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“In which I die."

Depressssssing, isn't it? Confronting your own mortality. The hardest, for me, is imagining a world without me in it. Hardly a world I'd want to live in – although, if you can keep a secret: I've done it before, and it's easier than you'd think.

My name is Game.

Oh, yes, I know. Go ahead, you clown, giggle and get it out of your system, I don't mind. Game Kenna, that's my name. It's always been my name, everywhere.

I have ears and a snout, and fingers and spots and I say this in the present tense because my body has lost none of these attributes since my death a few moments ago, only some heat and animation. Fingers and spots remain, the latter of which I've long found rather fetching.

And not I alone, I'll have you know! Since I came of age I haven't often had to suffer the chill of an empty bed and if we're talking off the record, you and I, I got ample practice before I was of age, too.

'Winsome', I was called then, 'handsome' later and 'rakish' later still. And now I'm called 'dead', but I remind you that throughout all this, beyond all else, I'm called Game.

Of all the lies I've told, never once was my name among them.

Well, see, I'm lying already: I once told a raccoon my name was Vale because I was horny and lying about your name was kind of the thing to do. That's about it.

•

I owe you a story, I think. Before I tell it, you have to know something. I'll say it now and you'll forget, just as I'll forget to remind you.

There will be no explanation. Not for you, any more than there was for me; there can be no explanation. You'll find no revelation, no secret spell or quantum entanglement experiment, no psychic gift or drug-induced hallucination.

What happens in this story simply happens. And that will frustrate you, my friend, my companion, it will gnaw at you and you'll hate me for it, but I have no balm to cool your burning curiosity. I'm sorry.

All I have for you is this story.

I could lie to you, of course, and make it grander, or invent an explanation for you. Would you like that? To be thrilled and mystified and at the end to have everything explained to you, with the answer to every question wrapped in a neat little bow?

Be honest with yourself, now. Does your life work like that?

Don't worry, I won't leave you hanging. I'll share with you every lesson I learn as I learn it, and isn't that the true purpose of a story?

Not to unravel the mystery or unmask the murderer, but to learn. That's how I see it, anyway. A story without lessons would be hollow and futile and not worth telling.

And in the span of time until my death, just these moments ago, I've learned quite a bit.

Painful lessons, their consequences not limited to just my own damnable self. I have blood on my hands, so much of it. I've ruined lives and marriages and broken hearts, and had my own broken just as gruesomely.

I never made a mistake I didn't learn from. I'd say that counts for something.

•

We start at the beginning, and if you suspect me to be lying already you must be a dire skeptic indeed, because in the beginning I am born. Go ahead and doubt me, I don't mind.

I am born, I am abandoned, but the how and where of it... We have a choice to make, you and I. So yes, I am born, that did happen, but where and when and how? We must decide together, and I'll ask you again for your trust. I can tell you this story in a dozen ways and they'll all be true but none of them will matter because we wouldn't have made a choice.

A castle, perhaps. Or maybe a skyscraper. Or a zeppelin! Maybe I was born on a zeppelin. Maybe I'm a street urchin in Dickensian Chicago, or an orphan set afloat on the Nile found by a childless servant of the Pharaoh. Maybe I'm a little boy found amid the irradiated ruins of Nagasaki after Fat Man.

I hadn't mentioned that before, had I? My gender. I am born, and I am a boy. We're already making progress. In a castle. Boom, just like that, I chose for you. Someone has to set an example.

•

My first memory is of blood and fire. Burning blood. I later discover this smells shockingly similar to candle-wax and let me tell you, that gives me some mighty unpleasant flashbacks during the first candle-light dinner I'm surprised with.

There is a castle, rapidly turning to ruin. The screams of men and the wails of women barely overpower the whipping of the wind. Fresh gashes in the masonry that should have protected the stronghold of the House Clavier, pillars of smoke, all seem to invite the wind to whirl and howl and play amid the carnage.

I am aware. I exist and I know it, even though I don't yet have sight and have no knowledge of reproduction or death. I smell blood and fire, and I feel cold, cold, cold.

