A Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat by Brandon Scott Gorrell

"Can I tell you where you will predict me," the boy said. "You will be right probably."

"Do you know where we are?" said the cat.

"What does it matter?" the boy said.

A wave happened, and the boy fell into the cat's chest. The boy rested there, in the cat's chest, inhaling the smell: a tiger, something alive, something affecting him, a little.

The boy was nothing and all things and the lifeboat existed in an array of situations which the boy had both processed and would eventually be willing to process. The cat sat beside him, analyzing.

"That wave there," the cat said. "Its crest seems different. Is there brown on that crest? What does that crest mean? What about the wave? Does that matter? What is the relationship between the crest and the wave?"

"Yes, there is brown on that crest," the boy said.

The lifeboat shifted to a new wave.

"All crests seem the same," the boy said. "I'm not sure."

"What's going to happen," the cat said.

The boy looked at the cat and at the waves and at the crests. The lifeboat swayed and rocked, and the boy could think of nothing beyond his immediate situation. The cat couldn't, either. The boy and the cat and the lifeboat drifted.

Over mountains underneath water. Above a constantly shifting gradient. On a never ending moving walkway.

"Everything's certain," the boy said.

"Everything's certain," the cat echoed.

The lifeboat waited for something to happen.

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Brandon Scott Gorrell lives and works in Seattle as a freelance writer. His work can be found or is forthcoming at Pindeldyboz, elimae, 3:AM, Lamination Colony, Dogmatika, NANO Fiction, and other places. His first poetry book, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is forthcoming from Muumuu House. He blogs here.

Tiger in a Lifeboat™ by Matt Briggs

The main problem was that the tiger would either eat the child in the first half-hour of the show, or the tiger would act like a big house cat until it starved to death. The desired effect of the show was that the cat would behave like a house cat with the inevitable, intended promise that it would eventually, freak out and eat the boy. The boy through cunning and guile had to survive -- not that the boy would survive because he had bonded with the cat. This was the problem they had uncovered after going through several hundred test boys -- that is boys without any clear identifying information that they had bought from the homes on the streets of LA. Four hundred bucks could buy a functional seven-year or eight-year old. They preferred English speakers, but many of the boys spoke Spanish. One boy spoke a haunted babble they could not identify but thought might be Linear Pict X. Thirty of the boys died within minutes of getting launched in the test lot with the tiger.
They tested five tigers -- and this became a problem, too, because the tigers that learned to kill continued to kill (and got better at executing the boys) and so the producers learned that once a tiger did the kill, it would keep killing. And this became part of their thought process in putting the boys in the boat with the tiger. They would have to have a supply of tigers, as well.

Of course, all of the boys had to die because no one could know how they had perfected the show. It had a lot of problems, this show. It was a delicate balance to get it to work.

Yann Martel had to be contacted and he threatened to sue if they went ahead with the show. The public domain idea, he said, was a boy and a wild cat. A boy and a tiger in a lifeboat, I have that copyrighted. If you do this, my lawyers will contact you. So they paid him a half-million dollars for the rights and threatened to say they would call it “Yann Martel’s Tiger in a Lifeboat,” playing both to his ego (like anyone even knew who this guy was) and his pretension, what kind of literary guy was he if he’d originated a reality cable show?

Reality was played out anyway. This was a latch ditch effort to get some interest behind the show. Early one morning in a warehouse in Burbank, they launched the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat, and waited.

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Originally posted at Semantikon (along with an MP3). A version with music provided by Christopher Chaplin was posted at MacJams.

Introducing A Boy, a Cat, and a LifeBoat

This blog is a series of short stories based on the public domain idea of a boy, a wild cat, and a boy stuck in a lifeboat. The idea became an international open source idea when the Canadian Yann Martel retold a story by Brizilian writer Moacyr Scliar as The Life of Pi. Martel hadn’t even read Scliar's work. However he had read a review in the The New York Times Book Review that Martel mysteriously attributed to John Upike. (Updike for his part, does not recall having written this review.)

In turn this blog is a sequence of stories based simply on the idea of: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat. Just as Martel didn’t read Scliar, I am not suggesting that anyone read Martel. The open source idea is: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat.

If you are interested in contributing a story concerning a boy, a wild cat (such as a tiger), and a lifeboat in any style or form that pleases you, it be my pleasure to receive this story at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail so that I can post it here.

My own story, a Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat will be released in a collection of stories called The End is the Beginning on April 16th, 2007 by Final State Press.