Kitty’s stomach lurched a little when the plane touched down at Albuquerque airport, in time with the plane’s wheels shuddering against the ground. Two jet engines roared. She looked out the little round window, at the wing and the engine it carried, and frowned for a moment.

“Backwards,” she said quietly. The plane slowed down.

The lady next to Kitty gave her an odd look, but said nothing.

Kitty scratched at her ears and looked out the window as the plane taxied over to the terminal. When the plane finally stopped and the seatbelt sign turned off, she took her seatbelt off and stood up. The top of her head thudded against the low ceiling. Clutching her head, she sat down, squished her tail, and finally settled for kneeling on her seat. She swished her tail to stretch it out a little, and watched as people stood in the too-narrow aisle and got their luggage and stuff, but weren’t actually getting any closer to the door.

When Kitty got to the luggage carousel, Violet was waiting for her. Her older sister had dyed her hair red and wore what seemed to Kitty an uncharacteristically feminine brown dress.

“Kitty cat!” cried Violet. She smiled warmly, her blue-green eyes shining, and surrounded Kitty with a squishy hug. Kitty heard something clack to the floor, and only saw after Violet let go that her suitcase had fallen down.

“Hihi,” she managed. She bent down pick up her bag, and Violet took the opportunity to scratch behind her ears. “Aaah...” she protested.

“Sorry. I just had to,” said Violet. “Let’s go find Will.”

Will was Violet’s husband, which made him Kitty and Ruby’s brother-in-law, which was still a weird word to fit into her life. It helped that Will was awesome.

They stepped out of a pair of automatic doors and into the dry New Mexican heat. Violet was already on her cell phone, and a dark-red Saturn pulled up in short order.

Kitty had just buckled into the seat when something cold and wet brushed against her thigh.

Will grinned through his wiry black beard. “I see you’ve met Powder,” he said in his calm, pleasant voice.

A dog with short gray hair looked up at her with friendly, expectant eyes.

“She doesn’t bark or anything,” explained Violet. Kitty tended to get jumpy around barky dogs.

“She might whine though,” added Will as he pulled the car away and started out of the airport.

Kitty petted Powder (who wagged her tiny stub of a tail) and looked out the window to take in Albuquerque. The sky was a pristine, unimaginable blue on one side, and yellow-orange as the sun set on the other. They had big, curving highway ramps, the kind that made her nervous, but where they were gray concrete in Neko Machi, here they had an adobe color, with turquoise decorations. The mountains were a magnificent clutter of ruddy stone that took on the warm colors of the bright, proud sun.

“Querque!”

Kitty and Powder both jumped. Violet had twisted around and was grinning at them.

Kitty tilted her head to one side. “Huh?”

“You know that Weird Al song, Albuquerque?” asked Will. “Violet was doing that for about a month after we moved here.”

Violet bounced up and down in her seat. “Oh my god and now Kitty Cat Sister is here! There’s so much I want to show you!”

The first place they went was the dog park. It was an expanse of green grass and trees, surrounded by a chain-link fence. There were a bunch of different people around, and all kinds of dogs. (Animal dogs, not dog people. Well, there were a few of those too.) Some of the dogs ran around, eager to have open air, some sniffed at each other, and others played fetch with their owners. Powder mostly played with Will and Violet, though she only seemed to want to do the first half of playing fetch. When someone threw a ball, she would race after it, and then sort of sniff at it until someone picked it up again.

The dog owners socialized a little too, and Violet told a couple she recognized but didn’t know the names of how Powder was an Australian Cattledog and Kitty was a Californian Sister.

Violet and Will lived in a rather nice tan-colored house. The front yard was a mess of scraggly desert plants, and inside there were many swords and axes and such mounted to the walls, and one wall that was nothing but shelves of board games. A black cat walked up to Kitty and sniffed at her feet.

“That’s Nightgaunt,” said Violet. “I’m sure Hastur is around here somewhere.”

Kitty was about to reach down to pet Nightgaunt when Will said, “Hastur, Hastur, Hastur,” and a mackerel tabby cat—kind of like Kumo, but bigger and darker—leaped down from a table and tackled Nightgaunt to the ground. The two cats rolled onto the many shoes set out by the door.

