Tails of Wonder and Imagination - By Ellen Datlow Page 0,136

in the air, and the mice forming a great circle around his body."

"See? You're concerned about him, Bern. Before you know it you're going to fall in love with the little guy."

"Don't hold your breath. Carolyn? What was his name before it was Raffles."

"Oh, forget it. It was a stupid name."

"Tell me."

"Do I have to?" She sighed. "Well, it was Andro."

"Andrew? What's so stupid about that? Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Carnegie—they all did okay with it."

"Not Andrew, Bern. Andro."

"Andrew Mellon, Andrew Gardner . . . not Andrew? Andro?"

"Right."

"What's that, Greek for Andrew?"

She shook her head. "It's short for Androgenous."

"Oh."

"The idea being that his surgery had left the cat somewhat uncertain from a sexual standpoint."

"Oh."

"Which I gather was also the case for Patrick, although I don't believe surgery had anything to do with it."

"Oh."

"I never called him 'Andro' myself," she said. "Actually, I didn't call him anything. I didn't want to give him a new name because that would mean I was leaning toward keeping him, and—"

"I understand."

"And then on the way over to the bookstore it just came to me in a flash. Raffles."

"As in raffling off a car to raise money for a church, I think you said."

"Don't hate me, Bern."

"I'll try not to."

"It's been no picnic, living a lie for the past three months. Believe me."

"I guess it'll be easier for everybody now that Raffles is out of the closet."

"I know it will. Bern, I didn't want to trick you into taking the cat."

"Of course you did."

"No, I didn't. I just wanted to make it as easy as possible for you and the cat to start off on the right foot. I knew you'd be crazy about him once you got to know him, and I thought anything I could do to get you over the first hurdle, any minor deception I might have to practice—"

"Like lying your head off."

"It was in a good cause. I had only your best interests at heart, Bern. Yours and the cat's."

"And your own."

"Well, yeah," she said, and flashed a winning smile. "But it worked out, didn't it? Bern, you've got to admit it worked out."

"We'll see," I said.

The White Cat

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and respected writers in the United States today. Oates has written fiction in almost every genre and medium. Her keen interest in the Gothic and psychological horror has spurred her to write dark suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith, to write enough stories in the genre to have published five collections of dark fiction, the most recent being The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense and Wild Nights!: Stories about the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway, and to edit American Gothic Tales. Oates's short novel Zombie won the Bram Stoker Award, and she has been honored with the Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers Association.

Oates's most recent novels are Blood Mask, The Gravedigger's Daughter and My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike. She teaches creative writing at Princeton and with her late husband, Raymond J. Smith, ran the small press and literary magazine The Ontario Review for many years.

Oates is a cat lover and has written several dark stories about cats. This one could be seen as the inverse of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat."

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife's white Persian cat.

His hatred for the cat was all the more ironic, and puzzling, in that he himself had given the cat to his wife as a kitten, years ago, when they were first married. And he himself had named her Miranda—after his favorite Shakespearean heroine.

It was ironic, too, in that he was hardly a man given to irrational sweeps of emotion. Except for his wife (whom he'd married late—his first marriage, her second) he did not love anyone very much, and would have thought it beneath his dignity to hate anyone. For whom should he take that seriously? Being a gentleman of independent means allowed him that independence of spirit unknown to the majority of men.

Julius Muir was of slender build, with deep-set, somber eyes of no distinctive color; thinning, graying, baby-fine hair; and a narrow, lined face to which the adjective lapidary had once been applied, with no vulgar invention of mere flattery. Being of old American stock he was susceptible to none of the fashionable