Cat Tales Issue #3 Read online

  Cat Tales Issue #3

  Steve Vernon

  Jamie Ferguson

  Leah Cutter

  Karen L. Abrahamson

  Annie Reed

  Danielle Williams

  Felicia Fredlund

  Linda Jordan

  Contents

  About this Bundle

  Fonts in this Ebook

  Steve Vernon

  The Boy Who Loved To Draw Cats

  The Boy Who Loved to Draw Cats

  Jamie Ferguson

  Gilroy and the Kitten

  Gilroy and the Kitten

  About the Author

  Leah Cutter

  Nine Lives

  Nine Lives

  About the Author

  Also by Leah Cutter

  About the Uncollected Anthology Series

  Additional Uncollected Anthology Stories

  About Knotted Road Press

  Karen L. Abrahamson

  Coyotes, Cats and Other Creatures

  Coyotes, Cats and Other Creatures

  About the Author

  Also by Karen L. Abrahamson

  A Sneak Preview of Afterburn

  Chapter 1 - A Laser Diffused By Mist

  Chapter 2 - A Liquid Silence and Black

  Fantasy, Romance and Adventure from Twisted Root Publishing

  Annie Reed

  Here, Kitty Kitty

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  About the Author

  The Case of the Missing Elf

  Omens and Oracles and Eros, Oh My

  Just My Luck

  My Cousin, The Rabbit

  The New Year That Almost Wasn’t

  Lights! Camera! Action?

  Annie Reed

  The Night Mischief Became a Real Cat

  The Night Mischief Became A Real Cat

  If you liked …

  Unbroken Familiar sample

  About the Author

  Danielle Williams

  A Gingersnap Cat Christmas

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Afterword: The Real Gingersnap Cat

  Special Thanks…‌

  Also by Danielle Williams

  About the Author

  Felicia Fredlund

  When She Gained Her Soul

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  About the Author

  Also by Felicia Fredlund

  Linda Jordan

  Eclipse

  Eclipse

  About the Author

  About BundleRabbit

  Don’t Miss These Other Amazing Bundles!

  About this Bundle

  Grab a copy of NINE of the wildest and weirdest cat stories that you have ever come across. Fantasy, mystery and true-to-life tales of cat wonder.

  * * *

  "Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience." - Pam Brown

  * * *

  "There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person." - Dan Greenberg

  * * *

  "Cats are like music. It is foolish to try to explain their worth to those who do not appreciate them." - Anonymous

  Fonts in this Ebook

  This ebook primarily uses the Alegreya font, designed by Juan Pablo del Peral.

  Alegreya is a typeface originally intended for literature. Among its crowning characteristics, it conveys a dynamic and varied rhythm which facilitates the reading of long texts. Also, it provides freshness to the page while referring to the calligraphic letter, not as a literal interpretation, but rather in a contemporary typographic language.

  The italic has just as much care and attention to detail in the design as the roman. The bold weights are strong, and the Black weights are really experimental for the genre.

  Not only does Alegreya provide great performance, but also achieves a strong and harmonious text by means of elements designed in an atmosphere of diversity.

  Drop caps are provided using the Great Vibes font by TypeSETit. Great Vibes provides an elegant flair which adds to the text’s aesthetics.

  * * *

  For the best reading experience, please set your ebook to use the Publisher or Original font.

  The Boy Who Loved to Draw Cats

  A Story from the Shadows of the Grimm Mountains

  A long plus a long plus about three more long times a hundred more longs squared to the hippopotamus long time ago, a boy sat all by himself just outside of his family’s woodshed, drawing cats. The boy was waiting to be punished for drawing cats and he knew deep down inside of himself that he probably ought not to be drawing even more cats, but he honestly could not think of a better way to spend his time.

  He drew happy cats.

  He drew sad cats.

  He drew cats that couldn’t make up their mind just how they felt.

  He drew cats that were polka dot and cats that were striped and cats that were every single color but cat-colored and a few more colors in between.

  Yes sir, that boy just loved to draw cats.