“It doesn’t usually work like that,” said Will.

Kitty watched the cats wrestle. Hastur sprang up and ran into a side room, with Nightgaunt chasing after him. Kitty watched them go. “What’s a Hastur?”

“We will educate you about Mighty Cthulhu and the works of H.P. Lovecraft later,” said Violet. “But first, El Pinto!”

Kitty furrowed her brows. “Does everything here have weird names?”

“Yes,” said Violet, taking her hand. “And El Pinto means awesome New Mexican food.”

They had barely dropped off Kitty’s bags and Powder when they got back in the car. Will put the local classical station on the radio. It was starting to get dark. Albuquerque had many small churches, and every fast food place had a sign with interchangeable letters that included the words “Go Lobos.”

“Oh yeah,” said Violet. “The Lobos are UNM’s football team. They’re big here.”

Kitty thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Handegg.”

She saw Will’s brows knit together through the rear-view mirror, and Violet gave her a look of amused incredulity.

“’Cuz it’s like a big brown egg you hold in your hands...”

Will and Violet laughed.

“When did your brain get so weird, Kitty?” asked Violet.

“Um, senior year?”

El Pinto’s parking lot seemed to just keep going, and when they finally parked, they were facing some brown horses from the other side of a fence.

“Horsies!” said Will. All three of them waved. The horses didn’t seem all that impressed.

It took a while to walk to the entrance to the restaurant. Kitty started humming to herself.

“What song is that?” asked Will.

“Huh?”

“What song were you humming?”

Kitty considered this, but wasn’t really sure. When they walked into the restaurant she was confronted with a big waterfall and fountain thing. Will went to the front counter, and when Kitty turned to watch she saw a wall covered by framed pictures of famous people—presidents and actors and musicians—at the restaurant, posing with the staff.

It took about 40 minutes for them to get a table. In the meantime Kitty took pictures of the waterfall (there were pennies at the bottom), talked with Will and Violet (Will was working tomorrow, so Kitty would go to UNM with Violet), and checked Twitter on her cell phone (Tiger was not happy about what Megalovision was doing with the upcoming Call of Honor game).

When the pager went off, they went up front and a waitress led them deeper into the restaurant. They passed a waiter with a secret service radio earpiece and made a bunch of turns before reaching a square table in a room with paintings of horses on the walls. The waitress was a short but athletic-looking rabbit-lady, and she took their drink orders. Will had a beer, Violet had a mango margarita, and Kitty had iced tea. Violet ordered nachos, which turned out to be all they were getting, because the nachos were a huge platter and piled high.

Just as Kitty had her first chip in her mouth, Will said, “So how’s your first taste of New Mexican food?”

Kitty savored the taste of a fresh tortilla chip with ground beef, sour cream, and something else that she couldn’t quite place, something spicy and savory.

“It has green chile in it,” explained Violet. “One of the major things about New Mexican food is that it uses red and green chiles that don’t grow much of anywhere else.”

Kitty tasted the dry desert air, the achingly pure sky, the patient hands picking ripened chiles and kneading dough into tortillas. She tasted worlds meeting in the bright sunlight, witnessed by silent mountains.

She opened her eyes and said. “Um, good.”

Violet rubbed the top of Kitty’s head. “Kitty Cat Sister.”

Between the mountain of nachos and the sopapillas (which were like little bread pillows served with squeeze bottles of honey), they were all quite full by the time they left, and there was still a good amount of nachos left. It was quite dark out when they trekked across the parking lot to the red Saturn. The horses were still there, but they were still pretty nonplussed at the sight of people.

Back at the house, it turned out that the spare room wasn’t ready for guests, so Kitty would be sleeping on a couch in the living room that folded flat. It had gotten pretty late, so they agreed to call it a night.

Kitty had just gotten settled into bed when one of the cats hopped up and rested against her back. It felt weird, but he let him stay. A second cat crawled under the covers and nestled next to her stomach. Kitty decided she didn’t mind, even though she could feel the second cat breathing which made her think about breathing and made it harder to sleep. Then a third cat hopped up and gingerly sat down along her hip and side.