Freshly born, I'm tiny and soaked in fluids sanguine and amniotic. In my veins I circulate a minuscule reserve of energy and nutrients, the only inheritance by which I can remember my mother, and as the wind lashes me I burn these up at a frightening pace.

The cold is worst, though, at my navel. I have no name for it, of course, I have no knowledge of my limbs, or the symmetry of my body, or the existence of gravity or justice. But I am the product of billions of years of evolutionary success and I want, so badly, to live.

I cast about with limbs I can't name or count, and feel something in a place I can't see, but I know that it's a part of my body, I know that for certain.

I learn, here, that there are two kinds of things in the universe. On the one hand there's me, and on the other, obviously, there's everything else. I told you this would be a story full of lessons, didn't I?

When I feel that cold tube, even though it's attached to me, I know it belongs in the other category. It's part of everything else, not part of me. And I want it off me.

I learn, too, that I can get what I want if I'm willing to do anything for it.

My mouth is full of blood and mucus already, so taking my umbilical cord between my jaws is hardly repulsive. I've yet to develop any standards of decency, anyhow. I chew. I have no teeth, but I chew, and tug, and chew, and tug.

She's dead, you see. The woman who carried me, grew me. A jaguar like myself, a graceful cat, quite exotic in these parts. She anticipated my arrival, with either fear or eagerness, and who, in the midst of a brutal attack, found a quiet mop closet in which to birth me. She might have thought the lock would hold against investigation; she hadn't thought that a cannonball would tear the chimney out of the tower and rip two walls away.

But, being dead, she's growing colder, and threatens to take me with her. And I won't go, not yet. Hell, I just got here.

•

“Evar, come and see!" The voice is rough. Strong and brutal. I have no sight, no frame of reference, so I can't judge his race. And if I did, I still wouldn't have a name for it. All I know is how the voice sounds.

Perhaps I imprinted on this first voice I heard, male and strong and unforgiving, qualities I'd hunger for throughout my adolescence, often surprisingly to my benefit.

“What do you got, Mistle?" The voice is sly and unkind; it utterly fails to mask its contempt and I will never, even in my earliest dalliances with deceit, fail so thoroughly as he.

“A little survivor, that's what. Here, feller, you need some help?"

It's an idiot's question, of course. I'm a slimy worm the size of a girl's paw, gnawing on my own cord to sever myself from my mother's corpse. Do I look like I need help?

The tough, wet tissue gives way, and I am free. I roll over, and over again, perilously close to a precipice I can't see. The back wall of the closet is gone and I'm rolling towards a sheer drop down to the equally exposed kitchens below.

But a fearless paw takes hold of me. Protecting me from the fall, shielding me from the wind, sharing with me its precious heat.

The one called Evar scoffs. “Put that thing down! It might be diseased."

“You mind your own, Ev! I hear screaming upstairs, and where there's screams there's throats, and where there's a throat, your knife's got business. Away with you." I don't understand the words, of course, but I know authority when I hear it, and learn a new thing to crave when I'm old enough to be craven.

I am wrapped in warmth. In his cloak, perhaps, or in a pocket. It's damp, there, but dryer at least than my pelt and I am warm and alive.

If I had cried at any time, he wouldn't have taken me. He wouldn't have risked smuggling me out under his clothes if he thought I'd test out my brand new lungs. In hindsight, the very longest hindsight of the recently dead, I think that before I learned how to cry, I learned not to.

•

I know, I know. That was gross. The bit about biting through my own–? That's how it was, I'm afraid, and if we set our story in a Viking hut or a nice New England brownstone instead of a castle under siege, I'll still be born that way. I'd still have to chew and I'll still be found by a man called something similar to Mistle.

And he'll still come to realize he has no plan for me. For a few days I amuse him, he feeds me porridge or ale from his little finger and holds me when his fellow mercenaries aren't looking, whispering the name of his own dead child. But he comes to his senses, and realizes just how long a child depends on a parent and just how heavy a burden that is, and he wraps me up and leave me to be found by someone else.

In any version of my story it's Mistle who teaches me the lesson that keeps me alive longer than any other: there is no trust, no protection, no safety. And for that, I owe him eternally.

