I said I didn't have any more Bolt stories in me. I lied. Don't hurt me.
Grimalkin, from gray malkin.
A grimalkin: a worn-out, old-fashioned word for a worn-out, old-fashioned lady of a cat. That was what Mittens had become, and because she had a pillow and four walls around her and regular meals and a diminutive but comfortable apartment balcony that made for a lovely sun-spot, she really didn't mind all that much.
That was Mittens the cat, eleven years later, short hair shorter, soft paws slower, kinked tail tired and bent as it swept across the carpet wherever she walked. She ate all that she wanted and her ribs still poked through her skin, another sharp point to join the rest of her angles, but the pillow was soft and deep and so that didn't matter either, not really. She was seventeen now and close to heaven, less because of her age and more because Penny's apartment, The World as far as Mittens was concerned these days, sat somewhere inconspicuous on the twelfth floor of a San Francisco high rise, and when the fog came in each morning staring out the window felt a little like flying.
She was seventeen and she was all right with that, because of the comforts she had, and because now her age finally matched her disposition, and because in the evenings when Penny got home from work the two ladies would sit together on the couch and the one would read or watch movies or chat pleasantly on the phone with Brian From Down The Hall and the other would sit in a lap and melt and purr and occasionally dream about Old Long Since.
Mittens was seventeen and she was alone, for the most part. Alone because two was ancient for a hamster and a dog might see twelve if he was lucky, but a cat would outlive all of that nonsense, especially the sort of cat Mittens was, who would sit on pillows and grow thin and content and squat serenely in the very middle of the sofa forever and ever.
A grimalkin.
But there was still Penny, and that was something that astonished Mittens. She had considered herself lucky, once, to find a Home again after so much loneliness and so little kindness and so many bitter New York alley nights. So that when the wild unwilling adventure of her youth had come and gone and Mittens was left with a real family and a warm old farm house she saw no reason why that didn't have to be the ending of things. And for a time it was.
The seasons came and went and the sun moved across the sky in lazy arcs and Mittens all the while walked through it with a renewed appreciation for life and everything that went with it. She went where she pleased and where she went was rarely very far from the soft footsteps of her precious idiot, her white knight in shining armor, her super-dog, her surrogate claws. Her Wags. And then all of a sudden one day Rhino had gone, nothing more dramatic than that, and though the Magic Box was now a bit quieter and she and Bolt had perhaps aged more in the interim than either of them realized, neither was especially unhappy about it. Solemn, perhaps, but not unhappy. True to his name, Rhino had charged into life, and nobody could really say he hadn't lived exactly the one he wanted.
(Mittens remembers once when she prowled silently through the house in the dead of night, the way cats meditate, until she slinked into the living room and found with only mild surprise Rhino, asleep in the glow from the now-quiet television, nested blissfully beside a lovingly exploded Bolt DVD box set. She wonders as she pads by if, now that the excitable rodent has actually lived the adventure he always dreamed of, he sees the mindless fluff of the TV show as hollow, or even more vivid and inspiring than before. Which is a silly question, really. She's heard him talk in his sleep. When Rhino goes he'll go to Valhalla, and it will be filled with superheroes and pyrotechnics.)
By that time Penny was only just stepping off the edge of Growing Up (or something similarly capitalized), suddenly and delightfully concerned with things like school and friends and boys; normal people things. And so there were often days when dog and cat had the quiet, comfortable house to themselves with nobody but Penny's wonderful, loving dumpling of a mother and each other for company. And that was good.
Of course Bolt was always Penny's dog first; that was just how dogs and people worked and Mittens didn't think of things otherwise, usually. And there was something between Penny and Mittens as well, something that most likely started with curiosity and then moved into an unspoken comfort. Bolt was her Good Boy, but Mittens was the one whose tail swung gently in time with the clock while Penny did her schoolwork, and who dangled from a tree branch overhead whenever the girl sought privacy in the wide, windy fields around the house.
But none of that stopped the quietly cantankerous cat from indulging in a certain amount of possessiveness over the retired super-dog. No matter what else and no matter how much she may have hated it at the time – and Mittens in one of her more philosophical moments mused that nothing genuinely transformative was ever really likable at the time – the journey they'd taken across the country was theirs. Theirs and Rhino's, once, certainly, but theirs alone now, so that when the two seasoned pets moved through the house and the yard Mittens liked to take every opportunity to walk by Bolt's side, shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing trust and camaraderie and possibly, quietly, a little something else.
. . . So that when Bolt finally wasn't anymore it was a bittersweet thing to see the suddenly very old cat softly padding through the house and the yard, only to occasionally list to one side whenever body-memory took over and she forgot there wasn't another body there to lean against. Walking with the thing inside her chest still there, but gently beginning to fade into the color of gray malkin.
(Mittens also remembers being out in the sun and the grass with Bolt, running and breathing and living like real proper animals. The little fluttering kernel in Mittens' chest that was so cold and small when she lived in the alleys is so big and sunny now that it's liable to burst right through her skin, and with that feeling she does the next best thing and sprawls bodily across the grass, letting the dust and dirt and air cover her over. Mittens looks at Bolt, still standing, dog-smiling, so far free of his old celluloid box that a million Mister Carrots couldn't coax him back. He's so much a part of the land here that Mittens lets herself think for just a moment that when Bolt finally does stop, it won't be something gone and empty but merely the once-whole sum of his parts dissolved back to the place they originally came from.)
