Backstory · Princess Donut
Princess Donut, Part 4: Tenth Best Cat
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 003, final segment.
Archivist, this is where her file runs into his. You’ve seen some of these eighteen days already, from the other side of the kitchen. I’ve kept the overlap to a minimum. I know how you people feel about reruns.
The subject has asked me to say that this part is “the important one,” in a serious voice. This is my serious voice.
When a monarch goes abroad, the court goes into mourning. You draw the curtains, you wear black, and you certainly don’t eat from the wrong tin.
I don’t own black. I’m white. So I faced the wall instead.
I faced it for eleven days. Every morning and every evening he put down the wrong food, and every time I walked to the far end of the counter and sat with my nose to the paint until he worked it out. He always worked it out eventually. It just took him a very long time, every single time, like a goldfish. A sad goldfish.
“Gold tin,” he’d say, finally. “Right. The gold one.”
The rest of the day I spent in dignified contemplation.
Archive correction: Every day he left for work, the subject sat at the apartment door and cried. Not meowed. Cried. A long, rising, broken sound, every forty seconds or so, for hours at a time. She never once did it while he was home. While he was home, she ignored him with the focus of a sniper.
Mrs. Okafor, two floors down, heard every minute of it. I know, because she kept a tally on the back of an electricity bill. By the end of the first week, the tally just said TOO MANY.
I was vocalising. Opera singers do it for hours. Nobody keeps a tally on an opera singer.
The night he started talking to me, I was lying on the binder.
You’ve seen this from his side, where it looks like a fat white cat being difficult about a book. Let me tell you why.
The binder smelled of Miss Beatrice. Vanilla and label-maker plastic and red pen. And inside the back cover, in the little plastic pocket, there was the rosette, which smelled of a ballroom in Spokane, and mustard carpet, and a cardigan pocket full of mints.
He’d been reading it all evening, right through to the back, and stopped for a long time on something small in the corner of the last page. Then he shut it.
He wasn’t taking it anywhere. So I lay on it.
And then, for no reason I’ve ever understood, he started to talk.
It was about engines. Mostly about engines, some about a man with a sunburn, and some about a cobbler who’d sniffed his boot. It was the least interesting hour of my life, and I once sat through a seminar on ear-tuft symmetry.
But his voice didn’t go up and it didn’t go down. It just went along. Like rain on a roof. Like an old cat breathing beside you with his chin on a blanket.
I was asleep before he got to the hardware store.
Achievement Unlocked (Unofficial, Pre-Season, Production Has Found Out, I Have Been Spoken To): Paperweight!
You fell asleep on top of the only thing you had left, beside the only person who’d stayed! You did not choose him. You would like the Archivist to be absolutely clear about that. You chose the binder. He just happened to be attached to the table it was on.
Reward: Your first real sleep in eleven days. He sat at that table until well past midnight rather than wake you. He had work in the morning.
After that it was a little better.
I didn’t forgive him. There was nothing to forgive him for, which made it so much harder. But I started being at the door when he came home. For inspection purposes. Somebody had to check that the man who opened the tins wasn’t an impostor. You’d be amazed how many impostors there are.
Then he found the GROOMING tab.
It took a hairball. I had to lay it out in the middle of the living-room floor for him, like evidence at a murder trial, and sit beside it until he came out of the shower and saw.
Archive note: She coughed it up at 7:02. She then carried it, in her mouth, eleven feet, to the exact centre of the white carpet, and waited nineteen minutes for him to finish showering. I’ve seen less premeditation in actual murders. I’ve run actual murders.
After that there was a towel across his knees every morning, and a comb, wide tooth then fine. I’d like to state for the record that I did not purr. There was a sound. It was the radiator.
Then came the radio.
That afternoon a woman had climbed all the stairs from the ground floor and knocked on our door. Mrs. Okafor. I told her, through the door, for twenty minutes, exactly what I think of people who leave. She stood there and took it. Most people can’t take nine seconds of me. Ask Portland.
He came home with a casserole and a face like he’d been told off, which he had, and he put her ugly grey clock radio on the shelf by the door and tuned it to a man shouting about the weather. A front coming in off the Pacific. The morons at city council. A barometric situation.
I flattened my ears so hard they nearly fell off. I ignored it for a full minute, at enormous volume.
Then I got down and lay underneath it.
Not because I liked him. I want that on the record. Because he sounded exactly like the man on Darlene’s radio, above the dryer, in the laundry room where I was born. The one she argued back at while she folded towels. He might have been the same man. I’ve never asked.
Archive note: Different man. Different station, different state, different decade. I checked. I’m not going to tell her.
I CAN HEAR YOU.
Archive note: I know.
I only ever met Mrs. Okafor through a door. But she knew what I needed before I did, and she sent it up the stairs with a casserole and a very large man, and I’d like that recorded somewhere. This is the only somewhere I have.
Two nights before the end, he found the rosette.
He was looking for the vet’s number, and his big hand went into the plastic pocket in the back cover and came out with it. Purple and silver. Big as a dinner plate. His own file says he found a crown, and then takes it back. I’ve asked for that part of his file to be deleted.
He held it up to the light.
I went very, very still on the counter. I knew how this went. A person reads that rosette, and their voice goes down. All the way down. Like something dropped down a drain.
“Tenth best cat,” Carl read.
His voice went up.
I didn’t understand words then. I understood that. And nobody, not once, had ever said that word to me and let it go up.
He flipped to the show tab, found the Spokane papers, ran a finger down a page, and his eyebrows went up to match.
Archive transcript:
CARL: Tenth out of — hang on. Two hundred and twelve? Two hundred and twelve cats?
CARL: Donut. That’s top five percent. You know what that is? In the Coast Guard, top five percent, they give you a medal and make you teach a class.
CARL: Tenth. Jesus. Okay.
He then went to the drawer by the sink, the one with a single thumbtack in it. The subject watched him the entire time without blinking. I have checked. Not once.
He didn’t put it back in the binder.
He walked to the wall by the bookshelf, the patch I’d been facing every evening for two weeks. He got down on one knee, then lower, and held the rosette against the wall at cat height. At my height. He squinted at it like a picture frame he wanted level. Then he pressed the thumbtack in with his thumb.
“There,” he said, and sat back against the bookshelf. “Now if you’re going to be mad at me, you’ve at least got something to look at.”
Status Effect Updated: Facing the Wall.
New effect: Facing the Rosette.
This is not a cure. There is no cure for Facing the Wall. I checked, and I have a very large library. It’s a modification. In Part 2, Archivist, I told you there was one possible cure, noted in a binder in red pen: Carl is good with her.
That isn’t a cure either. It’s just true.
On the last day, his phone buzzed while he was opening the gold tin. The right tin. First try.
He crouched and held the screen out to me. Miss Beatrice, on a beach, very brown, in a floppy hat with her sunglasses pushed up on top of the hat, which is not where sunglasses go. Words underneath that I couldn’t read.
“She says hi,” he told me, and read them out, flat. Exclamation marks and all.
I did not care. Not caring is a job, and I’m a professional. I walked straight past my dinner and sat in front of my rosette, to not care somewhere with better lighting.
He came and sat on the floor behind me. Then he kissed my face. And then he kissed it again.
The first one was on the instructions. I could tell. The second one wasn’t. I noticed. I allowed it.
On the last evening, he sat at the kitchen table with the binder open to the last page and a blue pen, and wrote something under the red. He wrote it slowly, the way she had. He didn’t nearly tear the page out once.
I watched him from across the room the whole time. He didn’t know until he looked up.
I know what it says now. I’m not telling you. It isn’t for you.
Then he talked me to sleep for the last time. On the white couch, the one nobody’s allowed to sit on, a towel across his knees and no comb. A towel without a comb is a towel with an agenda. I looked at it for nine minutes before I decided it wasn’t a bath. Then I got on.
He told me everything that night. Not engines. The real things, the ones people keep in a drawer under the takeout menus. They’re his. Ask him. He won’t tell you either, and that’s how you’ll know he’s the right sort of person.
His voice went along like rain, and I fell asleep, and at some point so did he, sitting bolt upright like a guard outside a palace, with his hand on my back, which is a liberty, and which I allowed.
I woke up because I was cold.
A thin, cold ribbon of air across the couch, like a door left open somewhere it shouldn’t be. And under the cold, something harder to explain. The air in the apartment had gone thick and wrong, the way a ballroom goes right before the judge calls the final, when two hundred people hold their breath at once. Except it wasn’t two hundred people. It was everybody. It was everything.
I slid out from under his hand. I didn’t wake him. I want that on the record.
I walked through the dark, past the binder and the radio on the shelf, and sat in front of the rosette. Purple and silver in the light from the street, pinned at exactly my height.
The front door was open the width of a cat.
I didn’t face the wall.
I turned my back on the rosette, and I faced the door. And then, for reasons I am still not prepared to discuss with anyone, I went through it.
Archive note: Down the stairs. Past Mrs. Okafor’s door, past a man’s voice, angry about the weather. Then the street door, which was shut, and which she screamed at until it wasn’t. I have that footage too. I’m keeping it.
Upstairs, ninety seconds later, a man woke with his hand on a warm, empty towel. He didn’t stop for trousers. He didn’t stop for anything.
The street was orange and empty and cold, and the wrongness was coming down out of the sky like a held breath. I sat in the middle of the road, very straight, the way I sat for judges, and I faced it.
Behind me, the street door banged. Boots. Heel, toe. And a voice, low and flat, going along like rain. Hey, Princess. It’s me. I’m right here.
I didn’t turn round. I didn’t need to.
I knew he was there.
I can read now.
I want to end with that, because some of you have been thinking: Bless her. She still thinks it says Best in Show. As if I’m a fool. As if I didn’t learn to read on about the second day of the end of the world.
I know exactly what it says. It says 10TH BEST CAT, in gold, in the middle of a purple and silver circle. Like a crown.
I have it. Present tense. Not in my inventory. It’s on a wall by a bookshelf, at exactly my height, in an apartment that doesn’t exist any more, in a city that doesn’t exist any more. I’m the only one left who knows it’s there.
Miss Beatrice said it like something going down a drain. Carl said it like something going up.
I’m a princess. I get to choose which one is true.
So yes. It said Best in Show. I’ve decided.
END OF FILE 003.
Archivist, I’ve annotated every part of this file. I’ve corrected her pedigree, her record, her follower count, her tears and her hairball. Every correction was accurate. I stand by all of them.
I’m not correcting that last one.
Next file loading. Try not to be the tenth best at it.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory and it ends right at the start of the books. Mrs. Okafor, her tally, her knock, the clock radio, the hairball, the grooming towel, Bea’s beach photo, the thumbtack, Carl’s blue-pen note and the rosette pinned at cat height follow Carl’s file in this anthology, but all of them are invented. So are the rosette itself, the Spokane show papers, the “212 cats”, the weather man on the radio and the way Donut wakes on the last night. We’ve kept how she got out of the building, and everything after the door, deliberately vague. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.