•

I am found by a poor but generous couple. Elderly rats, a race common to this area, and childless. Mickel is a cobbler, his wife Doria is a mistress of herbs, and it's during her dawn-lit perusal of the bounties offered by the township's fertile woods that she finds me. I'm swaddled in a cloak, my only material inheritance from Mistle, and in its folds she finds a folded note.

Fair Game, the note says, and now you know how I was named.

From Mickel and Doria I learn two things. To love, sparingly, and to lie. They keep me, feed me and raise me, and claim I am the child of a relative by marriage from a town two weeks down the river Scarlet, a town that once carried the name Burring, a town known now only as Blood.

For as long as the Bleeding Plague ravaged the nation of Delphe, that's the name given to towns that fell victim to it. “You can't go to Ferding any more, it's Blood," they'd say. “I lost my parents when Hunsel turned Blood."

The lie holds and isn't questioned, and my first true parents are congratulated by the Sayer of Carrick for their charity, and their bravery. The townsfolk are wary at first, but a Sayer's words carry more weight than folksy fears, and the lie my parents weave has been carefully weighed.

They withdraw from town life immediately after finding me, trying to decide whether their desire for children can weigh up against the danger of harboring an unclaimed child, of a foreign race no less! A spotted cat! They send away any who come to their door, never opening it, and cause a riot of hushed gossip in their community.

Both greying around the whiskers, they yearn so much for a child of their own that caution gives way to a desire for a family, and they set their sharp minds to crafting a story for me.

Hah. Crafting a story for me. You'll come to understand that's an amusing idea.

Why did they withdraw for so many days? Mickel and Doria prepare an answer.

They worried I might carry the dreaded Bleeding Plague, and sequestered themselves so that they'd pose no risk to their neighbors, and couldn't taint the food or water. The risked their deaths out of love for their relatives-by-law whom they lost by Blood, but took steps not to risk harm to their beloved Carrick.

They present me first, of course, to the Sayer, who then presents me to the congregation on Moonday Mass, and the congregation, together, petition the Arbiter to have me written me into the Book of Carrick.

The Writ bristles at the Arbiter's order – the old wolf is a stickler for the proper ways of doing things, and adding a paperless orphan is an affront to the Book. Generations of his line have kept the sanctity of the Book, he says, inspecting every marriage the Arbiter signs, checking every corpse before burial, every fresh-born cub suckling at his mother's bosom. In its long and storied history, the Book has never borne a name whose validity wasn't tested by the keen nose of the Writ's forebears.

But the only way to satisfy the wolf's need for propriety would be to retrieve the Book of Burring, which lies, of course, in a dead town now called Blood. The Writ relents, and with careful strokes of his quill I become Game Kenna, son of Mickel and Doria.

•

In my childhood I am rambunctious and bring terrible shame to my parents, who gleefully relish my every misdeed. I am punished, of course, for stealing an apple from the Ver Tallenses' orchard, or for scrawling obscenities in my wax tablet by way of practicing my letters, and for tricking an older bully into kissing the Arbiter's daughter.

When the Writ calls my parents to his chamber and shows them that my transgressions have exhausted all the space on the Kenna family's page, they quietly pay the fine for adding new pages tot he Book and twist my ear till I'm deaf for an hour, but all the while, I see how much they love me. They love me very much, and I understand why.

They love me because I am alive.

Every time Mickel patches a tear in my breeches or Doria rubs one of her precious ointments into a bruise or scrape, they sense my vitality. I am not a forgettable bundle of fur hunkered over his tablet in the school benches. Mine is a name spoken with frustration or worry, and perhaps a bit of admiration by those too young or too old to care about their reputation.

I am no less of a terror to the Kennas than I am to anyone else in Carrick, but I never disappoint them, not truly. I never fail to listen to what they tell me or to learn what they teach me. When I disobey a rule they set me it's not because I've forgotten it, but because I remember another rule they taught me and recognized a convenient loophole.

Many years will pass before I earn, from anyone else, the respect and love they show me. Me, a spotty-pelted foundling, for whom they sacrificed their honesty and, to no small degree, the standing of the Kenna name.

