Copyright 2020 Sonny Clarke
1.
There was a disturbance in the undergrowth; The four paws of Tinker heralded a desperate journey as they trundled through the old, forgotten woods. The snapping of sticks, the crunch of leaves, a squeak and then a puff, the last breath of a short-lived mushroom raised by the generous humidity. The liquid light of a near-full moon dripped and drizzled through the canopy to bless the upright ears of the hound who howled with a vague sense of lost freedom; an echo of his ancient spirit stirred beneath his tangled and matted fur. He sung in a loud voice to keep himself from tiring.
Through the woods I will trots,
as a message I has gots to deliver to the master of wings.
O’er fields I will go, over head over toe, I’m a jolly old dog and I sings.
He drew out that last word in a ridiculous howling sound to validate his nonsense rhyme for Tinker, the good boy that he was, was most certainly no poet.
Six days prior to this urgent moment, Tinker had been summonsed by his master and best friend, Mister Alain Unwin. Tinker had carefully snuck into the zoo where Alain and his comrades had been held hostage for almost a year by the great and handsome leader, Stromboli. The loyal dog lay in the shadow by his master’s cage awaiting instruction.
“Tinker,” Alain’s voice was peppered with pain, “I need you to go fetch…. Tinker”
Alain tried to raise enthusiasm with his voice but his ribs were so sharp against his food-deprived form he could hardly bear the pain. Tinker’s ears suddenly stood upright and the dog bounded off only to return momentarily with a half-chewed stick. He dropped it by the bars and woofed, “Go on, throw it! Yes!”
“NOoo!” Alain admonished with difficulty, “Fetch the bird Tinker…. Fetch Henri Le Rennet”.
Tinker’s enormous, thick head tilted sideways while the slow cogs of his mind tried to understand and after a lethargic pause, he leapt with all four paws off the ground and was gone into the woods; he was really gone this time.
Alain slid hopelessly down the bars landing on the ground of his cage. He rolled over onto his back and called out. “GUARD!” he used all the energy he could muster and from around the side of the cage a lithe, black Siamese slowly curled his way into view, like a plume of smoke dancing on a gentle breeze.
“Missster Unwin,” The Siamese hissed, “Why don’t you stay quiet like the rest of your comrades.” He gestured to a litter of bodies strewn across the cage behind him.
“They are sick. We need food or we will die!”.
“You’re on a diet fatty,’ the bulimic feline spat, ‘all hoomans must lose weight, orders from the great Stromboli himself!”
The Siamese pouted as he leaned against a nearby tree and started to sing in a breathy falsetto, ‘Sometimes birds, suddenly appear…… every time you are near,’ He cackled as he paused, ‘Just like you, I want to be, tasssssting them….’
Alain lay gasping in agony while the mangy guard proceeded to hack and spit out a fur ball so rancid that it bounced away on the concrete below him.
Now, you may be wondering about Stromboli. He was a feline of utter magnificence. With an illustrious black and bronze coat, a top-hat and a monocle, he immediately stole the attention of any room he entered. Strom, as he was called by those from his inner circle, was sitting at his desk, delicately eating sardines from a tin with a silver cocktail fork. With each mouthful he exuded a loud, pleasurable purr “ahmmmmmmm” before taking another taste. He glanced over at his own reflection in a mirrored vase that stood in a corner and he frowned.
Since seizing power over the Southern Lands and subjugating the disorganised hooomans, he had admittedly over-indulged on his favourite delicacy so cruelly denied him during his years as leader of the under-species. At that memory, the burden of PTSD from this torture, his mood shifted and he prowled slowly around the room. He batted the vase as he walked past it, tipping it and its insulting reflection to the floor. He then moved on and opened a long velvet curtain revealing a glass enclosure, inside which was a man. The man was tethered to a chair, arms bound by feathery cat toys, legs strapped with spiky, leather collars adorned with jingling bells. Strom let out a low, purring cackle.
