Summary: by Judith Tarr read by Amanda Ching Links for this episode: This story was previously published in Daily Science Fiction, 2011 Get more of Judith Tarr’s work on Amazon.com Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page Author Judith Tarr about the author… from Amazon.com: I have a lot of academic credentials (PhD from Yale, MA from Cambridge University, AB from Mt. Holyoke) and taught writing and Latin at Wesleyan University in Connecticut–before I ran away from it all to live on a mesa in Arizona. I breed and ride Lipizzan horses, read and study history (and make up my own alternate and fantastical versions), and write–novels, short stories, articles. I teach writing online (details at http://capriole.smoe.org) and blog on the livejournals as dancinghorse. My alter ego is author Caitlin Brennan, who also has a plog on amazon. Narrator Amanda Ching about the narrator… Amanda Ching is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has appeared in WordRiot, Candlemark & Gleam’s Alice: (re)Visions, and every bathroom stall on I-80 from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. She tweets @cerebralcutlass and blogs at amandaching.wordpress.com. Made of Cats: A Love Story by Judith Tarr Never mind the slithy toves; let me tell you about the time all the cats splooped into floons. It all started the day the aliens landed. (Doesn’t it always?) We’d been getting the odd invasion–sometimes really odd–for about a hundred years by then. The ones that came up out of the ground and down from the sky and blasted people to powder and tried to marsiform the planet? And got the common cold and turned into slime mold and died? They were just the start. We were pretty solid on the intergalactic maps by the time the Kovarrubians showed up. Killer microbes? Check. Nuclear option? Check. Toxic xenophobia? Triple check. So now when the aliens came, they came in peace. For reals, dudes. Cure for cancer? Check. Super-mega-hyper-insta-teleporta-warp drive? Check. World peace? Not so much. But now when people got their hate on, mostly they got it on somebody Out There. The day the Kovarrubians came, Emily Habibi-Rubinstein, age five and a half, was having a terrible, horrible, awful, no-good, very bad day. Which meant that as her mother, I, Shannon Habibi, age never mind, was having one, too. Between the snufflecrud that kept her home from school, the power failure that took out the television, the Internet, the house controls, and the air conditioning in one fell swoop, and the failure of the city bus to show up and get us both to the library where we could cool off and toss Emily into a big blissful pile of books, we were not a happy family. Oh, and did I mention that the phones were down, too? So we were effectively cut off from the world? Right. That was the first indication that we might be having another alien invasion. The second came about an hour later, after the power came back on and brought the air conditioning with it, but everything else was still stubbornly refusing to get the memo. I’d made Emily lie down for a nap she insisted, at 120 decibels, that she was too old for. “I’m too old for you not to,” I said, hard-hearted, and cranked the air and shoved Mr. Gubbins into her arms and shut the door on her. Emily is what we call strong-willed, but she gets it from me and she knows it. The howling stopped after six minutes and thirty-three seconds. It would start again, by my calculations, exactly fourteen minutes later, but meanwhile I had a reprieve. I pulled a can of Diet Crack out of the secret stash in the back of the fridge, popped the top, and blissed on a long swallow of liquid heaven. Just as I got my breath for the second dose, a shriek from the back of the house came _thisclose_ to splitting my eardrums. That was a solid 160 db, easy, and left E above high C croaking in the [...]