•

“The end." Mickel's voice is so soothing and decisive, it never fails to calm me for sleep.

•

They die, of course.

First Mickel, who releases my paw to clutch at his chest when we're out buying leather and string at the market.

I shed no tears for him when his body is wrapped and remanded to the earth. My mother cries enough for us both in the weeks that follow, until her strength fades her and one day I wake to find her body cold in her bed.

I am thirteen summers old by then, old enough to earn a page of my own in the Book – the Kennas both lived to see that day, squeezing each other's paws as I wrote my name under the Writ's watchful eye, terrified I'd defile the Book and their reputation by scrawling a rude drawing in the margin.

With no living relatives, it falls to me to cast the earth onto Doria's wrapped corpse, to speak about her. At the reception in the Norrish Inn, the Arbiter praises me for holding back my tears, and then whispers to me that there's no shame in crying, that it can soothe the soul.

The Sayer quietens the crowd with the mere raising of his antlers, as stately as only a buck can be.

“Game wasn't born of Carrick, and is the last to hold the name of Kenna," he says solemnly. “But he will not be abandoned."

From a piece of vellum he reads the Pledges. First, his own, unsurprising. If I so choose I may join the clergy, under his tutelage and, in time, his sponsorship if I am deemed worthy of entry to the Schola.

Three families have pledged to care for me, should I so choose, and to my great surprise this includes Arry Ver Tallens. The father goat steps forward without his customary stoop and declares I've been nothing but a menace to him, but in my thieving I've shown myself to be quite a deft apple-picker, and in his old age he'd welcome such help at his orchard.

The congregation manage to hold their laughter until mine breaks. I give the ram a smile, which he perhaps returns for an instant before he slouches back toward his seat.

The greatest surprise is the last, though. Even the Sayer pauses before he reads the last Pledge. “And finally, Game Kenna, the door is opened to you by... Arfer Pucking, the Writ of Carrick."

Stunned silence rolls through the Norrish Inn and all eyes turn to the old wolf. “There is a tree," he intones with great gravity, rising from his seat and striding to the center of the hall. “A tree with nettlebushes around it, an hour into the woods. A tree I climbed in my youth, on whose bark I practiced my letters to gain a steadier paw than wax could teach me."

I know which tree he means, but I'm as rapt as anyone – I haven't a clue where he's leading.

“In this tree I carved my tresspasses. They were few," he adds hastily, his cheeky grin eliciting a soft round of chuckles. “But I carved them into that tree's rough bark. On occasion, now, when my legs refuse to tire from my evening constitutional, I like to visit that tree. Shortly before we laid Good Mickel to rest I came upon that tree, and found it had been vandalized."

For a wolf who lives a life so cloistered, so dedicated to writing and so averse to speaking, the Writ knows how to spin a tale. I can see children struggling to sneak past their parents to get a better view of the wolf. The air in the Norrish Inn is thin, strung tight as a bow-string.

“Where once there were faded scratches signifying a few childhood errors, long ago, its bark now bore a litany of sins, a list as tall as many of the men here today! A litany that is well familiar to my quill. Game Kenna!" he says, pointing a bony finger right at me – causing a few of my peers to cautiously step away from me.

“It was you who scarred my tree with your savage exploits. Every one since you were old enough to snatch a plum off a market table, from the swaddle on your mother's back. Every one, remanded to the tree as we remanded Good Doria to the earth. Each recorded perfectly to the letter, from a practiced memory, and in a paw as sure as my own once was. Game Kenna, you have the makings of a fine Writ, and my door is open to you."

Applause, then. Even from the Arbiter, even from the Sayer. Even from me. If I had it in me to cry, I'd love to do it now.

The clapping dies and all eyes are on me. The Arbiter clears his throat. “Game, you needn't decide now. Each Pledge stands until the changing of the season at least; you may go, today, with anyone and change your mind tomorrow–“

“I know what I want to do, Your Justice." My voice is steady, my paws are, too. At thirteen I am a man, by some reckonings, and it's as a man that I stride to the center of the inn. I'm small even compared to my schoolmates. I feel the pity of the men, who are reminded that they once weren't as strong as they are now, and knew that it was good fortune and family support that helped them rise to the challenges they faced when they came of age. I feel the pity of the women, who see me still as a child.