“You see Guido self-determination has done me well!” He gestured around the room before sharpening his claws on the arm of a leather chair placed purely for the purpose of sharpening his claws. Strom slowly coiled himself around a lamp and entered Guido’s enclosure. The grand feline took another sardine from the tin and relished it before teasing Guido with his mouth half full, “You’re not looking so good kitty, you haven’t touched your dinner.” They both looked at a dry bowl of kibble that sat in a plastic dish on the floor.
“I can’t eat that.” Guido dejectedly replied.
“No?” Stromboli feigned shock, “But that is the very same food you fed me all those years when you kept me captive. Don’t you like it Kitty? If you’re hungry you’ll eat it Kitty, won’t you!”
By the time Stromboli had ambled to the door again, Guido had mustered the energy to yell, “How long are you going to keep me!” Without turning back, Strom replied dryly, “My dear kitty, not much longer.” Stromboli signalled. A moggy guard brought Guido a real, fit-for-human-consumption meal and unshackled him. Guido dropped to the floor and gorged.
“A friend in the North has sent word that his master, like yourself, has had a windfall.” Strom had turned to watch his former owner desperately devouring his food, “Two joint winners, the largest lottery in the history of mankind and as you know Guido, mankind is history. Anyway,” Stromboli slowly redrew the curtain over the enclosure, “My feline friend will inherit his master’s share of the money should anything happen to him. They still don’t understand how silly that could be!” Stromboli took another tin of sardines gently pulling at the lid. “should anything happen to him. Ahahahaha purrrrrrr.”
2.
“Well done Tinker! Good boy!” Alain Unwin was greatly lifted by the sight of Tinker returning with a large crow dangling upside-down from his mouth. The K9 pulled up outside his master’s cage.
“Do you think you can get me out of this predicament, it’s a rather ungainly way to travel.” The crow, Henri Le Rennet, spoke with a low, unemotional rasp to the upside-down image of an old friend. Alain Unwin signalled to Tinker. He unlocked his retriever jaw. Le Rennet let out a surprised squawk and righted himself to avoid hitting the ground, then hopped two paces over to a bench and shape-shifted into a small human in a dark suit sporting an undergrown moustache. He brushed down his sleeves and worked his hands as if they had just been released from a plaster-cast, “It has been said that I have a rabid dislike of felines but I am having second thoughts about canines now too.” Tinker smiled dopily mistaking Le Rennet’s words as complimentary.
Alain drew himself up using the bars, “Mr Le Rennet, Thank-you for coming.”
“I don’t see that I had a choice. You look like, excuse my French, merde Mr Unwin.”
“The great Stromboli has been escalating his revenge on humanity. He has declared any human that does not submit to his rule will be impounded in his concentration camps and starved... to death!”
“Not starved hooman…” The Siamese materialised from thin air and grinned widely to the gathering. Le Rennet, at this disturbance, became a crow once more and perched himself high enough to be safe from an ambushing feline. Tinker, possessed with bravery leapt at the intruder and growled and barked but the Siamese just sighed and calmly picked up a stick and threw it off into the distance. Tinker lurched off after it in an ungainly manner.
“Bit of a let down, man’s best friend. Surely you could have picked a more useful companion Mr Unwin.”
Le Rennet, crowed from above, “The bird nations are almost upon you. They are leading a charge from the north to reclaim their lands and free the littering humans from your prisons. We will return over-flowing garbage bins to the curb-sides once more and you cannot stop us.”
“Why don’t you come down here and tell me about it,” The guard leant against the enclosure picking at his teeth. Henri Le Rennet without responding took flight and quickly disappeared over the horizon.
The Siamese retrieved a scrap of food from his teeth and looked at it momentarily before dangling it over Alain Unwin’s head. “Can’t be that hungry then hooman.” And with that, he slithered off, winding himself around objects until he was finally out of view.
3.
Two long and tortuous days passed without word.
Alain Unwin began to lose hope and let himself slide down amongst the corpses of his comrades. Letting himself slip away forever was now a real possibility.
His vision blurred in and out as the stuffy air of evening peaked; vapour clouds and the twinkle of far-off stars were broken by the fresh wave of morning dew. Was this how it all ended? Counting the hours; Blind and benign. His mind wandered back through the catalogue of his life and stopped with fondness on a childhood long ago. He was ten and was given a kitten.
