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That afternoon, the first day that Pancakes had showed up in his office, Dr. Gust went to his own doctor, but the doc couldn't find anything. Blood pressure was normal. No hard lumps in his abdomen. His prostate felt better than ever.

Dr. Gust tried to bravely carry on at work for the rest of the week, but every morning that goddamn cat was in his office. Dr. Gust couldn't handle it. He was young. Or youngish. He had so much juice in him yet. So, he did what he felt he had to do: during his lunch break on Friday, he took Pancakes in the cat carrier to the animal shelter. The sad one on Breaker Road off Main Street in Pondville, with the concrete cells.

"He's only two years old and his name is Pancakes," Dr. Gust said to the woman at the counter. "I hope he finds a good home. He's a wonderful cat," he continued. "But he was a...well, he's...a killer."

"Did you put a little bell on him?" the woman volunteering at the animal shelter asked. Her name was Alana, and she had six cats at home. "If he wears a jingle bell on his collar, it will be much harder for him to kill birds. Or you could always make him an indoor cat. That's a great option."

Dr. Gust didn't want to get into it with this nice lady at the volunteer animal shelter. He did not want to get the cat a jingle bell. It would do nothing to fix the problem. He shook his head sadly. He would not change his mind. "He's an agent of death," he said to Alana.

"That's a shame," Alana said, shaking her head also. "We'll try to find him a good home. Maybe he'll get lucky." Those were heavy words: maybe and lucky.

Dr. Gust teared up, but he turned away. I am a good person, he reminded himself. I work with the elderly. I am a good person, he repeated, before driving away from the animal shelter and back to work.

That afternoon, Alana smoked a bowl at her desk. She fed everyone their kibble, refilled their waters, and then locked up for the night. Pancakes enjoyed his dinner before he started working on the lock. Thanks to his claws, Pancakes was able to pick the lock with surprising ease. Once he was freed, he jumped from his cage to Alana's desk to the top of the filing cabinet. Alana had left a window cracked open to air out the pot-smoke smell overnight, and it was through that window that Pancakes slipped out into the night.

Out on the road, Pancakes took a left onto Main Street. He walked through the town center, past the stone library and the white-steepled Congregationalist church on the right. On the left was the town hall, built in 1856, still coated in a thick layer of lead paint. He went past the athletic club, past the liquor store, past the gun shop, past the crumbling brick fire station. He walked by White Rock Elementary School, a square building with lots of windows, built on land that backs up onto Assawompset Pond. Pondville was named for the network of five ponds in the town, and Assawompset Pond is one of the five. Assawompset is a word from the Wampanoag tribe, and it means "the place of the white stone."

Pancakes kept walking. He followed the main road out to the edge of town, past the cranberry bogs and the cranberry juice factory, past a stone bench memorial for a teenager who had drowned in the bogs nearly fifteen years before. There was an old man who sat on the bench sometimes while he worked through a six-pack, but no one was sitting there now. Pancakes sniffed the legs of the bench. He lingered for a minute. Up ahead was the town border.

LEAVING PONDVILLE, the sign said, at town's edge. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE! it said underneath that. Pancakes had learned to read from one of the patients in the nursing home. Alberta Russet would read aloud from the Russian masters while Pancakes snuggled on her lap. Alberta Russet hadn't made it to the end of Anna Karenina before her death, had missed the entire part about the train.

Pancakes walked to the other side of the roadside sign. WELCOME TO PONDVILLE! it read. And then in smaller letters, written in yellow on a white sign, looking like piss in snow, the town motto read: YOU'RE SAFE HERE.

Bullshit, thought the cat, because he had seen his fair share of bad things, and he was only two and a half human years old. No one was safe in Pondville, because no one is safe anywhere. Pancakes knew with certainty there had been violence in the town. He remembered that the first events of King Philip's War happened in Pondville in 1675, and that war was an absolute bloodbath. All cats have an ancient knowledge; it's dogs that are born with a blissfully clean slate.

But this isn't a story about cats, or even about dogs. It's a story about horrible things that happen to people, and how on earth anyone can stomach raising children in a world where doom and disaster lurk around every corner. So, no, it's not a story about a cat. It's just a story that starts with a cat, and it goes from there.