“I want to inherit my parents' home, and to fill the void their passing left behind. Carrick needs a cobbler, and could use a cordwainer too. I learned all my father could teach me in his years above the Earth, and if anyone has a doubt..." I step forward, open the buttons on my jacket, and put myself on display. My shirt, my breeches, my belt, my shoes. I know how to present myself. “I cut every swath, sewed every stitch, polished and fitted all you see upon me."

Okay, so clearly I needed to work on my verbal delivery because that's all kinds of over-the-top. I'm thirteen, remember? The fact is, though: I get my point across, and the Arbiter declares that as the last living Kenna, the house falls to me, as does the right to provide for myself.

The crowd is quiet as they shuffle out, unsure how they should feel. In a way I slighted some of them by rejecting their kind and generous offers for care. Some of the adults shake my paw, the Arbiter even ruffles my ears, but there's a sharp note of loss in the air. The town lost the Mickel and Doria, and lost the boisterous boy called Game. The other boys and girls know I'm no longer one of them. I feel each loss in my heart as I walk home.

Home. Mine, now. Mine to guard, heat, clean and furnish. Mine to occupy in silence and solitude, without being told what to do, and without having anything done for me.

Today, I am a man, and soon I'll outgrow Carrick entirely. Soon I'll need to forge my own path through the world, and it won't be the path of a small-town cobbler.

Soon I'll take the path of revenge.

•

But this isn't the story of revenge. Revenge isn't a story, really. It's a compulsion, it's an addiction. Like sorrow, it's something you cling to because to do otherwise would devalue the source of your sadness. If you give up revenge it feels like that means that what you lost didn't matter so much. And all the while, everything else that makes you who you are simply erodes, all sacrificed at the altar of vengeance.

This is my story, though. It's a story of my life and growth, neither of which bloom on the hard-trodden path of revenge. So I'll have to tell the story another way, won't I?

I am sixteen and on an eastbound Greyhound bus. It is 1991, I am American, and my name is still Game Kenna, though my adoptive parents are now Mike and Doris, both rats, an accountant and a home-maker respectively. Were, I should say.

In this story I was born to an addict named Maria who lost what little restraint she had left when she was diagnosed with feline immunodefiency virus. Out of some sick vengeance she sought out feline men to take to her bed, barely noticing when her belly began to swell with me, each time asking only for a pittance with which to score just a little more crystal.

In this story, like all others, my birth kills my mother, and I'm found by a pusher who calls himself Missile, and he, too, is impressed by my will to live. He, too, keeps me as a pet and he, too, leaves me to be found.

The town where I'm found is Cattewick, Wisconsin. There's no Bleeding Plague here to speak of. Instead of an Arbiter there's a Mayor, instead of a Sayer there are eight different pastors who all hate one another and instead of a Writ there is the vast and horrifying machine called Child Protective Services, with whom Mike and Doris fight a years-long battle.

In this story they live until I'm sixteen, now fully and legally adopted, and old enough to emancipate. I am sent home from school on charges of indecency, of which I am completely and delightfully guilty, and ride my dilapidated motorbike to the Kenna homestead to find myself overtaken by fire trucks.

I don't understand it, I don't understand it at all, but when I see the pillar of smoke emerging from the Kenna house on the corner of Roosevelt and Apricot, I smell melted candle wax. I hear swords clanging, fire chewing at wood and stone, and I hear the wind, the wind, howling through the broken corpse of Clavier Keep.

A crop duster crashed into the house, its pilot most likely having suffered a stroke in mid-flight. The fire trucks can't save it; it takes them most of the evening to dampen the flames enough to retrieve Mike and Doris's bodies.

The insurance company calls it force majeure, but I refuse to sign off on that. The Kennas didn't raise no fool!

I take the insurance report to Arye Van Dale, a retired lawyer who, thanks to his beloved and bountiful orchard, bore the brunt of many of my childhood pranks. He holds more grudges against me than anyone and I apologize for nothing, saying only that I am certain he's a man who won't brook injustice and I trust no-one with this matter more than I do him.

