Cats and Dogs

Or, "But You Can't Take Arkansas out of the Girl"

A Horrible Story that Explains Nothing
BlueThing, by Therianthrope
Cast of Characters:

Setting:

Arkansas. Untrue to her name, the KID has returned to the Ozark hills for a Thanksgiving holiday. The family home is not exactly a cabin in a holler, but it's something close; the road is a dirt road, and the sounds of dogs and chickens can be heard outside. MASIE is telling a story.

MASIE

Oh, my new cat, he's so cute, I've named him Steve, he's a little patchwork calico cat and he's so good at hunting the spiders, it's so cute the way he pounces on them, whipping his tail and bashing them with his paw…of course most of the fur on his head has fallen out because he has ringworm right now, and I'm pretty sure I caught it from him.

KID

Ringworm? Isn't that, uh, contagious?

MASIE

Yup, it's real contagious. Look right here, you can see one of the marks on my neck. See? A perfect red circle?

KID

Yuck! Get away from me! Jesus christ!

JESSE

Haw haw! Yeah, that sure is gross! Hey, do you remember that one cat we had that had her kittens up a tree?

MASIE

That's right, that's right! All the other kittens were getting eaten by owls so this one cat, she climbed a tree and had her kittens there. I don't know why she thought it was safer up there. Anyway, so as soon as the kittens get big enough to start crawling around…[she trails off into gasps of laughter]

JESSE (also hooting with laughter)

…They all fell out of the tree! Bam! Bam! It was raining kitten bombs!

KID

Oh god, the little blind kitten bodies lying all around the tree! That's sick!

MASIE (still laughing her ass off)

Yeah, it was sad. Having kittens in a tree. There's a mutation that nature will select against. Real dead end, Darwinistically speaking.

JESSE

Those cats were all mangy, feral fleabags anyway. They wouldn't let you pet 'em after the first generation of them. The ones we got spayed just got run off by the others. Remember that one that started turning inside out?

MASIE

You remember, you were still here then. There was a big tumor or something hanging out her butt. It looked like her intestine was half hanging out. We couldn't catch her to take her to the vet, not that we tried very hard. Finally Dad stopped feeding any of them. And they still hung around, so he threw rocks at them all until they ran away.

KID

Shit, I do remember that. That was a pretty shameful chapter in our family history, that business with the cats.

JESSE

Hey, it wasn't as bad as Cleo's puppy.

KID

Cleo had puppies? When?

MASIE (laughing anew)

Oh man! So our dog Cleo! She likes to carry things around with her, you know. There was this one tie-dyed t-shirt she carried around everywhere. Anyway, so god knows where she got it, but one day we realize she's carrying around a puppy. A dead one.

JESSE

Yeah, its legs were sticking straight out and its eyes were staring and it was real gross, but you couldn't get to it. She would come up carrying this dead puppy in her mouth, and kind of drop it and look up at you, pant-pant-pant, all happy like, but if you tried to walk up to her she'd grab the thing in her mouth and run off a little ways.

MASIE

Dad finally got it away from her and threw it down the hill, but she just went and fetched it and started carrying it around again.

JESSE

We buried it one time, and she dug it up.

MASIE

That's right, that's right, and then it started to rot and get flies and stuff, and she's still carrying it around everywhere, this rotting dead puppy…

Now both of them are laughing too hard to talk.

KID (getting angry)

Jesus christ, you guys are disgusting hillbillies. When's the next plane to California? Crap, I can't believe I'm sitting here listening to this. My wormy diseased sister and my sadistic brother laughing over kittens falling from trees and a rictus puppy dog-toy…Jesus that's…that's…Oh god, it's actually pretty fucking funny.

All three laugh. Close curtain on the sorry scene. Walk away briskly.

RedFeather, by
Therianthrope

The Frisco Kid is generally to be found all likkered up and spoiling for a fight. She's a sexy Wild West gunslinger in the great tradition of Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, only a little less with the sharpshooting and a little more with the booze-fueled marathons of Star Trek and sodomy.

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