My hands stung and I hissed through my teeth.

  Missy didn’t bother looking over to see if I was all right.