08/19/2026
My next-youngest sibling Kristine texted me last week to verify my address because she had something to send me. We currently live on opposite coasts; she’s back in the same region of New York where we grew up, within 30 miles of the old homestead, while Google tells me that as the crow flies, I’m 2,414 miles west of the manse on Prospect Avenue. Personal mail is light in the 21st century. The last piece I received that wasn’t an occasional card or a book was a postcard appreciating my novel Ember Sins from a reader (which has a place of pride on my publications shelf.) I didn't ask what was being sent, because Kris wouldn’t send something pointless; that’s who she is. Me? Ma left me over a thousand dollars in U.S. postage when she died. I’m stupid for correspondence. Want a letter? A haiku? A hand-traced Thanksgiving turkey illustration? Hit me up, before I wither the USPS. Also? I dig a surprise.
Anyway, yesterday an 8 1/2 x 11 mailer shows up in the box via USPS. It was a pretty typical Twitchday—that’s Tuesday to most of you—with a kinda crappy workday, plus I found I’d stupidly mis-cut some lumber I’ve been working with building a sink surround—measure twice, cut once is great, so long as you don’t write down the wrong gorram number—so the mere fact of personal mail on Twitchday is a mood booster. I tear open the envelope flap and inside I find a letter, a handful of photos—mostly from childhood, one from a wedding reception—and…
and The Fat Cat.
For a moment, I feel like my heart has just been hugged, probably as hard as that time I got a box from Kris and inside was Panda, the vinyl-faced, threadbare fun-fur covered panda bear that I’d had since I was maybe four years old, left behind when I went off to college and rescued by Kris when our parents got divorced and the contents of the house on Prospect Avenue were going in six directions; Panda, who I once lost outside—I’d stuck him in a V of branches in a bush in the yard and forgotten where I’d set him, and I was inconsolable in leaving him behind for the night. You know that Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin goes through that with Hobbes? Bill Watterson never lied.
And there Panda was, in the mail, out of the blue and long after I’d lost track of him, and in the box with him was a note…
And I laughed and cried because I’d lost him in the collision of all the lines of life… but Kris hadn’t. Panda is right here in the office even today, a totem. (It’s only mildly terrifying that at least four moves and three decades later, I knew exactly where to find the note to include it here.)
Lordy. The Fat Cat.
Run with me down another side-street. We grew up surrounded by books. My mother made sure we had reading material, whether the Collier’s Junior Classics series, or various Disney book sets, everything from Little Golden Books right down the line, and I’m also sure we never went to a Scholastic Book Fair without a couple dollars in our pockets.
I was, and remain, a voracious reader. As a child, I read some books to tatters. I can’t remember what I had for lunch two days ago; but I could describe the artwork in Janet Burroway and John Vernon Lord’s The Giant Jam Sandwich, and tell you of the angst of The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read as he tried to make dinner but discovered what he thought was a box of spaghetti was actually wax paper, and the magic of Jenny Linsky, dear Jenny, the little black cat with the red scarf central to Esther Averill’s series of early readers… These were food of my imagination before I moved from the kids room at the Catskill Public Library (where our grandmother Rosealma made a point of taking us to get library cards and weekly check out books we didn't own—a small, beautiful Carnegie library at the corner of Bridge and Franklin Streets, a block off Main, across from the Masonic Temple) to the adult science fiction section where I discovered Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and tripped over a host of others in the Robert Silverberg-edited The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964. But before the stars and the wonders of space, my head was filled with Peanuts and Jenny Linsky and the various exploits of Morris and Boris and Gus the Friendly Ghost and…
and The Fat Cat.
I didn’t need to re-read the book as I stood there, marveling at it, my name written in blue on the cover. I remembered it from countless repetitive readings. If you know me, this book explains a LOT about the weird and occasionally surreal pivots my imagination takes. It may be singular in explaining the warping of my five-year-old mind.
Subtitled A Danish Folktale, written and illustrated by Jack Kent (best-known for the comic strip King Aroo), published in 1971 by Parents’ Magazine Press. Mine was a Scholastic paperback copy, a fifth printing from 1973. It concerns a cat who’s left to watch an old woman’s pot of gruel on the fire while she calls on a neighbor. The cat obliges, tastes the gruel, eats it…and then the pot… and, when she returns, the the old woman… and he then goes on a low-key walking rampage through the book, everyone he meets commenting on how big he’s getting, to which he responds by eating them—a flock of birds, a ring of little girls dancing, a parson (and his crooked staff)—the cat growing larger and larger, slowly filling each page of the book, until he encounters a woodsman who he threatens to eat…
Except the woodsman has an axe…
And…there’s no such thing as spoilers for a fifty-plus-year old children’s book. The woodsman hacks the cat open and everyone he’s eaten escapes unharmed. The last page of the story shows the old woman running home with her pot of gruel, happy to no longer be cat food. No flies on those Danes. Grim as Grimm can be.
Except except there’s a big Rod Serling twist with a final illustration after the story proper ends (shown left). Wordless, it makes me smile as much now as it did when it was fresh and new, because it’s a wholesome end I’d wager isn't in the original Dutch fairy tale.
*chef’s kiss*
A criss-cross bandage and that “What the hell just happened?” expression on the cat’s face makes the whole cat-fattening rampage and axing not at all barbaric when you’re five.
And that, my friends, is The Fat Cat.
There are now hundreds upon hundreds of books across multiple rooms of our house. While I have early readers among them ranging from Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown storybooks to the contemporary works of Berkeley Breathed to my own copy of Kenneth Mahood’s Why Are There More Questions Than Answers, Grandad? (that’s its own story) and a modern reprint of Esther Averill’s Jenny and the Cat Club, all of them were purchased in fits of nostalgia, later. The books we had as kids were largely passed down to nieces and nephews, or to family friends who had children, were donated, even disposed. I have paperbacks from my teens that survived purges, but my actual childhood books, the ones that laid the foundation for a lifelong love of reading, writing, storytelling?
Until yesterday, I didn't have any of them. And then The Fat Cat came calling.
Five year old me is grinning because… holy moly, that cat goes absolutely nuts! And he gets Dick Hallorann-ed in the end! And that little X bandage heals all! When you’ve only got sixty months under your belt on Earth, that stuff is gold.
And fifty-eight year old me is grinning, because I didn't know this piece of me even still existed, and it could have been recycled or landfilled because fifty three years is a long time for a flimsy paperbound kids storybook, and instead it’s found its way home to my shelves, because I have the best sister, and it unlocked a little flood of memories I hadn’t had in a while.
Nicest Twitchday ever.
(c)2026 by Doug Lane; all rights reserved