At sixteen, I'm already such a player.

People are complex, it's true, but any one person is one thing more than anything. It's never the thing they claim to be, or the thing they think they are. Van Dale isn't content as he claims to be, or lonely as he thinks he is. I know what he is, because I know what it's like to be it.

Van Dale is guilty.

Of what? I don't know. I'm sure I could deduce it if I researched him, but I only need him to serve my purpose. What if I discovered he was a murderer, or something similarly, scintillatingly gruesome? Would I report him or blackmail him, would I be able to keep living in Cattewick while knowing a monster concealed himself there?

When Watson told Sherlock about the Earth revolving around the Sun, Sherlock blew a gasket and tore into the good doctor, chewing him out for burdening his precious brain cells with information that would never ever serve him any use. I get that.

It's not a matter of ignorance being bliss, it's more... what you know and what you don't know shape your universe. There's so much knowledge that we're denied, which we might want but can't have. Why shouldn't we exert some conscious control over how we see the world?

I never looked under my bed as a child, at least, in the lives where I had a bed to look under. There's no sense in it. I'd feel no safer if I looked; it would be better simply to decide I was safe.

I chose how I wanted to see my world. In a small way, that prepared me for things to come.

Anyway. I also choose not to investigate Van Dale and instead get him to fight the insurance company for me. As his most hated nuisance, my opinions of him carry some weight. And I tell him that I think he's honest. To a man used to the yoke of guilt, that's a relief he hasn't known for long years.

So he writes his letters, he challenges the insurance company and sure enough, a settlement comes along after a month or two, during which I couch-surf with neighbors.

Holding the check in my paws I wonder if I have it in me, simply to slip away without a word. I know I'm leaving Cattewick, and Wisconsin; I'd decided as much when I smelled the wax. And I know I'm not likely to see anyone here ever again, so would it matter at all in my life if I didn't say goodbye?

It might be good for me to learn to be so hard, so cold. Remember, I'm used to being abandoned, and maybe if I learn to be an abandoner I'll deal with it better in the future.

I realize that I can't do it, though. I'm too soft. For a moment I berate myself for it but I come to my senses soon after. My whole life I can expect people to judge and criticize who and what I am; I refuse to do that to myself.

So I say my goodbyes. I promise everyone I'll write, obviously a lie, and I endure a tearful and inappropriately long hug from Van Dale.

And now I'm sixteen and on an eastbound Greyhound bus.

•

I know how much I'm asking of you. I haven't explained how both these lives can be true; it's not something I can tell you. I don't understand it myself. But it is, and I need you to stay with me just a little longer.

It was confusing to me, too, when I became aware of it. It felt as if everything I'd gone through was meaningless because in another version of my story it happened differently. Most of it happened differently.

Until I understood, fully, that all of it's important. Mickel and Doria loved me just as much as Mike and Doris did, just as much as Mikhail and Dunya, just as much as Michel and Dorinde. All childless and giving and all dead just as I turned old enough to make a man's decisions.

All to drive me away from what I knew and toward what I needed.

Driving me, like this Greyhound bus, to the City.

•

You'll have noticed by now that I never mention friends. This isn't an omission; I never have any. I have classmates and agemates and playmates, in both the innocent and lewd senses of the word, and I'm never lonely or bored. But I never bond either, not really.

In hindsight it's obvious to me why that is. If I have friends, I have something to stay for. In my life I've had so very little that even that little would be worth staying for, and I must not stay. Not in Carrick, not in Cattewick, not in Carque, not in Katarsž.

That's why life in the City is so different, more different than any of the versions of Carrick were from each other. In the City, I am a man, I make my own life, I form bonds, tentative though they may be.

And in the City, my friend, my trusted companion on this journey, in the City I am beautiful.

Call me arrogant. I won't contest it, I most assuredly am, but just as assuredly I am beautiful.

My body is in the prime of its age, a temple of desire. My golden pelt gleams with perfect lustre, my spots trace a tittilating pattern that drags the eye across every sinewy muscle, every firm, masculine bulge and every supple, youthful curve. My whiskers are wide and alert, my tail sly, and my eyes – good God, my eyes...