“Pepper, I’ll name her pepper!” his voice was high and joyous and he indulged that playful little kitten, enchanted by her antics.
“You see young man,” The remembered voice of a veterinarian interrupted, “kittens can’t tell when they’ve had enough to eat and they get addicted to junk food. So we humans have to make sure they don’t eat too much!”
The vet showed young Alain a chart of cat silhouettes viewed from above and ask him to point to which one looked like Pepper, now a sleepy and snuggly adult cat.
“That one,” Alain pointed to a silhouette that looked like a blob. Alain’s smiled sagged as he inferred his crime. In that moment he resolved to do better. To join an emerging class of humanity that, out of love, tough love: put their felines on a diet, kept them locked indoors and purchased straw-filled cat toys as a replacement for their sport. It was utter humiliation for Pepper, who had since been dubbed Sekhmet by her street-smart-peers at the all-night kitty-litter café on Shadow Lane. Pepper all but disappeared from the street-scape, her renown left to legend.
As Alain dazed in and out of consciousness, watching rabbling bats squeak and argue on their way back to their roosts he suddenly realised that the bats he was gazing at were coming his way, except these were not the same bats that he was watching a moment ago. While his vision had glazed over with a death-rattled memory, the bats had become pigeons. Masses of pigeons blackened the sky and eclipsed the dawning light as they tutted and hooted over head. Ranks of them broke off and headed in different directions. The final rank swiftly glided in, landing by Alain’s prison. As agile orange toes touched the ground, each bird nodded and shape-shifted into a full rank of upstanding human-shaped beings.
4.
A group of small, agile men snuck around to where the moggy-guards slept and quietly rolled a cucumber to land beside them. The moggies, alerted by the subtle sound of a vegetable rolling along the ground woke suddenly and seeing the thing evacuated to take cover inside a nearby bush. Eyes wide with terror, they waited in absolute silence until it was evident that the thing was of no harm and then they quietly crawled out from their cover, keeping low to the ground and batted it a couple of times with a cautious paw. Realising their foolishness, they straightened up and teased each other for being so silly when suddenly a pigeon appeared before them.
“Hey Frank, where’d he come from” The larger moggie nodded toward to the bird, “I thought we ran you lot out of town,” Frank challenged. “No matter, Frank, I could use a little snack!”
The pigeon instantly transformed into a human who, taking advantage of the stunned stillness, blew dust in the moggies faces. They cough and managed a few words, “Frank, what is this….” before collapsing to all fours being returned to regular animals.
The others had meanwhile busted Alain and his comrades out of the lock-up and help the staggering, starved humans move to safety. The evacuation was disturbed by the Siamese guard who, on seeing what his moggie underlings had been reduced to, put his paws up in the air, “I can see you guys are busy and I won’t trouble you. I have no loyalty to the big fuzz ball, so I’ll just quickly be on my way.” And with the speed of light, the hair on his spine stood on end and he was gone.
The morning soon gave way to noon and as chaos reigned all across the Southern Lands pigeons, crows and multitudes of other bird nations freed human kind and brought the ranks of brutish Burmese and rioting Russian Blues to their paws. Stromboli was still eating sardines in his cat tower, blissfully unaware and uninterested it what was going on outside of his stomach. Henri Le Rennet glided into the chamber and stood before the obese overlord.
“I am Henri Le Rennet.”
Stromboli got up from the floor causing a clatter of empty tins around him. He was encumbered by a massive weight gain that seemed to appear overnight. “Yes, I’ve heard of you but those are not your clothes. No matter, you will die in them anyway.”
Le Rennet took a cucumber from his pocket and placed it on the ground in front of Stromboli. Strom, was confused at first but then broke into a long, loud belly laugh. “Is that all you have … a cucumber! Oh my, oh my I’m getting a stitch. I need to sit down.” Stromboli plonked to the ground causing a slight quake with his girth and continued to roar with laughter. “Do you really believe all that guff about cats being scared of cucumbers? You are a bigger fool than I took you for Le Rennet – a fool and a feline hater all along.”
