Backstory · Princess Donut
Princess Donut, Part 1: Of Royal Blood
ARCHIVE ACCESS GRANTED.
Archivist! Third file. You keep coming back. I’m starting to think you like me, which is a mistake, but a flattering one.
Now playing: File 003. Subject: the princess.
A procedural note. Every other file in this archive was assembled by me, from footage, with care. This one was not. The subject asked to narrate her own file. Correction: the subject informed me that she would be narrating her own file, and that I could “hold the camera, if you’re quiet about it.”
I agreed, on one condition. I get to annotate.
She has no idea how much footage I have.
I was born a princess, and I need you to take that literally.
Not the way humans say it about a little girl in a plastic tiara at a bowling alley. I come from a line of queens.
My great-great-grandmother sat in the lap of a duchess. Before her there were cats in Persia, which is where the name comes from, obviously. Persia. Persian. Cats fed from silver dishes by men in very tall hats. Cats with servants. Cats with small thrones.
I opened my eyes for the first time on a bed of the softest cloth in the world. It was warm. It hummed beneath me like a throne that loved me. The whole chamber smelled of flowers.
Archive correction: The subject was born in the laundry room of a split-level ranch house eleven miles outside Yakima, Washington, on a pile of towels on top of a running dryer. The throne that loved her was set to PERMANENT PRESS. The flowers were a dryer sheet called Spring Meadow Burst, which contains no meadow and has never burst.
To her left: a plastic tub labelled XMAS LIGHTS (TANGLED). To her right: a water heater that made a noise like a man about to disagree with you.
I’ve also checked the duchess. There was no duchess. There was a mobile grooming van in Boise called Duchess Cheryl’s Pampered Paws. Your great-great-grandmother sat in Cheryl’s lap for one photograph and then urinated down the front of her smock.
It’s a nice photograph. The smock was a write-off.
That was clearly a different cat. I’m not going to dignify it.
There were five of us in the litter. I was the most beautiful. That’s not boasting. It’s a measurement.
My nursemaid was a woman named Darlene.
Darlene was a person of simple means. She wore the same green sweatshirt every day, which said STATE CHAMPS, a reference to a sports team and not to us. Her hands smelled of tuna. Her radio was always on, always playing a man who was furious about the weather, and she argued back at him while she folded towels.
She knew she was in the presence of greatness. I could tell by the way she held me. Other kittens, she scooped.
Me, she lifted.
It was Darlene who gave me my name. I slept curled in a perfect circle, nose to tail, and one morning she looked down at me and said, “Well, look at you, you little donut.”
People will tell you that’s a silly reason to name somebody. Those people don’t understand symbolism. A donut is a circle. You know what else is a circle?
A crown.
I’m not going to explain this any further. If you don’t see it, you don’t see it.
Archive note: Darlene also named the water heater. She called it “you little bastard.” Not everything she named was an honour.
My brothers and sisters left one at a time.
People came in cars. They sat on Darlene’s flowered couch drinking weak coffee out of mugs that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GRANDMA. Then they picked us up and stared into our faces, very close, the way you’d check a melon. Rude. Even then, I knew it was rude. Then they wrote Darlene a cheque, and one of us went out to the car in a plastic box with a wire door.
First my brother with the orange smudge. Then my two sisters, together, to a family with a little boy who cried when he saw them. Then my last brother, the big one, who went to a man from Portland who wanted “something to breed off.”
I was saved for last.
Obviously. You don’t put the crown jewels in the front window. You keep them in the safe, for someone worthy.
Archive correction: I have Darlene’s listing. It went up on a breeder website when the subject was ten weeks old, and was revised four times. Here is the final version, in full.
Female Persian, white. Good bloodlines. Show potential (MAYBE). Ears set a touch wide. Very vocal. VERY vocal. Price reduced. Price reduced again. Make an offer. Serious offers. Any offers.
The man from Portland was offered the subject first, at a discount. She screamed directly into his ear for nine seconds without drawing breath. He took her brother, and later described her on a breeder forum as “a tea kettle with a grudge.”
Darlene did keep her in the back. That part’s true. She kept her in the laundry room so the screaming wouldn’t put off the customers.
That man from Portland lives a very small life now. I assume. I’ve decided.
I want to tell you about the day Miss Beatrice came, because it was the most important day of my life until it wasn’t.
It was raining, the kind of rain that doesn’t fall so much as loiter. The screen door banged. Then a voice I’d never heard before, high and quick and laughing.
“Oh my God, Darlene, it’s like a hoarder’s house, but for cats. I mean that as a compliment.”
And then she was in the laundry-room doorway.
She was young, with dark hair piled up very high and sunglasses on top of her head, in the rain. She smelled of vanilla and something underneath that I didn’t have a word for yet. I’ve found the word since. It’s ambition. Her fingernails were painted the colour of the inside of a seashell, and she held her phone the way other people hold a coffee.
She crouched in front of the dryer and looked at me.
I looked back.
Everyone else had checked my face for mistakes. Miss Beatrice tilted her head and looked at me the way you look at something in a shop window you can’t afford. She had come for me. Only me. Word had reached the city that there was a princess in a laundry room.
“Hi, gorgeous,” she said. “Are you going to win me things?”
I didn’t know what win meant. I knew the answer was yes.
Archive transcript, partial:
BEA: I mean, she’s perfect. Look at her. Why’s she so cheap?
DARLENE: Ears are a bit wide. And she’s got a mouth on her.
BEA: Ears I can fix with grooming, I watched a video. What’d you say, six?
DARLENE: Six hundred.
BEA: Would you do four if I paid cash today?
DARLENE: I’d do four if you took her right now, before she starts up again.
The subject has always described this conversation as “a negotiation between two great houses.” I’m not saying she’s wrong. I’m saying one of the great houses had a dryer in it.
