KITTY LOVE
Tomi Shaw

Everybody in Lincoln called him Bot, on account his last name was Botkins; he wasn’t sure anyone knew his first name was Leonard. Pretty sure, he was, no one cared to know either. The people in town just let him bump his way down the sidewalk. His gimp leg carried the sound of his shuffle well ahead of his actual presence. Bot lost his arm when Old Melvin pushed him under the train that came through on its way to Portsmouth after a round or four too many. A one-armed gimp attracted a lot of attention, plenty of whispers, never any company. That is until he started eating up the town’s flowers, and while the company wasn’t exactly the attention he craved—he’d really have preferred to be approached than do the approaching—it served his purpose.

Mrs. Grover was the first to notice that her feathery, precious ferns had been gnawed to their stems. But it was Kitty Little who caught him munching her black-eyed Susans. She was about to storm out her porch door and kick him out of her garden, but when he stood up, he was naked, a orange-yellow petal dangling from his lip. He threw his arms wide and started spinning, spinning and spinning until his gimp leg got left behind on a particular pirouette and he fell and tumbled and rolled, coming to a stop finally on his stomach, ass shining.

Kitty wanted to go to him and make sure he was all right, but Bot was naked and she wasn’t sure how Paulie would like her eyes falling on any naked man but him. She figured—rightly—that she’d be in big trouble if he knew she’d seen Bot buck ass, never mind she had nothing to do with his state of undress. So even though she couldn’t tell if he was abreathing or not, she looked over the fence into the Terrys’ backyard then to her other side at Widow Ames’s back door. Nobody around. She slipped back through the door and set the deadbolt for good measure. Still the image of Bot’s butt lingered in her mind’s eye, and for whatever reason, she played with it there. She grew accustomed to his ass fur. She told no one.

After the black-eyed Susans that no one but Kitty Little knew about, Bot took a break on the flowers. When he started up his cravings again, it took a tad bit longer for the town folk to figure out something strange was afoot—again. Apparently, Bot’s herbivorous days were done. Townies started to go missing their cats and dogs, even Mr. Ferber’s raccoon.

The day Bot got hauled into the doctor, lugging his leg and complaining of a stomachache, was the day the cock feathers flew. It was the Widow Ames brought it all to a head; she was the one this time who saw him eat up Kitty Little’s parakeet and put in a call to Paulie. Then she watched as Bot stripped off his coverall and johns, threw his socks one by one into her garden vacant of its little black-faced sunshines. She stuck her ear to the window screen and tried to make out what Bot was singing, cause singing he was, parakeet blood flying through the air on the wind of his sibilant exhalations. After twenty or so words and no repetition or hint of a chorus, Widow Ames knew he was making the song up. It wasn’t bad she thought, a love song.

“I just wanna be”

He started spinning.

“the one in your garden”

Spinning and spinning.

“arms, in your eyes”

On a similar pirouette of his flower dance, his leg lagged behind.

“in your bed. To night”

He fell and tumbled, rolled.

“To day. To live.”

He fell asleep.

This time Kitty Little knew he wasn’t dead. She’d seen him eat her Sparky, and she’d let the wicker couch on her sun porch suck her posture right out of her, landing on it and sat, unmoving, unhearing. Paulie found her there, him in the yard. On account of Kitty couldn’t tell him what was going on, he whopped her upside the head before carrying his bull self across the shorn green grass and picked Bot up by the nape of his neck!

Now, the Widow Ames could have saved that Saturday night pugilist from whacking Bot up and pretty enough to make the doctor wince, but she just sat at her tea table, peeling a tangerine, letting its citrus tickle her nose and whet her taste buds. She plopped the first piece in her mouth when Paulie finally got Bot to open his eyes and then punched the right one closed. Paulie and Widow Ames finished their work at the same time, except that Paulie carried Bot to the doctor and Widow Ames carried the peel to the trash.

Kitty walked to the fence, her hair still sticking up from the smack Paulie’d given her. “Widow, did you see that?”

“Surely.”

“Whatcha make of Bot eating my bird and singing naked in my backyard?”

Widow simply shook her head.

“Yeah. Me too.” Kitty scratched her head and patted her hair back into place. “Got any more of those tangerines? I can smell it all the way out here.”

“That was the last one, sweetie. Last of the season.”

Kitty nodded, and without another syllable, stepped away from the fence and back across her yard. Half way to her porch, she stepped in something cold. She was afraid to look at her foot. She walked on the back of her heel until she got to the faucet sticking out of the masonry of her house, the house Paulie built. She turned the water on and let it run over her foot. It tickled and for some reason it sounded like it was singing: to night, to day, to live. “Last of the season, hmmmm,” she mused aloud. “There’s always next season, yes?” She bent her head and watched the red dissolve into pink. She watched until the water falling off her foot ran crystal clear.

© Tomi Shaw

Tomi Shaw lives in Kentucky, late of the woods but now in the big city lights. She loves the sound of rain tat-tattering on a tin roof. Summer weekends find her at the drag strip in a bittersweet-colored Mustang, cutting killer reaction times and making the gearheads gnash their teeth when they get beat by a girl. Her work has appeared in The Barcelona Review, storySouth, Absinthe Literary Review, Outsider Ink, Pindeldyboz, Smokelong Quarterly, Snow Monkey, Penthouse, Literary Mama, The Dead Mule, Edifice Wrecked and elsewhere. Currently, she is co-editor of Prairie Dog 13 Magazine and is hawking a story collection and continually revising her novels. She maintains a semi web presence at http://www.tomishaw.com.

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