“You know,” Le Rennet’s raspy, almost inaudible voice gently replied, “I like cats, I really actually do.” and with that Le Rennet opened his palm and blew dust, not at Stromboli but over the cucumber. Stromboli looked at him, a confused pause and then more laughter but just as his jowls started to jiggle, the cucumber moved, it started to rock side by side and Strom swallowed his joy and watched. Suddenly that small cucumber was born into a towering green monster with a gaping mouth that roared open and swallow the great, fat, Stromboli whole.
When the dust settled, the cucumber had shrunk back to it’s usual size and revealed a beautiful black and bronze Persian sitting under the weight of a top-hat. Le Rennet lifted the hat releasing it’s captive and Stromboli, severely lacking his former grandness uttered in a whine, “You think this will stop me Le Rennet? I will be back; I will be back!”
Le Rennet crouched down to Stromboli and whispered even quieter than ever before, “Nevermore” and blew a final palm-full of dust into the great Stromboli’s face. Stromboli sneezed and then mewed before waddling off as fast as his stumpy legs could take him. Le Rennet folded down back into his crow form and hopped out of the window, taking flight toward the horizon.
Alain Unwin, quickly recovered from his weight loss was laying in a field throwing a stick for his faithful friend Tinker when a crow flew in and landed beside him. Alain sat up and watch the bird as he bowed his head and shaped-shifted. Alain stood up smiling at the vision of Henri Le Rennet standing before him. “You disappeared. I never got to thank-you.” Le Rennet bowed his head, “I had other appointments in the Northern Lands. You can thank me by ensuring that felines stay where we put them. No more diets, keep those cats well fed, it serves us all better that way.” Alain Unwin firmly nodded in agreement and Le Rennet once more became a crow and took to the skies with a caw.
Guido Gotcelli, a portly old man, returned home to find his handsome Persian, Stromboli, in the larder. “Stromboli!” Guido admonished and the cat turned and hissed at him. “Let me get that for you, kitty kitty.” Guido cowered as he reached the pantry and pulled the lid off a tin of sardines.
1.
There was a disturbance in the undergrowth; The four paws of Tinker heralded a desperate journey as they trundled through the old, forgotten woods. The snapping of sticks, the crunch of leaves, a squeak and then a puff, the last breath of a short-lived mushroom raised by the generous humidity. The liquid light of a near-full moon dripped and drizzled through the canopy to bless the upright ears of the hound who howled with a vague sense of lost freedom; an echo of his ancient spirit stirred beneath his tangled and matted fur. He sung in a loud voice to keep himself from tiring.
Through the woods I will trots,
as a message I has gots to deliver to the master of wings.
O’er fields I will go, over head over toe, I’m a jolly old dog and I sings.
He drew out that last word in a ridiculous howling sound to validate his nonsense rhyme for Tinker, the good boy that he was, was most certainly no poet.
Six days prior to this urgent moment, Tinker had been summonsed by his master and best friend, Mister Alain Unwin. Tinker had carefully snuck into the zoo where Alain and his comrades had been held hostage for almost a year by the great and handsome leader, Stromboli. The loyal dog lay in the shadow by his master’s cage awaiting instruction.
“Tinker,” Alain’s voice was peppered with pain, “I need you to go fetch…. Tinker”
Alain tried to raise enthusiasm with his voice but his ribs were so sharp against his food-deprived form he could hardly bear the pain. Tinker’s ears suddenly stood upright and the dog bounded off only to return momentarily with a half-chewed stick. He dropped it by the bars and woofed, “Go on, throw it! Yes!”
“NOoo!” Alain admonished with difficulty, “Fetch the bird Tinker…. Fetch Henri Le Rennet”.
Tinker’s enormous, thick head tilted sideways while the slow cogs of his mind tried to understand and after a lethargic pause, he leapt with all four paws off the ground and was gone into the woods; he was really gone this time.
Alain slid hopelessly down the bars landing on the ground of his cage. He rolled over onto his back and called out. “GUARD!” he used all the energy he could muster and from around the side of the cage a lithe, black Siamese slowly curled his way into view, like a plume of smoke dancing on a gentle breeze.
