a boy a cat by Justin Dobbs

But he's just a boy, thought the mayor as he pushed through the door of his house, and indeed, when he opened the closet the boy flew suddenly into his arms.

A young, winning boy, he liked to curl up in front of the mayor's fireplace with the black tiger who had wandered into the house after a tea party. The tiger had nestled around the legs of a very nice lady named Ms. Machete, who was the town baker, and who had been sitting on the couch before the fire, and when she first saw that it was not actually a cat she didn't become as frightened as she did on the day that she first attracted a tiger.

And when the mayor would go to bed at night when the winds were just as fierce as the lagging tiger, when he hit the sack, when the mayor slept in bed with the woman who hogged the creamer, when he did so everynight he prayed that the tiger would not follow him, because that's just what had happened the other night when the glow of the tiger's yellowish eyes were the clock's accomplices in an early morning's fright whose flight was as sadsongy and slowavistic as the bloodied backyard's sundials movement around the raspy husks of leaves and which were accompanied by the jazzy movements of the monstrous boy's hands.

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Near daylight the next week the boy left with the tiger on a lifeboat on the lake near the mayor's and to mark the triumph of their leaving, a woodpecker knocked fifty times consecutively into the wood of the mayor's head.

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Justin Dobbs lives in Seattle.