Kitty sat up and lifted the side of the blanket. Two cats tumbled to the floor. As they rolled down she heard jingling collars and crackling static, and saw little purplish-blue sparks. She grabbed the final cat and put him on the floor. All three jingled off to other rooms.

Kitty lay down and fell asleep trying to remember the third cat’s name.

Kitty woke up with the three cats arrayed on and around her. When she went to the bathroom it was full of different kinds of rubber duckies, including a duckie soap dispenser.

As she took a shower, as the hot water fell soothing on her shoulders and face, it occurred to her that she’d had a dream about the top of the world, which was weird because the world didn’t really have a top any more than it had four corners. There had been a coyote too, and she wondered if she wasn’t remembering an episode of The Simpsons instead.

When she finished with her shower, she tried to fix her hair, but that one sprig of hair still stuck up no matter what she did. When she finally finished in the duckie bathroom, she heard typing sounds and found Will at his computer, checking Facebook and something about Shannen Doherty. “Good morning.”

Kitty rubbed the back of her head. “Morning.” It was quiet and she didn’t know Will as well as she would’ve liked, so talking felt like reaching through a wall of Jell-O.

“I’m going to make some tea. Would you care for some?”

She nodded. “Please.”

“What kind?”

Kitty considered the relative merits of black, oolong, and green teas, and variations of such, and how much caffeine each contained.

“Kitty?”

“Earl Grey?”

“Coming right up.”

Will sprang out of his chair, and poured boiling water into two mugs, then put a tea ball of Earl Grey into one and of gunpowder green tea into the other. Kitty sniffed the cup as it steeped. It smelled of rich black tea with a hint of citrus. She thought of tea fields in the mountains of India, the fields of bergamot in Italy, of fine tea served with pride (and scones) in elegant silver tea ware in England.

When Kitty opened her eyes she saw Will drowning his tea in sugar.

“I know,” he said. “I like to oversteep my tea and put tons of sugar in.”

Unsure of how long her tea had been steeping, Kitty pulled the tea ball out and took a sip. It seemed to be about right.

Will stirred his tea and took a sip. “I was thinking of making something for breakfast. Would you be interested?”

“Um, sure.”

Will set about what turned out to be some kind of culinary experiment. He told Kitty she could use Violet’s computer to go online, though Hastur and Nightgaunt kept interrupting with demands to be petted, and Will kept poking his head in to ask if a given ingredient (mushrooms, bell peppers, green chile) was okay.

A sleepy Violet hugged Kitty from behind. “Morning sister.”

“Morning.” Kitty glanced towards the kitchen, where it sounded like something was frying. “He’s making... something.”

“He does that sometimes.” Violet squeezed, then let go and stood up. “Or a lot, actually.”

“Something” turned out to be a curious mix of pasta, scrambled eggs, and assorted vegetables. It was an eccentric dish, but it tasted good.

One of the cats hopped up on the one unoccupied chair at the table.

“Hi, Bart,” said Will.

Kitty petted Bart and sipped her tea. Wisps of cat fur kept coming off from Bart’s relentless shedding. He closed his eyes and purred. “Where’s Millhouse?”

Will and Violet’s eyes met for a moment, and Violet said, “Um, he died. We tried the chemotherapy for him, but it didn’t work.”

Kitty started petting Bart again.

When everyone was ready, they got into the car and went to UNM, where Will dropped them off. Kitty and Violet crossed the street onto the UNM campus. They started out between the bookstore and the architecture building.

As they walked along, Violet pointed out the different buildings. They came across a huge abstract shape, rendered in aluminum and at turns curved and straight. Around it were several brown metal statues of different kinds of people, most of whom seemed baffled by the aluminum thing. A man held his cap in one hand and did an exaggerated shrug. Another was pointing and explaining things to his metal friends. Some flesh and blood kids were hanging from the statue’s arms.

“It’s called ‘Modern Art,’” explained Violet. “It always attracts a lot of attention. Anyway, I’ve just got a studio art class, and I’ll probably get out in like an hour. I’ll call you when I do.”

Kitty wandered around the campus while listening to music. Most things were in tan and brown colors, though there were some green plants and a duck pond. None of the schools in Neko Machi had anything like that. Kitty sat down on a bench and watched and listened. The water was greenish and nearly opaque. There were ducks that sat on the ground, floated on the water, and swam around, sometimes bobbing after something or other.

The sunlight felt different from Neko Machi, more... direct. She thought about Millhouse and how he would splay his toes whenever someone picked him up. She thought about the day she’d rescued Kumo from drowning in the river.

After a while, Kitty got up and wandered towards the student union. It looked very new, with clean, shiny tiles in New Mexico colors, and several chain fast food places.

There was a table set up with a sign that said “Japanese Club Onigiri Sale” in both English and Japanese. The Japanese writing was just a little off, though someone had obviously worked hard on it.

“Hello,” said a girl sitting behind the table.

Kitty looked at her, hesitated for a moment, and then replied, “こんにちは。ニューメキシコにでも日本語研究会があるなんて面白い。ええと、おにぎり一個を下さい。”

The two club members looked at each other, then the girl said, “Um, １ドルになります?”

Kitty have her a dollar and got a rice ball in return. She wound up talking to them in Japanese for a while, and found out that Lobo Comics was the best place in Albuquerque to get anime stuff.

Finally, Kitty put in her earphones to listen to music again and went to the area in the lower part of the student union where there were many comfy chairs.

She thought about what awaited her back in Neko Machi. High school was over, and she still wasn’t sure what came next. Summer break wouldn’t go on forever. She was trying to force herself to stop thinking about it when Violet called.

When they met up, they decided to have sushi for lunch. They started walking towards the bus stop.

“So what do you think of UNM?” asked Violet.

“It’s a beautiful campus, though it feels... um...”

“New Mexican?Desert-y?”

“Planned?” Kitty offered. It was like someone had built it from a kit full of similar parts, where at NMCC and NMSU no two buildings were quite alike.

Violet smiled and scratched behind Kitty’s ear.

The bus came only a couple minutes after they got to the bus stop, though Kitty’s change got caught in the coin slot. “Sorry,” she whimpered as she pulled out a pen and fought to dislodge the coins. Finally they went in, and the drive handed her a pass. She hurried to sit down while the remaining five or so people got on.

“Where are you from?” asked an old, brown-skinned man.

“Um, Neko Machi,” said Kitty. “I’m visiting my sister.”

“Want me to show you around? I can show you the real Albuquerque!”

“Um...”

“Has she shown you the ice caves? Or the gold mine? Or a cock fight? I can show you all that stuff and more!”

Kitty clutched Violet’s hand. “Uh, I think I’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“Hey,” said a lady on the bus. “How’ve you been?”

The man swiveled around “What?”

“How’ve you been?”

“Eh. All right.”

Violet squeezed Kitty’s hand. Kitty silently thanked the woman for distracting the weird man.

Kitty hadn’t been sure what to expect from sushi in New Mexico, but it turned out to be really good. The “Albuquerque Roll” had some green chile in it that was just delicious.

After that they took the bus a little further to the Winrock Shopping Center. It used to be a mall, but now there were only three stores, and the rest was empty. “It’s kind of neat,” explained Violet. “But we can go to the real mall later if you want.”

Kitty held up her camera and took a picture. “I think I want to see this.”

Everywhere there were empty storefronts, all with their gates down or doors closed. In the middle there was the occasional empty kiosk or barren planter. Once in a while they would see someone, usually someone old, walking around. Kitty thought of what the mall must have been like before, of stores a lot like they had back home and people talking, laughing, shopping. Some people had worked here, spent more waking hours than not in he humming mall, a home away from home, until the day someone told them the store was closing.

The ceiling was high and had many skylights, so the voices must’ve echoed high above. There would’ve been quiet times and loud times, the hours just before opening and the Black Friday stampedes. Whatever parts it had been made of, this place had had a kind of life. Kitty stopped in a sunbeam and closed her eyes. She could hear the faint whirr of air conditioners, and somewhere in the distance there were footsteps. She slowed her breathing and listened. The fluorescent lights hummed. She could hear Violet breathing. For just a second, she heard another sound, a roaring of wind, but when she tried to focus on it, it was gone.

When she opened her eyes, for just a second she saw a shape, something orangeish.

“Kitty? Hello?”

Kitty started, and saw Violet was standing in front of her waving.

“Are you okay?”

“Um, yeah. I just… spaced out for a second.”

Violet took hold of her hand and led the way to Dillard’s. Kitty had never heard of it, but it was a department store like any other. They looked around the other mall too, which was a perfectly ordinary mall. There were some stores that had things with red and green chiles in, and the sports store had lots of Lobos and Isotopes shirts.

By the time they were done it was getting into the late afternoon and the sky had become overcast, and they headed for the bus to go home. At the bus stop there was a man with brown skin was showing people pieces of blue paper that had sketches of eagles and coyotes. He talked a man into giving him some cigarettes for one. Kitty looked at her feet, and saw small raindrops hitting the ground.

Everyone hurried to get underneath the bus stop’s awnings as the rain started coming down harder. The man with the drawings put them away and started smoking one of his cigarettes. When the bus came he didn’t take it.

On the bus Kitty sat by a window and looked outside. The roads were already becoming slick. She saw a flash of light, and a few seconds later there was a thunderclap she felt as much as heard.

“When it rains out here,” said Violet, “it really rains. I think I’m gonna call Will.”

They got off the bus by Central, and took shelter next to a gas station. Kitty rubbed at her arms; her flesh felt cold. Will was supposed to be coming by with the car soon, but the rain kept coming down, and the sky kept flashing and booming.

“Rough weather, huh?”

Kitty and Violet turned to see a lanky, brown-skinned young rabbit-man with long black hair. He was wearing a button-up shirt and jeans. “On the reservation it rains 24/7 you know,” he explained.

“That’s a lot of rain,” said Kitty. He was an Indian, and she didn’t know what to say with the weight of history hanging in the air. In Neko Machi there were hardly ever storms like this. She had been maybe five years old the last time there was a real thunderstorm. She remembered how the bolts of lightning just kept coming, how the curtained window seemed to have a great flickering fluorescent light behind it.

“I’m going to buy stuff to make fry bread,” he added

“Oh, cool,” said Violet. “We’re just heading home.”

They all seemed to run out of things to say. Kitty wanted to ask someone about coyotes, but it seemed like every time the words tried to make their way to her mouth a crack of thunder scared them off.

When the red Saturn pulled up, its headlights making twin halos of light in the raindrops, the Indian told them to have a good night, and Violet said the same as they got into the car. As they pulled away Violet said, “So we met a gay Indian.”

“Uh huh,” said Will.

For dinner they went to what Will called the “meat fountain.” It turned out to be a Brazilian grill restaurant called Tucanos. They sat at a table, and men would come by offering to cut slices of tasty meat or occasionally grilled pineapple off of skewers.

When the bill came, Kitty noticed that the price started with a 1 and had three digits before the decimal point.

Will looked up at her. “It’s a Polish thing, where you be as good a host as you possibly can. When you make the big bucks you can pay.”

Kitty wondered what she could do that would let her make enough money to spend that much on dinner.

On the way home the sky still boiled and flashed, and where on the sunny days that had come before the sky had seemed huge and far off, now it felt smaller and closer, as though it was leaning closer to wrap itself around Albuquerque.

When they got back to the house, Kitty went straight to bed, and let the sounds of the angry sky lull her to sleep. She dreamed, something about the world turning upside-down.

The next day was Saturday, and Will and Violet were having a party, a “Mad Science Luau.” In the morning they all went out shopping. The ground was damp, but the sky was clear and blue. The storm had gone as quickly as it had come.

First they went to Costco and bought a bunch of random things, like macadamia nuts and tropical fruit parfait and fruit punch. Then they went to a store that sold nothing but alcohol. Kitty waited in the car, and when Will and Violet came out they had ten different kinds of beer, a lot of which were Hawaiian, and one of which had little rocket ships on the side.

The first guest to show up was a woman names Serena. She was wearing a lab coat made of Hawaiian shirt type fabric, and had a cat on a leash. The cat was named CaitSith (pronounced like Kate who’s an evil Jedi), and did this weird thing where whenever anyone pet him he would start a sustained yowl, like some kind of hand-cranked siren. No matter how much Serena assured Kitty that CaitSith was just a weird cat, it still felt like she was doing something wrong.

Will was setting up a bunch of random science toys, like a Jacob’s ladder and some random things that did stuff with ball bearings, while Violet set out the brain-shaped jell-o and a sheet cake decorated with the periodic table.

When more people started showing up, Will plugged his MP3 player into the stereo and put on a mix of luau and science-y songs, alternating between ukulele songs and the likes of “Monster Mash” and “Skullcrusher Island.” Most of the guests seemed to already know each other, but Violet introduced each to Kitty as they arrived. There was a big guy with a beard in a Hawaiian shirt and steampunk goggles named Carl and a lanky catboy who went by “Bunny” for some reason, but after that Kitty mostly lost track of who was who.

People played board games, talked, and drank their way from afternoon to night. Kitty drank mostly water and ate a lot of the macadamia nuts. When they sat in the back yard, the night was pleasantly balmy, and someone had set up those tiki style oil lamp things. Kitty found herself seated between Violet and Carl, holding a strawberry Italian soda. The ground was lumpy and had only a few scraggly weeds, so Kitty’s chair rocked just a little.

Violet took a big gulp of wine and said, “So what’re you doing next? You graduated from high school, right?”

Kitty looked at the ground. Senior year hadn’t been anything special. Oh, there had been a class trip to Super Kitty Adventure Park, and some extra paperwork, and all the random stuff for the graduation ceremony. She hadn’t really cared about the ceremony, but her family all wanted it. And then she and her friends had stopped going to school and it was just another summer.

“I dunno,” Kitty murmured. She looked down at the Italian soda, at the little bubbles coming up out of the reddish-pink water.

“Didn’t you plan for college?” asked Carl.

Kitty swished her tail. “No.”

“So what’re you going to do?” asked Violet.

“I dunno.”

“Oh come on, Kitty. You gotta have some idea.” Violet gave her a playful shove.

The next thing Kitty knew, she was tilting sideways. The thing she knew after that was that she’d fallen on the ground. The uneven dirt was hard enough that her shoulder hurt. She rolled onto her back and looked up at the sky.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry!” said Violet.

“Um,” said Kitty.

Will looked down at her. “Are you okay?”

“Uh, I think so?”

Will and Carl helped Kitty to her feet. “Why don’t we go back inside?” said Carl.

It was like that shove was the leak that let the air out of the balloon of the party. Without saying much, everyone finished their drinks and started saying their goodbyes.

It took a while for Kitty to fall asleep. The same scene kept repeating in her head. She wondered what she could have done differently, and she wondered if Violet would even remember in the morning. One of the cats hopped up on the bed/couch and lay down alongside her. Kitty swished her tail and thought about how sometimes cats have it easier.

When she woke up she was sure she’d dreamed about something, because the words, “I am here, if you wish to listen” kept playing in her head. It was early, and Will and Violet were still asleep. After evicting the cats, Kitty decided to go for a walk. She took the spare keys from where they’d been hung, put on her headphones, left a note, and stepped out into a warm morning.

She was starting to get a feel for the streets around the house, and her feet were starting to know which way to go. One street curved into another, until it took her past the elementary school. There was a sculpture of a dragon, whose long body curved in and out of the ground. Kitty stopped when she reached the head, and stared for a while.

“Um, excuse me?”

There was a woman with a stroller. Except the stroller was empty. Kitty stared at the spot where a child would go.

“Excuse me,” the woman repeated.

“Invisible baby?” said Kitty.

“What?”

“Uh, nothing,” said Kitty as she stepped aside. The stroller batted against her swishing tail as it passed, and she took hold of her tail to keep it still.She felt a little irritated, though she wasn’t sure who she was annoyed at.

Along the way she passed by the Wal-Mart, and found herself standing in front of a gas station that had a huge octopus statue thing on its sign. It was a blue-green color. She passed by more random shops, more Go Lobos signs. She had an early lunch at Carl’s Jr. They had green chile in among the other condiments. While she was eating her cell phone rang; it was Violet.

“Hey Kitty.”

“Hihi.”

“When’re you going to be back?”

Kitty looked at her half-eaten hamburger. “Um, in another hour or so?”

“Um… Okay. See you then.”

She ate a little more, but didn’t have all that much of an appetite. She kept thinking about ending up on the ground in the back yard, looking up at the darkening sky. When she left the restaurant, she continued her walk, which took her past a shopping center with a grocery store and drug store.

Then she saw a sign. It said “Don’s” in a cursive font, and “Used Books” below that in block letters. She crossed the street can came closer, until she saw that the tiny shop that had the word “BOOKS” in simple block letters above its front windows.

The interior of store was a little warm, and it had that old book smell. Kitty inhaled, and felt at peace. It had that smell, the old book smell, like mom and dad’s shelves of weird old books at home.

“Let us know if you need anything,” said a girl behind the counter. She looked high school age. There was also a man with gray hair, who Kitty suspected was Don. Both were dog people with floppy ears.

Kitty wandered all around the store, taking in the different books. There were old science fiction paperbacks from as far back as the 50s, their non-acid-free paper nearly brown with age. There was a shelf of romance novels with pictures of languid, shirtless men that she sidled past. There was the general fiction section that was a bit of everything, too jumbled to find anything in particular. In the reference section she found a little book called Schott’s Miscellany that was full of random bits of information. In the foreign language section she found one Japanese book. She could just barely puzzle out was called Ten Nights of Dreams. When she finally went to the register, Don looked down at it and said, “You can read that?”

Kitty grabbed her wayward tail. “Um, not yet.”

She was feeling a bit better by the time she’d put the two books in her backpack and started back to the house. She thought about learning more Japanese, and tried to remember which was right and which was left. One was migi and the other was hidari, but she could never remember which was which.

When she got back to the house she put the keys back and called “Hello?” but Nightgaunt was the only one who responded. He padded over to the front hall and plopped down on her shoes. A quick search of the house failed to turn up Violet or Will. Kitty decided to take a nap; they would turn up when they turned up.

It was warm, and she had to close the curtains so that it wasn’t so bright, but the sofa/bed was soft, and the faint breeze that came in through the window was soothing.

The sky was a pale blue save for a few perfectly fluffy white clouds. The ground was hard, the plants were scraggly, and the heat of the day was still lingering. She’d been walking for days. She knew this in the way that you know things in dreams. She was dimly aware of knowing that too.

Kitty struggled to the top of a plateau. When she sat up, she turned her head skyward. The blue glare hurt her eyes.

She jumped at the sound of a deep male voice. “Who are you?” asked Coyote.

“Um, Kitty?” she offered.

“That is a name. Who are you?”

“Is this like that one episode of The Simpsons then?”

“Do I sound like I’m being voiced by Johnny Cash?”

Kitty shrugged. She knew her mom liked to listen to Johnny Cash sometimes, but she wasn’t sure what he sounded like. “Um, I dunno?”

“I think I sound more like Keith David.”

“Who?”

Coyote rolled his eyes. “How could you not know?”

“Is he famous?”

“He does a lot of movie trailers. But never mind that.”

Kitty realized that it was getting dark. The sun was setting, turning into a line of light on the horizon, covering the desert with a riot of red, purple, and orange.

Kitty bent down to get a closer look. Coyote had reddish-brown fur and yellow eyes that seemed to bore into her. “Are you really, like, the Native American spirit thing?”

“I am what you think that ‘Native American spirit thing’ should be like.”

“Including sounding like a movie trailer guy?”

Coyote shrugged. It was an interesting gesture coming from a coyote. “It’s your subconscious. It’s all on you, including the cultural appropriation.”

It was getting darker still. The moon hung high in the sky, and the stars speckled the dome of the world. They were a family, all together for a brief moment. She got to her feet and held her hand up. It tingled.

She and the coyote were casting long shadows, so long they fell off the plateau. She reached to pet him, but he snapped at her hand. “So, um, why are we here?”

“Silly girl, dreams have no purpose save what humans give to them after the fact.” Coyote’s gaze turned upward. “But if I were to hazard a guess, I would say that looks quite significant.”

There was a ring of dancing stars. “Is this, like, the European Union?”

Coyote stared at her. “No. It’s something just for you.”

“What is it?”

“A boundary line, a border that you will cross into undiscovered country.”

“It looks like a ring?”

Coyote groaned. “Fine.Here.”

The circle of stars grew bigger. It was rushing down at her, faster and faster.

Kitty jerked awake, then jerked again when she realized that Bart’s nose was less than an inch from hers. Her jumping made Bart leap off of the bed/sofa and run away. Once she’d calmed down, Kitty sat up. The light coming through the window was reddish-orange. There was a faint buzz to the air, something she felt as a rising in her chest. There was also a pleasant, sweet smell in the house.

She had just started towards the kitchen when a pair of hands covered her eyes. The hands were soft. “Um, hello?”

“Hey sleepyhead,” said Violet.

“What’s going on?”

Violet chuckled. “You’ll see.”

“Not like this…” said Kitty.

Violet laughed out loud. “Here we go.” She guided Kitty forward, and then told her to sit down. Once Kitty was seated in one of the wooden kitchen chairs, Violet said, “Okay, you can open your eyes now.”

The hands retreated. Kitty slowly opened her eyes, and saw candle flames forming a ring around a cake. The frosting read “Happy Birthday Kitty!” in red on white. There were eighteen candles. That light feeling in her chest jumped up a notch, taking her by surprise, making her tear up a little. Past the cake, Violet and Will were watching her.

“I thought that… this would be more what you wanted,” said Violet. “Just the three of us.”

Bart hopped up on the table, eyeing the cake.

“Or the seven of us, if you include pets.”

“Thank you,” said Kitty.

Violet and Will sang the birthday song. Kitty let the flickering flames fill her vision, and then as the song ended she blew out the candles. Each candle let out a little trail of smoke.

“I’m on the other side,” she murmured.

“Of what?” asked Violet.

Kitty blinked. “Um… High school was over there, and now I’m on the other side, but I don’t know what’s here yet?”

Violet tousled her hair. “Kitty Cat sister.”

The cake had strawberries and cream in the middle. Each bite was soft and sweet and a tiny bit tart.There were some presents too, a book of stories about New Mexico and a plush jackelope. After a homemade dinner, the three of them watchedGalaxyQuest, with Kitty in a warm little sandwich between Will and Violet. She kept the jackelope plush on her lap, up until Bart decided he wanted to sit there.

When Kitty went to sleep, she contentedly curled up and let the cats drape themselves around her. She dreamed normal dreams, fragments of moments that never happened with familiar faces.

The rest of Kitty’s visit seemed to go by in a blur. They had sushi with some of Will and Violet’s other friends, they went on a little hike with Powder, and Kitty went back to Don’s and bought some more books.

On the last day, before they took her to the airport they had New Mexican food again. They talked about stuff back in Neko Machi, about Sylvia and Tiger and Snowball, about Mr. Mog and Miss Arlene, about games and movies and comics. Kitty savored the taste of red and green chile, and thought about home.

Her first flight was delayed by about 20 minutes. The flight itself went smoothly, but she had to run to the other side of the Salt Lake City airport to be the very last person to board the second plane. She had a whole aisle to herself though, so she sat by the window. She read a story about a woman who kept seeing a coyote on the road outside her house. She listened to a podcast interview with Neil Patrick Harris. She slept for just a little while, and faintly remembered a dream about someone saying she was coming back soon.

Kitty woke to the pilot saying they were on their final approach to Neko Machi International. As the plane got closer, she could see the street lights below, a galaxy of yellow. She rested her forehead against the little window and, with a lump in her throat, said, “I’m back.”

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