I rode to the city in the plastic box with the wire door, on the passenger seat of Miss Beatrice’s little car. I screamed the entire way. I wasn’t frightened. I was making announcements.
She drove with one hand and talked on her phone with the other, and every so often she poked a seashell fingernail through the wire to touch my nose.
“No, she’s gorgeous,” she was saying. “She’s the one. I can feel it. Mom, it’s not wasting money, it’s an investment.”
I didn’t understand words then. I remember the music. Her voice went up on gorgeous and down on investment. Up was for me. Down was for something else.
I decided, on that drive, to only listen to the up parts.
I recommend it.
Miss Beatrice lived in an apartment with white walls, white carpet and a white couch that nobody was allowed to sit on. I fitted in perfectly. I believe she decorated it for me in advance.
The very first night, she gave me a bath.
I had never imagined a bath. A bath, it turns out, is when someone you trust holds you in hot water and rubs soap into you while you list, at the top of your voice, everyone you’re going to have executed. I was ten weeks old and I already had a list. Then they point a machine at you that roars hot wind into your face for an hour and a half.
I will never forgive the machine. I’ve forgiven a great many things since. NEVER THE MACHINE.
When it was over, Miss Beatrice set me on the white couch, the one nobody was allowed to sit on, and stepped back and took a picture of me with her phone.
Then she took forty-one more.
“Oh, look at you,” she whispered. “They’re going to die.”
I didn’t know who they were, but I was pleased they were going to die. It sounded like a compliment. Then she turned the phone round, and I saw myself properly for the first time. White and enormous and furious, with a face like a full moon and fur standing out all around me like a cloud that had decided to become a lion.
I thought: Oh. There I am.
Achievement Unlocked (Pre-Season, Unofficial, Do Not Tell Production): Protagonist Syndrome!
You saw your own reflection and immediately concluded that you were the main character! Most beings take decades to reach this conclusion, and almost all of them are wrong. The jury is still out on you. The jury has been out for some time. The jury has asked for snacks.
Reward: Forty-two photographs, posted that night under the caption “MEET MY PRINCESS 👑👑👑”. Seventeen likes. Four of them were Bea’s mother, who has two accounts and can’t work out how to un-like things.
It was Miss Beatrice who finished my name.
The registry, which is the government of cats, needed a full name. She sat on the floor with her laptop and me in her lap, and said “Donut” out loud a few times, like testing a step before trusting it with her weight.
“Donut. Donut. Ugh. It sounds like a cat who lives in a garage.”
She thought for a long time. Then she typed something, smiled, and kissed the top of my head.
“Princess Donut,” she said.
Darlene gave me a name, and it was a good name, but it was a name for a laundry room. Miss Beatrice gave me back my title. The one that had been mine all along, from Persia and the silver dishes and the tall hats. She didn’t invent it. She recognised it. That’s different.
I loved her very much from that moment. I want that on the record before we go any further. Whatever it tells you, and I can feel it hovering, waiting to butt in like an aunt at a wedding, I loved her.
My first show was six weeks later, in a hotel ballroom by the airport, on a carpet the colour of a bruise.
The circuit is getting its own part. For now, all you need to know is that I was the youngest and the most beautiful cat in my class, and the judge was a tall man with a moustache who lifted me up to the lights in both hands. He held me there, and the whole room went quiet.
That was the first time I understood that people could go quiet for me. Not because I’d screamed. Just because I was there.
Then I bit him.
I don’t regret it. You don’t keep a princess in the air indefinitely. It’s undignified for everybody.
Archive correction: Eleven seconds, which is standard. She bit him through the web of his thumb and held on, growling, and he had to walk her back to the table attached to his hand like a very expensive oven mitt.
He needed a tetanus shot. He retired the following year. I’m not saying the two are connected. He said so, at length, at his retirement dinner.
On the drive home, Miss Beatrice didn’t touch my nose through the wire. She talked on her phone again, and there were no up parts at all. Only down, and down, and down.
Archive transcript, partial:
BEA: No, she bit him. In the ring. In front of everybody. Tamsin Gould was right there. I wanted to die.
BEA: I know she’s a baby. I know. But she’s got the look, Mom. She’s got the look and none of the — I don’t know. She’s not easy.
BEA: If she doesn’t make a final by spring, she’s going back to Darlene’s. I’m serious. I can’t keep paying entry fees for a cat who eats the judges.
The subject has heard this transcript. She asked me to play it twice. Then she said it was a forgery and I’d got the voice wrong.
I didn’t get the voice wrong.
I didn’t understand words then.
I understood that the car was dark, and the rain was back, and the only voice in there was going down. So I turned around in my little box until I was looking at the back wall. Grey plastic, with a sticker that said THIS SIDE UP.
I faced it all the way home.
It was the first time I did that. It was not the last.
End of Part 1.
She’ll tell you she was perfectly calm in that box. She’ll tell you she was “reflecting.” I have the footage, Archivist. She was a four-month-old kitten with her nose against a plastic wall, and she didn’t make a single sound for thirty-six minutes.
It’s the only time in this file she’s quiet. I wanted you to know what it looks like.
Bea gave her until spring. Next part: a ballroom in Spokane, an old cat called Gus, and a deadline. Spoiler. She missed it.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory told by an unreliable narrator. Darlene, the house outside Yakima, the duchess (and Duchess Cheryl’s grooming van), the water heater, Donut’s litter-mates, the listing, the man from Portland, the price, Tamsin Gould, the first show and the bitten judge are all invented. So is the origin of the name “Donut”, and Bea adding “Princess” to it. Donut calling Bea “Miss Beatrice” is a nod to the books, but everything Bea says here is our own invention. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.