“Missster Unwin,” The Siamese hissed, “Why don’t you stay quiet like the rest of your comrades.” He gestured to a litter of bodies strewn across the cage behind him.
“They are sick. We need food or we will die!”.
“You’re on a diet fatty,’ the bulimic feline spat, ‘all hoomans must lose weight, orders from the great Stromboli himself!”
The Siamese pouted as he leaned against a nearby tree and started to sing in a breathy falsetto, ‘Sometimes birds, suddenly appear…… every time you are near,’ He cackled as he paused, ‘Just like you, I want to be, tasssssting them….’
Alain lay gasping in agony while the mangy guard proceeded to hack and spit out a fur ball so rancid that it bounced away on the concrete below him.
Now, you may be wondering about Stromboli. He was a feline of utter magnificence. With an illustrious black and bronze coat, a top-hat and a monocle, he immediately stole the attention of any room he entered. Strom, as he was called by those from his inner circle, was sitting at his desk, delicately eating sardines from a tin with a silver cocktail fork. With each mouthful he exuded a loud, pleasurable purr “ahmmmmmmm” before taking another taste. He glanced over at his own reflection in a mirrored vase that stood in a corner and he frowned.
Since seizing power over the Southern Lands and subjugating the disorganised hooomans, he had admittedly over-indulged on his favourite delicacy so cruelly denied him during his years as leader of the under-species. At that memory, the burden of PTSD from this torture, his mood shifted and he prowled slowly around the room. He batted the vase as he walked past it, tipping it and its insulting reflection to the floor. He then moved on and opened a long velvet curtain revealing a glass enclosure, inside which was a man. The man was tethered to a chair, arms bound by feathery cat toys, legs strapped with spiky, leather collars adorned with jingling bells. Strom let out a low, purring cackle.
“You see Guido self-determination has done me well!” He gestured around the room before sharpening his claws on the arm of a leather chair placed purely for the purpose of sharpening his claws. Strom slowly coiled himself around a lamp and entered Guido’s enclosure. The grand feline took another sardine from the tin and relished it before teasing Guido with his mouth half full, “You’re not looking so good kitty, you haven’t touched your dinner.” They both looked at a dry bowl of kibble that sat in a plastic dish on the floor.
“I can’t eat that.” Guido dejectedly replied.
“No?” Stromboli feigned shock, “But that is the very same food you fed me all those years when you kept me captive. Don’t you like it Kitty? If you’re hungry you’ll eat it Kitty, won’t you!”
By the time Stromboli had ambled to the door again, Guido had mustered the energy to yell, “How long are you going to keep me!” Without turning back, Strom replied dryly, “My dear kitty, not much longer.” Stromboli signalled. A moggy guard brought Guido a real, fit-for-human-consumption meal and unshackled him. Guido dropped to the floor and gorged.
“A friend in the North has sent word that his master, like yourself, has had a windfall.” Strom had turned to watch his former owner desperately devouring his food, “Two joint winners, the largest lottery in the history of mankind and as you know Guido, mankind is history. Anyway,” Stromboli slowly redrew the curtain over the enclosure, “My feline friend will inherit his master’s share of the money should anything happen to him. They still don’t understand how silly that could be!” Stromboli took another tin of sardines gently pulling at the lid. “should anything happen to him. Ahahahaha purrrrrrr.”
2.
“Well done Tinker! Good boy!” Alain Unwin was greatly lifted by the sight of Tinker returning with a large crow dangling upside-down from his mouth. The K9 pulled up outside his master’s cage.
“Do you think you can get me out of this predicament, it’s a rather ungainly way to travel.” The crow, Henri Le Rennet, spoke with a low, unemotional rasp to the upside-down image of an old friend. Alain Unwin signalled to Tinker. He unlocked his retriever jaw. Le Rennet let out a surprised squawk and righted himself to avoid hitting the ground, then hopped two paces over to a bench and shape-shifted into a small human in a dark suit sporting an undergrown moustache. He brushed down his sleeves and worked his hands as if they had just been released from a plaster-cast, “It has been said that I have a rabid dislike of felines but I am having second thoughts about canines now too.” Tinker smiled dopily mistaking Le Rennet’s words as complimentary.
