Pickles belted out a yowl that, to Mamie Levine’s ears, put the alley cats and their nightly startle-fest to shame.
Outside her open living room window and three stories below, the alley cats proved her wrong by screaming so nearly in unison that their voices beat together in alternating peaks of cancellation and summation.
Pickles spun three or four complete rotations, at the same time flopping through three or four barrel rolls, howling madly through the whole acrobatic impossibility.
“Good lord, Pickles,” Mamie said. “You’re acting as if you were caught in a blender.”
Pickles spun and rolled a few more times, jumped straight up, landed on all fours and zipped like a cartoon across the living room carpet into the bedroom.
The cats outside were joined now by dogs or wolves or coyotes.
What in blue blazes had gotten into those animals? Was there an earthquake coming? Here in Chicago?
Mamie looked into the bedroom, where Pickles was tearing at the bedspread with her claws. Bits of fluff flitted into the air.
That was going to take a lot of work to patch.
Pickles darted off the bed toward the window. Mamie heard the harsh scrabbling of Pickles’s usually dainty claws. Then something crashed (there goes the curtain rod), and Pickles burst, howling, down the hallway toward the kitchen. The howling cut off suddenly, followed by a loud bump (cat into cabinet) and a squeeky “bip” from Pickles.
“Oh, dear,” Mamie said. “I just waxed that floor yesterday.”
Mamie looked again into the bedroom. Pickles’s furry fury hadn’t disturbed the rest of the bedspread, which was still tucked primly under and folded primly over the pillows.
Mamie cocked her head and looked at the neatly made bed. Wasn’t she just in there, snuggled into bed, reading J. D. Robb’s latest futuristic detective romance novel? When had she made the bed?
And she couldn’t remember coming into the living room. One minute she had been in bed reading, and the next she had been in the living room watching PIckles go bonkers.
Another fugue. Oh, dear.
The noise outside was louder now. Mamie could not hear Pickles.
“Pickles?”
She walked down the hall to the kitchen. Pickles sat on his haunches, facing toward Mamie, panting.
Her cat was panting?
Mamie noticed that the floor was wet. In the far corner the mop stood in the mop bucket. She could smell the fresh wax.
Fugue mopping? That couldn’t be a good sign.
Outside the cats screamed and the dogs howled. And there was more. People screaming. Horns honking.
Mamie heard a siren in the distance.
Then the air raid warning siren two blocks away burst into song.
<em>What in the blue blazes?</em> Mamie thought.
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