The thirteenth cat lived in a museum of glass and twine, where everything was for sale. Mistress was an artist, and the museum was a house, a miraculous house with false walls because they were constantly being sold off. They were made of the doors of cars, bits of plywood and aluminum siding. . . The front door, in fact, was two Volkswagen doors on their sides. The roof was aluminum.
"You're the unlucky number, you know," Mistress had said long ago.
Because she was an unlucky number, it was her duty - so felt the thirteenth cat - to look out for all her sisters.
And so it was the thirteenth cat who'd noticed that Mistress had been excited, and it had nothing to do with hanging Christmas decorations, this year.
A new person had come to visit the junkyard where they lived. The cats had seen many of her kind though. These women and their men were all the same, with their long noses and their minks and fur coats, their pearls and their double-breasted suits, their monocles with which they stared down their long noses at Mistress and her works.
This one was a vampire. You could always tell by the faint dried flower scent.
The other twelve sisters contented themselves with their usual games, and ignored the newcomer.
They washed themselves, they climbed drifts of snow that was falling outside - Fat Petunia rolled on her belly till she was sick and the thirteenth cat went over to comfort her. Harlequin caught a mouse up on the roof, and dangled it by its tail for an hour. The twins chased each others' tails.
The day went on, and still the strange woman had not gone away like the others had. She stayed for tea and even afterward, talking and talking.
Mistress called all of them to her as soon as the strange woman had left. "I love you all so much," she said, tearfully, "and because I love you, I think you'll be better off with this than in some asylum, where they'd surely separate you. . . who but a crazy old artist would want thirteen cats anyway?" She petted the thirteenth cat tenderly. "You're the unlucky number, but I see what you do for the others. Look after them now, as always. You will all always be in my heart!"
With that, she flung them out into the cold snow, and barred the doors against them.
Most of the cats sat at the door for a long while mewing in sadness and confusion, and Harlequin even pounded on the roof, trying to get back in. But the thirteenth cat just thought.
There would be no dancing tonight.
After a while, the other cats came and gathered themselves around her. They all looked at her, trying to see what to do.
This confused the thirteenth cat, but she took to the job. She started devising a plan, based on each cat's talents.
Harlequin came back, looking very pleased with herself, at dawn, when they were all huddled together under a dead car. Half the cats were dead from the bitter cold. Fat Petunia had been yowling for hours. But Harlequin sauntered right up to the sisters, without seeming to notice these tragedies - in other words, she saw all of them and chose to take no notice - and she smelled like fish.
Fish?
Harlequin cocked the tip of her tail.
When she went, the others followed. The thirteenth cat was ignored again; after a night without food, the smell of fish and its promise of food was overpowering, despite the fact it smelled dangerous somehow.
The market was more than any cat could wish for. There were more people than the cats had ever seen. Still, it was the fish and the meat that caught the cats' eyes.
"So, you've brought friends?" asked a broad man smelling of tasty things, as he bent down to them. Harlequin sniffed victoriously at the thirteenth cat and sauntered inside the market, followed by the others.
Not the thirteenth cat.
Something was wrong.
The man picked her up by the scruff of the neck.
She yowled.
"You - no, I don't think you should stay here," he said.
This wasn't the fishmonger Harlequin usually stole from; no indeed. But the thirteenth cat recognized his scent.
It was not a scent she liked. She stayed well away from the bones in the shop, even when he told her she could gnaw on them if she wished.
The thirteenth cat would not eat her own kind.
For, he smelled of the people who only appeared under the full moon.
That night she slept on the floor of his shop. She remembered Christmas back at the dump, in their museum: Mistress used to decorate with bits of glass she hung strung on wires, and every year they would have a big fish, which she divided into thirteen equal portions.
She was asleep when he picked her up again.
"You're to have a new home. That'll be nice, right?" he chatted as he carried her up some steps.
Suddenly she found herself face to face with a girl.
The cat knew what human youngsters looked like. This one had a broad face, and she wore her hair under a scarf.
"Kitty!"
"That's right, and she's yours. Too small for the sausage, you know. This one you keep to play with, to snuggle with - I bet she knows how to catch mice. And when you become older. . . well, you know how Mom has a toad?"
So it was that the thirteenth cat became someone's Christmas present. Knowing Harlequin and Fat Petunia and all would be someone else's sausage, while she escaped, didn't help - though the back of her mind was glad that she had.
Really, had she lost a family or gained one?
Maybe it was a little of both. - END