Alain drew himself up using the bars, “Mr Le Rennet, Thank-you for coming.”
“I don’t see that I had a choice. You look like, excuse my French, merde Mr Unwin.”
“The great Stromboli has been escalating his revenge on humanity. He has declared any human that does not submit to his rule will be impounded in his concentration camps and starved... to death!”
“Not starved hooman…” The Siamese materialised from thin air and grinned widely to the gathering. Le Rennet, at this disturbance, became a crow once more and perched himself high enough to be safe from an ambushing feline. Tinker, possessed with bravery leapt at the intruder and growled and barked but the Siamese just sighed and calmly picked up a stick and threw it off into the distance. Tinker lurched off after it in an ungainly manner.
“Bit of a let down, man’s best friend. Surely you could have picked a more useful companion Mr Unwin.”
Le Rennet, crowed from above, “The bird nations are almost upon you. They are leading a charge from the north to reclaim their lands and free the littering humans from your prisons. We will return over-flowing garbage bins to the curb-sides once more and you cannot stop us.”
“Why don’t you come down here and tell me about it,” The guard leant against the enclosure picking at his teeth. Henri Le Rennet without responding took flight and quickly disappeared over the horizon.
The Siamese retrieved a scrap of food from his teeth and looked at it momentarily before dangling it over Alain Unwin’s head. “Can’t be that hungry then hooman.” And with that, he slithered off, winding himself around objects until he was finally out of view.
3.
Two long and tortuous days passed without word.
Alain Unwin began to lose hope and let himself slide down amongst the corpses of his comrades. Letting himself slip away forever was now a real possibility.
His vision blurred in and out as the stuffy air of evening peaked; vapour clouds and the twinkle of far-off stars were broken by the fresh wave of morning dew. Was this how it all ended? Counting the hours; Blind and benign. His mind wandered back through the catalogue of his life and stopped with fondness on a childhood long ago. He was ten and was given a kitten.
“Pepper, I’ll name her pepper!” his voice was high and joyous and he indulged that playful little kitten, enchanted by her antics.
“You see young man,” The remembered voice of a veterinarian interrupted, “kittens can’t tell when they’ve had enough to eat and they get addicted to junk food. So we humans have to make sure they don’t eat too much!”
The vet showed young Alain a chart of cat silhouettes viewed from above and ask him to point to which one looked like Pepper, now a sleepy and snuggly adult cat.
“That one,” Alain pointed to a silhouette that looked like a blob. Alain’s smiled sagged as he inferred his crime. In that moment he resolved to do better. To join an emerging class of humanity that, out of love, tough love: put their felines on a diet, kept them locked indoors and purchased straw-filled cat toys as a replacement for their sport. It was utter humiliation for Pepper, who had since been dubbed Sekhmet by her street-smart-peers at the all-night kitty-litter café on Shadow Lane. Pepper all but disappeared from the street-scape, her renown left to legend.
As Alain dazed in and out of consciousness, watching rabbling bats squeak and argue on their way back to their roosts he suddenly realised that the bats he was gazing at were coming his way, except these were not the same bats that he was watching a moment ago. While his vision had glazed over with a death-rattled memory, the bats had become pigeons. Masses of pigeons blackened the sky and eclipsed the dawning light as they tutted and hooted over head. Ranks of them broke off and headed in different directions. The final rank swiftly glided in, landing by Alain’s prison. As agile orange toes touched the ground, each bird nodded and shape-shifted into a full rank of upstanding human-shaped beings.
4.
A group of small, agile men snuck around to where the moggy-guards slept and quietly rolled a cucumber to land beside them. The moggies, alerted by the subtle sound of a vegetable rolling along the ground woke suddenly and seeing the thing evacuated to take cover inside a nearby bush. Eyes wide with terror, they waited in absolute silence until it was evident that the thing was of no harm and then they quietly crawled out from their cover, keeping low to the ground and batted it a couple of times with a cautious paw. Realising their foolishness, they straightened up and teased each other for being so silly when suddenly a pigeon appeared before them.
