The two fallen women feasted on Gentry's entrails by the frozen meat display case. They ignored me, and I managed to get a lot of cases to the truck before I could see the rest, coming for me like sleepwalkers from all directions. They were a block away.

Everyone I'd ever known.

I sped off as their strangled calls rose in the cold night where chimney smoke once coiled and broke apart.

Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh...Were they crying "blue," asking the sky why it had turned on them?

The next day I stored the food in the attic and put a can out near the porch. I found myself in the rocker waiting for Peg Leg to come again. I laughed with a strange sense of amusement, as I realized I'd given him a name. I'd never named anything before, and I used to wonder how the pet owners I knew chose from so many options. Now I saw: names just appeared from nowhere, like purple zombie-making skies.

The pain in my head and my sides shut me up fast.

He did not come that day. November bugs laid their eggs in the food and I had to throw it out.

The next morning I sat with my coffee on the porch. There was a trace of coming rain in the air, so the screen doors gave off a pleasant metallic odor. I watched an old clothesline suspended from the third story to a tall oak tree guarding the border between the yard proper and the woods. A faded red scarf hung by the side of the forest, clothes-pined to the line. It was put there to dry by my mother. It might've been the last thing I'd seen her do.

A rustling drew me from the cloth. I raised the shotgun I now kept near by at all times. A cat approached the fresh food I'd put out when I woke. The cat sniffed the ground, head moving side to side and rubbing his chin on the earth as he crawled, like a solider advancing under enemy fire.

His coat was confederate gray but it might've once been white. Under his nose was a black mustache smudge. I wondered if he was blind, as he didn't look up at me, but seemed to have found the food by scent alone. He ate rapidly. Then thunder pealed, and he raised his head with taut masticated ears. He had no eyes. A shiny BB gun pellet was lodged in one socket.

The rain fell hard and he zigzagged in a crazy pattern toward the trees, more like a fly without wings than a cat. The sky turned the color of his coat.

But my thoughts ran to friends and family. Perhaps the rain would melt them away like a herd of wicked witches of the west. Or perhaps having forgotten what rain is they would seek its source and come up the hill to look for it, finding me instead of clouds.

Why not? Weirder things have happened.

The days grew colder. It became my daily ritual to sit on the back porch, waiting for cats to get the food I'd put ten feet from my seat. I'd wait with anticipation to see who would arrive, cleaning my shotgun to kill time. I found if I left five or six cans I could get as many as ten cats to come up to the house. Sometimes it was Bandito (as I started to call the mustached cat). Other times he'd not appear for days. I also named Pickle, Jester, Streak, and Crush, orange tabbies like my mother's Charlie; three Calicos called Mike, Jesse, and Bombay; gray tigers (Lee and Max were my favorites), and a striking dark chocolate brown cat I think belonged to a friend of my cousin. I called him Friend Lee. They tended to remain quiet. I didn't see Peg Leg for weeks.

Then one frosty December morning I woke with him sitting on my chest.

His eyes were a pale violet I'd never seen on any feline. Of course, I never looked face to face with a cat before. I pet them now and again. But the cats weren't mine, and you don't look eye-to-eye with what isn't yours. But still, they seemed unusual.

He must've come in through the torn screen door on the back porch, although he would've had to be smart enough to figure out how to lift the loose piece of screen up before slipping in. I couldn't help but think he wanted something from me, and was waiting for me to understand.

"What do you want?" I asked, for the first time talking to an animal, as I'd seen so many people do before.

We locked eyes.

Black slices of darkness in the middles of his eyes like propeller blades on a plane resting between flights...

I wasn't sure what to do. Though I'd been around cats plenty, I'd never picked one up. They even made me a little uncomfortable. Winston slept near me, but only when Joy was there to stroke her and make her happy. My presence in the bed was incidental.

As if sensing my discomfort, Peg Leg jumped off. I heard claws jutting from three feet patter on the wood floor, and the hinges on the back-porch screen door move as he slid out.

I didn't see him again for a long time.

The first week of December the snow started, slow and light. The house gets frigid at this time, as it's in a real shambles. One afternoon a thud drew me to the attic. Part of the roof had fallen in. Squirrels nested in a corner next to a steamer trunk filled with old curtains and doilies. I thought the house might not last the winter once it gets going.

Through a hole in the attic roof I noticed a knot of activity down in the town center where the Queen of the Egg Festival would've been crowned atop a massive hen-shaped float, all yolk-blonde tresses and shell-white skin. On Festival day the sky went purple at two o'clock----an hour before the ceremony----so this would be the first year with no Queen. Now the bodies gathered there, moving more rapidly than I'd seen before, walking in duck-duck-goose circles.

Remember what Gentry said?

Needed cold.

They wanted it to snow.

I moved the cans of cat food to the back-porch, where they would be shielded from the wind and snow. I would then sit behind the screen door in the rocker with my coffee and watch from that warmer vantage point. None of these cats figured out how to get through the screen door like Peg Leg, so I didn't worry about them getting in. Peg Leg seemed smarter than the rest. But I didn't know cats enough to be sure.

To my surprise the number of visitors to my porch increased as snow fell in earnest. I worried there wouldn't be enough cases to last the winter. The cat food was looking pretty good to me now as my own supplies dwindled.

I always liked Crumble-Down Farm in December; the gray wood outhouse, the tool-shed, the caved-in barn, the wet, black trees covered in the same blanket of snow, the yard a picture of quiet stillness. But now intermittent cat-movements invaded the calm. Paw prints Rorschached the snow, and I heard their steps up the porch stairs, and aluminum cans clanging into each other as they ate in a hurry.

It was a strange sight from the third story window. I saw the dark shapes of the cats set in the whiteness below, some still and washing up or scratching, others jumping after squirrels or birds, and most going somewhere unknown to me.

Usually I didn't look toward town, but I'd hear them, like demented backup singers in some dead pop star's insipid love song.

Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooooh...

Near month's end I saw fewer cats as heavy snowstorms swept over this part of Connecticut. The town was nothing but a blank valley and the moans stopped---or else I mistook them for the wind living in the skeleton trees. I imagined the yard was drowned in all the envelopes lying around the post office, great piles of white that hid messages forever undelivered. Congratulations, greetings, apologies, love... The snow drifted five feet high in some places there, which I guessed made cat-travel difficult, if not impossible. And the other night I spied a fox eating cat frozen food that had sat untouched for days. I let him finish it; then I threw out the cans and stopped the attempts at feeding.

Until this morning.

My isolation must've got to me because I spoke out loud to myself for the first time ever (So many firsts lately: First cat fed! First thing named! First lesbian sighting! First cat seen eye-to-eye! First zombie knocked over! First day of the end of my life!). My exact words were: