just follow the cat

Part 1 - How to Name a Cat

Room 208, Maryland Avenue Motel

Baltimore, Maryland

Things were looking up.

For the first time in years, Cassandra Lailoni Antone had a place to live. While some people might not consider the Maryland Avenue Motel a big step up in life, it was surely several rungs above a crowded space on a steep slope under a highway bridge. Cassandra's particular bridge was on East Madison Street under the Jones Falls Expressway. People in Baltimore can tell you that Madison isn't the fanciest street in the city, but it's still close enough to the center to see the downtown streets sparkle every night. Baltimore is beautiful that way.

Cassandra was also rich. Through miracles cast forth by God and bureaucracies, Cassandra now had exactly $8,128 in the bank. And each month, another $496 dollars was deposited without any effort whatsoever on her part. The money (as they say) came out of the blue. Two months previous, God had seen fit to help a middle-aged man into the afterlife. That man happened to be Cassandra's father. It didn't much matter to the well-heeled bureaucrats that Cassandra had never known her father. Someone had to get the money attached to the man's name and Cassandra was as good a person as any. The world is surely magic.

Finally, Cassandra now owned a cat. She had taken care of this cat for several months while she lived under the highway bridge. However, the mere fact that she was able to lock a door behind her each night made Cassandra feel like cat was now hers. The cat felt much the same. The cat also appreciated not living in such a filthy world anymore. You see, there's only so much fur licking a cat can manage before it decides that being filthy is its lot in life.

On the day Cassandra moved into the Maryland Avenue Motel, she filled the tub with warm water so she could wash the cat. When that water got too grayish brown, she filled the tub again and gave the cat one more good scrubbing. Finally, she filled it a third time to make sure that she could see the bottom of the tub after drenching the cat yet again.

All along, Cassandra had thought the cat was black from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail, but after the water got so dark the first time she put it in the tub, she briefly wondered if the cat might actually be white or yellow or covered with exotic stripes. Just as she had suspected, the cat was black. It was also tiny. Years of street grime and matted fur had made the cat seem twice its actual size. When it was in the tub, with its wet (wet) fur plastered against its skin like last year's leaves, Cassandra could see that her cat was barely larger than a kitten.

"You're nothing more than a peanut," she cooed as she was drying the tiny cat.

But finding out that her cat was no bigger than a peanut was just the first surprise of the day. Cassandra also discovered that her tiny, orange-eyed friend had extra toes. One extra on each paw. At first, this fact surprised Cassandra so much that she thought her cat had some kind of magical abilities and that it must have sprouted those four extra toes when it was put into the water.

"Just add water," she said to herself. "Isn't that what all those packages in stores say these days?"

But that errant thought didn't remain in her mind for very long. Soon enough, a much more logical explanation replaced it. While Cassandra might have believed in magic, she believed in mathematics even more. She looked down at the calendar of payment dates that the woman at the motel's office had given her. The math could lead to only one conclusion.

She looked at her orange-eyed friend and said, "52 days left in the year. 4 extra toes today. At this rate, you'll have 208 extra toes by New Year's Day and I don't think that can possibly happen."

Then she looked at the card a second time and a huge smile crossed her face. "I thought you were a magic cat, but this is just a different kind of magic. Magic with a message."

She picked up the tiny cat and pressed on the big pad at the center of one paw. Six perfect toes spread out like they were breaking through a morning yawn. "I think the message is clear, don't you? Since we live in Room 208, we'll just have to call you #208? That's a perfect name for you."

And so it was.

x = y = x