No peace in stout. No peace in apple wine! Kenneby customarily ask-
ed for "a little solace" when he finished his rounds and sagged into the
last seat at the bar in the Loop & Lettuce, but he had never argued with
what he received before, nor shown any sign of needing to be soothed, des-
pite his rough lifestyle. Brows still furrowed from the rainwater running
off his scalp, he sipped from each decanter given him and sent it back with
a twitch of his unoccupied left hand. Eventually, Delia had nothing else to
offer. She didn't send him out, on account of the weather, but she also
didn't pay any more attention to him.
	Demanding patrons refused to let the matter lie as evening wore on
into night. They asked what Kenneby was doing at the bar (though not by
name), always with arm pointed up and finger pointed down to indicate "over
there". Certainly no hobo was sitting on their side of the dining room, if
indeed, as it appeared, one was in the establishment at all.
	Her reserves of patience now exhausted twice over, Delia approached
Kenneby carefully from behind. He worried the fringe of his overcoat back
and forth with his right hand and gripped his cheekbone tightly in the
other. Delia stepped to one side, hoping to simply appear in his field of
vision suddenly. "You've never stayed this long before," she said flatly;
"you'll have to go." He might have looked at her (it was hard to tell) but
gave no response out loud. His lips continued moving sharply.
	Whatever words he was mouthing, he then started to grumble from
deep within his chest. The rattling noise wobbled and wowed as he continued
bending his lips this way and that. While her diners coughed and shifted in
their chairs, Delia took a deep breath and stepped away without turning.
Something brushed her ankle.
	A line of cats, one russet tom leading the way and another bringing
up the rear, scuttled in through the open door. Wind slammed the door
closed as the last tail inched clear of its trajectory. Both brown cats
knelt before the mumbling beggar; the others dissolved their phalanx to go
and sit under tables.
	Now Kenneby spoke aloud, but not in his intriguingly high-born
accent, as Delia was expecting. He addressed the cats in the creole of a
nearby town, visited some two generations earlier by the unintelligible
unfortunates displaced by some far-off battle. Fragments of familiar words
slipped out between sibilant foreign consonants. Delia saw the customers
grow unusually still.
	Yelps split the near-silence. As the well-bred wrung their thumbs
in the air, Kenneby slowly deflated, one cat digging its teeth into each of
his hands. The beasts puncturing him looked up into his eyes until he was
flat, a puddle of skin and clothes no more three-dimensional than the
sheets on an unmade bed.
	Horrified guests patted themselves frantically, but they all found
themselves as solid as ever. The blood trickling from their thumbs changed
colors, orange then green and blue, then finally a royal, royal purple.
	Violet-eyed cats filed into the kitchen and from there, it must be
assumed, back into the night that bore them.

written for Graham Leuschke in my office 10/31/01

I got self-conscious about playing around a lot with people's stories and wanted to do something straightforward. The fact that it's Halloween must have factored in there somewhere as well. I feel like the results are a bit dull, yet still possibly dense in the unhelpful way that I am sometimes.

Well, I don't know, it has the pacing of an anecdote rather than a longer story, and in this case that's a good thing.

Managed just under one story per day in October! I hope that'll be good practice for writing a whole novel in November, though I sense disaster in the offing. Wish me luck.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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