  It was kind of a deep-rooted obsession; I guess you could call it, if you wanted to be all harsh and judgmental about it. A kinder sort of spirit might decide to squint at the boy’s actions and call it a passion and in a way you would be perfectly right to call it either passion or obsession. I don’t really know quite when the whole thing started. I am quite sure that he must have been sitting there by himself drawing and scribbling with his crayons on paper making lines and squiggles and boxes and maybe he saw a big old tomcat chasing after a field mouse that had just crawled up from somewhere under or in behind of the woodpile, or maybe he just dreamed the whole thing up, but no matter how it all first started the honest-to-Bible truth of it was that boy just plain loved to draw cats.

  Just that very morning his Daddy had handed him a big old horsehair paint brush and a bucket full of barn red paint and he had told the boy to go and paint the barn.

  “Oh but Daddy,” the boy said. “We painted that barn last year and the year before. I mean, it isn’t like anybody is going to come around from Beautiful House and Barn Keeping magazine and give our barn a solid gold ribbon or some other sort of an award. Why in the whole wide world do I need to paint that big old stupid barn again?”

  “Because that barn needs painting,” Daddy said. “And besides, it will build your character.”

  The boy had come to a conclusion some time ago that his Daddy had some serious deep-seated issues about building character. It seemed like pretty near everything that Daddy told him to do was going to build him some character. The boy didn’t really know just what good a good character was ever going to do for him, but he was pretty sure that by now – after all of the chores that his Daddy had been tell
ing him to do over all of the years that the boy had known him, that his character must be about as big and as bright as a freshly painted, forty-four million board sized brand new barn.

  So the boy dragged the bucket of bright red barn paint over to the barn and he was about to set to painting, except he decided to feed the barn cats first. And then he had to stop and scratch each of the barn cats behind the ears, and some of them come around and he had to scratch them twice and then he just sat there and listen to them purr and after an hour or two he decided that he had better get to painting that barn – only just as soon as the boy had dunked his big old horsehair brush into the bucket full of paint and splashed on his first splash of paint, he got himself a really bad idea.

  You know the kind of idea I am talking about. The kind of idea that you get every now and then and you think to yourself that you really ought to know better only you don’t know better and you do it anyway – which is exactly what that stupid inspired boy did.

  He painted himself a cat – a great big gigantic barn-sized cat.

  It took at least a half an hour just to fill in the outline.

  “That is one big old beautiful cat,” the boy said to himself.

  Now, if that boy had just left it at that and painted over that big old barn cat’s painted-in outline until the whole barn was covered in red barn paint and then his Daddy wouldn’t have even been able to tell the difference and this whole story might have turned out a billion times different than it turned out to turn out – only that boy didn’t just leave it at that. That boy started painting little tiny bright red barn cats around that first gigantic barn cat’s outline and then he started making them cats do things and then when he got tired of painting big and tiny red barn cats he mixed in some mud and painted big and tiny brown barn cats and then he mixed in some charcoal and painted big and tiny black barn cats. Then he poured in some orange juice thinking that he could make himself a great big old tabby orange barn cat only that turned into a great big sticky old orange bucket full of mess which is right about the time that his Daddy turned up to see how the boy was doing.

  “What in the name of holy red barns are you doing, boy?” his Daddy asked.

  Now another boy might have tried to lie and say that it had been some entirely different boy who had come along and stolen his barn paint and his horsehair paint brush and beat him up and painted all those beautiful, wonderful, stupendous barn cats all over his Daddy’s barn, only there was one undeniable thing that boy was – was honest.

  That stupid cat-drawing boy was just about as honest as the day was wide, long and square at the corners. He could not tell himself a lie if his life depended on it.

  “I drew a cat,” the boy told his Daddy.

  “You drew a whole bunch of cats,” his Daddy said ruefully. “Just what in the name of Puss and go Boot were you thinking about, boy?”

  The boy blinked, three whole times.

  “Well I guess that I wasn’t thinking all that too hard,” the boy admitted to his Daddy. “I just love to draw cats is all.”

  His Daddy shook his head so hard that the boy was afraid that his Daddy’s head was going to fall off of his Daddy’s shoulders and roll around in the dirt grinning.

  “I just don’t know what I can do with you boy,” his Daddy said, still shaking his head. “I guess that I am going to take you up to the church and give you on over to the preacher man.”

  “Why do you want to do a thing like that?” the boy asked.

  “Why did you want to go and paint those cats for?” his Daddy asked right back. “Like I said, I just don’t know what to do with you, is all. I know that your Momma gives old clothes to the church every spring and on Easter she paints up Easter eggs and gives them to the church and whenever the preacher decides to hold himself a bake sale your Momma has to bake up a big old batch of turnip bread and bring it up to the church and she seems to get some sort of good out of it, so giving you away to the church seems to me to be just as good an idea as any that I have ever had.”

  And that is just what his Daddy did.

  He took the boy down to the church and the preacher smiled at the boy and asked him all sorts of questions about God and the universe and what the world was good for and I guess that old preacher must have liked what he heard because he decided to take that boy in and teach him up about all of the things that he needed to learn to become a preacher.

  The boy’s Daddy walked away, thinking to himself that he had done a good thing, only he had a whole lot of explaining to do to the boy’s Momma when he got home, only the boy’s Momma wasn’t all that broken up about losing the boy the way that she had on account of they had six more boys to work with and she surely knew which way the wind was blowing on any particular day in time.

  “I guess he is going to be happy as a preacher,” his Momma said. “And he can draw those cats whenever God isn’t watching him.”

  Only it didn’t work out quite that way.

  The boy seemed to listen to what the preacher had to say and he tried his very hardest to learn, only it seemed that nearly every time the preacher turned around that boy found himself a pencil or a paint brush and set to drawing more cats.

  He drew them cats on the pews and the preacher just looked the other way.

  He drew them cats on the pulpit and the preacher kept on looking the other way.

  You see, that preacher was turning the other cheek, which apparently is what you are supposed to do if you are any kind of a holy man, only when that preacher caught the boy drawing in the pages of a Holy Bible the preacher up and decided that it was high time to do something about all of this cat drawing foolishness.

  “There are no cats allowed in the Bible,” the preacher pointed out. “You ought not to be drawing in the pages of a Holy Bible like you’ve been up to.”

  “Why not?” the boy asked. “There were cats on old Noah’s Ark, wasn’t there?”

  “Not that it says in the Bible,” the preacher replied.

  “Well there ought to have been cats,” the boy said. “I mean everybody knows that boats are full of rats and there isn’t anything better on this planet for keeping down rats then a great big old hunting cat. Maybe God just goofed, is all, when he went and forgot to put cats in the pages of the Holy Bible.”

  The preacher just shook his head so hard that the boy thought to himself that his Daddy must have surely been an amateur when it came to the fine art of head shaking. That Preacher shook his head so very hard that his shoulders dislocated two or three times, and his ears rang like a pair of big old pink wax-stained cowbells.

  Only the boy didn’t stop there.

  “Are you saying that God didn’t make cats?” the boy asked.

  “That’s not what I am saying,” the preacher said. “I am saying that God doesn’t want cats, because cats never do what they are told to do, just like certain little boys who just won’t do what they are told to do – which is namely, to stop drawing so darned many cats.”

  The boy shook his head. He knew that he was in trouble and he knew that if he said anything more that he was going to be in even more kinds of trouble than he already was, but that did not stop him one little bit from doing one more thing.

  “God is wrong,” the boy said. “Cats do belong in church and belong in the Bible and cats are something that churches ought to look up to.”

  And then the boy pointed up at the ceiling and the preacher leaned his head back and looked on up and saw that the boy had been up in the rafters all morning long and had drawn a gigantic cat made out of clouds and dream dust, stretched out across the ceiling of the church reaching one big old paw up towards the heavens like it was reaching out its paw for God his own self.

  “See,” the boy said. “Cats do belong in church.”

  The preacher let his breath out in a long gusty old sigh of defeat and went on back to shaking his head.

  Finally he spoke.

  “I have got to send you away from the Church this very min
ute,” the preacher said. “Although it hurts my heart to say that to you, but the truth of it is, you will never make a very good preacher, but you might very likely someday grow up to become the world’s best cat drawing artist – and I guess there is something to say about being the world’s best at anything that you decide to go and do for yourself.”

  “If you say so,” the boy said.

  “Just let me give you one last piece of holy advice,” the preacher said. “If you find yourself sleeping out at night, find yourself a big old barrel to hide inside of. No one ever thinks about looking inside of a barrel at night.”

  “Why is that?” the boy asked.