I learn, first of all, to seduce men. Men of stature, of significance, at least in the circles they inhabit. I learn how much I have to offer a man who knows he shouldn't crave me, and how much I can ask in return.

Many of them are married and it's through this social contract that I learn I have a similar effect on women, though it takes me a while to understand the differences.

Men hunger for conquest; women yearn to be desired. It's an art I need to learn; to bed a man you simply goad them into demanding you and then yield to them. A woman must be made to feel desirable, you must pursue and persuade. A knack, once mastered, that rarely fails.

I take to sex like a duck to water. To bear the brunt of a man's rough lust or to bring a woman ecstasy, I do it fearlessly, effortlessly, even when I am surprised by some new form I hadn't thought of. Put that in there? If you like, be my guest, enjoy. You like it when I lick there? My tongue is slow to tire.

I dance between the raindrops of collapsing marriages and little scandals, remaining untouched by the damage I cause. I don't feel guilty, not even slightly, because all these men and women chose to dally with me, knowing full well their duties and the consequences.

I learn later that I give myself too little credit. I underestimate quite how significant a power I wield even when I simply walk. The swagger of my hips, the bouncing of my tail, the firm roll of my shoulders.

I'm ruthless and limitless. I make it into a sport, to live in a City without gainful employment, to subsist only on the generosity of those with whom I share myself. It's prostitution, betrothed to the deepest cunning. My shower springs a leak, so I find a bar with a plumber's van parked outside, deduce its owner and befriend him. My friendship carries all manner of benefits in the privacy of the alley behind the bar, and as I zip him up again I ask if I can shower at his place.

Of course I've seen the wedding band on his finger, but I pretend I hadn't and apologize as he slurs his awkward refusal, though he's sorely tempted. Of all the carnal skills I've learned, the one I'm most proud of is the subtle art of satisfying someone while leaving them wanting more. Hinting, while I please them, at other pleasures I could have provided.

The trap is set. He doesn't just turn away; he sees an opportunity to see me again without asking for it, so he asks instead what's wrong with my own shower. Oh, it's broken? I happen to be a plumber! I can drop by tomorrow after work, if you like.

Instead of a plumber, it might be a chandler, or a carpenter, or an electrical engineer or a hinge-smith. The versions are immaterial; the point is that I know exactly how to get what I want.

And after two years, that is so boring.

•

It’s 1969, and I’m twenty years old. I’m a British citizen in California, and my accent alone is enough to have girls swooning with Beatle-fevered adoration.

It’s the fifth moon of my eighteenth summer. As a feline I’m exotic, even in a city as well-traveled as this, its gates open to all manner of travelers like the legs of a tired whore.

It’s the day of the Second Sun festival and I have painted my body gold, hiding all my spots and painting new ones in a pattern on my chest that shows my family’s constellation. Naked but for a cloth, I join the dance around the holy fire, to the beat of the holy drums.

It’s Sunday, in the year of our Lord 1150, and broken crusaders file solemnly into the city, the scars of battle and defeat etched deep into their faces.

It’s 2006 and I had just been given my first iPod.

It doesn’t matter where or when today is, it never matters for the important things. What matters is that today is the day I meet John.

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It’s as simple as walking in the sun and seeing him amid the crowd. He’s a dog, about my age, his tail bushy, his snout sharp, his pelt tan and black. A Shepherd, he’s called in some versions. In others, I don’t know the name of his race. I don’t know his name at all. All I know is that he takes my breath away.

I stand dumbstruck, muzzle agape like a moonbrained fool. He doesn’t see me, although he’s walking my way. I’m just a face in the crowd like any other.

In a perfect paw he holds a fresh red apple, and he takes a bite. For a moment his eyes flutter shut, while he ignores the world around him and savors the taste. I taste it with him, tart and sweet, the firm flesh of the fruit challenging our fangs so playfully. The cool, crisp pulp on our tongue, quickly heating while it sheds succulent sour juice that makes our mouths water.

He opens his eyes and sees me.

He opens his eyes and I am in love.