“Hey Frank, where’d he come from” The larger moggie nodded toward to the bird, “I thought we ran you lot out of town,” Frank challenged. “No matter, Frank, I could use a little snack!”
The pigeon instantly transformed into a human who, taking advantage of the stunned stillness, blew dust in the moggies faces. They cough and managed a few words, “Frank, what is this….” before collapsing to all fours being returned to regular animals.
The others had meanwhile busted Alain and his comrades out of the lock-up and help the staggering, starved humans move to safety. The evacuation was disturbed by the Siamese guard who, on seeing what his moggie underlings had been reduced to, put his paws up in the air, “I can see you guys are busy and I won’t trouble you. I have no loyalty to the big fuzz ball, so I’ll just quickly be on my way.” And with the speed of light, the hair on his spine stood on end and he was gone.
The morning soon gave way to noon and as chaos reigned all across the Southern Lands pigeons, crows and multitudes of other bird nations freed human kind and brought the ranks of brutish Burmese and rioting Russian Blues to their paws. Stromboli was still eating sardines in his cat tower, blissfully unaware and uninterested it what was going on outside of his stomach. Henri Le Rennet glided into the chamber and stood before the obese overlord.
“I am Henri Le Rennet.”
Stromboli got up from the floor causing a clatter of empty tins around him. He was encumbered by a massive weight gain that seemed to appear overnight. “Yes, I’ve heard of you but those are not your clothes. No matter, you will die in them anyway.”
Le Rennet took a cucumber from his pocket and placed it on the ground in front of Stromboli. Strom, was confused at first but then broke into a long, loud belly laugh. “Is that all you have … a cucumber! Oh my, oh my I’m getting a stitch. I need to sit down.” Stromboli plonked to the ground causing a slight quake with his girth and continued to roar with laughter. “Do you really believe all that guff about cats being scared of cucumbers? You are a bigger fool than I took you for Le Rennet – a fool and a feline hater all along.”
“You know,” Le Rennet’s raspy, almost inaudible voice gently replied, “I like cats, I really actually do.” and with that Le Rennet opened his palm and blew dust, not at Stromboli but over the cucumber. Stromboli looked at him, a confused pause and then more laughter but just as his jowls started to jiggle, the cucumber moved, it started to rock side by side and Strom swallowed his joy and watched. Suddenly that small cucumber was born into a towering green monster with a gaping mouth that roared open and swallow the great, fat, Stromboli whole.
When the dust settled, the cucumber had shrunk back to it’s usual size and revealed a beautiful black and bronze Persian sitting under the weight of a top-hat. Le Rennet lifted the hat releasing it’s captive and Stromboli, severely lacking his former grandness uttered in a whine, “You think this will stop me Le Rennet? I will be back; I will be back!”
Le Rennet crouched down to Stromboli and whispered even quieter than ever before, “Nevermore” and blew a final palm-full of dust into the great Stromboli’s face. Stromboli sneezed and then mewed before waddling off as fast as his stumpy legs could take him. Le Rennet folded down back into his crow form and hopped out of the window, taking flight toward the horizon.
Alain Unwin, quickly recovered from his weight loss was laying in a field throwing a stick for his faithful friend Tinker when a crow flew in and landed beside him. Alain sat up and watch the bird as he bowed his head and shaped-shifted. Alain stood up smiling at the vision of Henri Le Rennet standing before him. “You disappeared. I never got to thank-you.” Le Rennet bowed his head, “I had other appointments in the Northern Lands. You can thank me by ensuring that felines stay where we put them. No more diets, keep those cats well fed, it serves us all better that way.” Alain Unwin firmly nodded in agreement and Le Rennet once more became a crow and took to the skies with a caw.
Guido Gotcelli, a portly old man, returned home to find his handsome Persian, Stromboli, in the larder. “Stromboli!” Guido admonished and the cat turned and hissed at him. “Let me get that for you, kitty kitty.” Guido cowered as he reached the pantry and pulled the lid off a tin of sardines.