Bolt affected Mittens far more than Rhino, of course, and afterwards there were plenty of days when she'd sit on the roof and refuse to come down, or stare sullenly across the expanse of the living room without making a sound. Penny was away at college when it happened, and so, with some degree of sympathetic gratitude, Mittens was spared the now-young-woman's face for that particular piece of awful, inevitable news. But just like Rhino it's nothing she could really argue against, and so eventually the trusting and the laps and the quiet thrumming purr returned. Mittens was old by then already, and like all old cats she took to meditating, still and sleepy, and that was her life, and that was all right.
Which was why it was so astonishing to Mittens that Penny, when she had become a woman with a life and a job and an apartment, might take the cat with her. Mittens trusted her new people, of course, but she was ingrained in the farmhouse, and, despite her old travels, never before had she thought of herself as something that somebody would want to bring along when they left. But she did, and so Mittens entered a new stage of her life, where a modest-but-comfortable apartment was all the world she knew, and because she was old by then, that was all right. And Penny was happy, and had the normal life she'd always wanted, and a job she enjoyed, and a boyfriend, who she'd met at work, who was Brian From Down The Hall, who Mittens acted aloof towards but secretly liked, because he had the enthusiasm of a dog and the posture of a cat and his fingers felt like warm, soft wind across her ears.
She knew, if nothing else, that Bolt would have appreciated her being there to see Penny safe and sound at last.
Mittens kept waiting for the day when Penny would come home with something else. When she'd walk through the apartment door holding a little stray white kitten, or a puppy her friend had given her, or even a big-eyed little hamster from the pet store down the block. Because that was how this sort of thing went, Mittens thought – or rather knew, now that she was old – and then she'd have to hate it and hiss at it and generally be a spiteful old woman around the place until at last she warmed up to the innocent little thing and passed on to it everything she'd learned in her long cat-life, the same as she'd done to the deluded, big-hearted dog she met all those years ago.
That was what should have happened, Mittens thought, but it never did. For whatever reason Penny never got any new pets, and so it remained the two women (and sometimes Brian From Down The Hall) while Mittens grew slow and comfortable and alone. And that was all right, because it let Mittens be alone with her thoughts and her meditations and her pillow, and for the most part she didn't want anything else.
Eventually, though, it truly was eventually. And something deep inside Mittens told her that she couldn't just fade gracefully into the walls of the place, since of the three of them who'd traveled from one end of the continent to the other she was the last one left, and there was a responsibility to that she couldn't quite describe.
And so one day while on the apartment balcony, (which was small, but just big enough for a chair and a little table and a pillow in the chair in which the cat sat), Mittens had an idea, and just like that there was no problem anymore. Before she had time to change her mind she'd called over one of the pigeons from an adjoining balcony (an old grandmother cat being nothing the bird would have to fear) and then she shared her idea and the pigeon listened and bobbled and spiraled off and that was that.
If she was honest with herself Mittens really didn't actually think anything would come of it. But she'd had plenty of surprises in her life so far, and so it was only really one more little one when she went out through the open door to the balcony at the same time next day and found three new pigeons, plus the one she had spoken to, perched patiently on the railing and watching her wise, slow approach.
They had brought food, which Mittens didn't really need, but even in old age she had something of a sense of humor and an idea of how things ought to properly be done, and at any rate this time she certainly wouldn't withhold herself if the birds brought merely what they could and nothing more. So she climbed up to the chair and the pillow and she eyed the birds and the little tribute of food and then, with no real idea of how to start but a growing confidence the further she went, she told them The Whole Story.
Or at least she started to. Mittens, being obstinate, was actually quite a bit older and creakier than even she thought of herself as, so that right around the time when she was describing Bolt's insane determination to board the rushing train, with the pounding steel and wind below and the improvised bucket-helmet sinking low over her eyes as she struggled desperately against the teetering bundle of enthusiasm she was still tethered to, she yawned, and paused in her story, and told the birds (who had been perfectly silent and attentive up until then) to come back the next day for the rest.
That met with such shocked cries of disappointment that it really shouldn't have surprised the old cat when she came out to her chair the next day and found a slightly larger pile of food (unbidden, this time) and a slightly larger crowd of pigeons (just as attentive as before), all waiting for her, and the story.
And then, Just So, when the words came she was young and they were alive and everything was all right, and the very last puzzle piece of feeling good about being old slid gently into place. And that was close to heaven, too.
And that's how it went, and that's how it is. Now it is now, and Mittens still sits and tells to any bird who'll listen, which is plenty of them. She tells the story over and over, and it never gets old and they never stop wanting to hear it. And there's life in it, right there in the words and in her eyes and mind, even as her body winds farther and farther down. That, by the way, is becoming harder and harder to ignore now, which is, of course, inevitable. Her joints have grown stiffer and her walk slower; her eyes have gone rheumy and there's something wrong with her liver, now, so that she has to eat special food and get stuck with a needle every morning. Which she endures. But on the balcony it's comfortable, and the birds are respectful, and by now Mittens has no end to what tales she can spin.
At first she only told the truth, because that was story enough, but now her imagination drifts and with some secret enjoyment she occasionally stretches things – sometimes she'll think of Rhino and tell stories about big shiny exciting fights, or about Bolt, and come up with something to do with knights and honor and loyalty. Sometimes if she's feeling particularly indulgent she'll even make up wild fairy-tale adventures about the handsome orange cat on the next apartment balcony, and his partner in crime, who just happens to be a young, beautiful, declawed tuxedo tabby. But she enjoys herself, at any rate, and always among the listening birds there are ones who are regulars and ones who are new and curious and almost always kept rapt by what they find.
And so it goes. The balcony becomes famous. There are birds politely perched on its edge every day. They call her Grimalkin Who Tells Stories, and they listen with eyes as wide and attentive as children's.
And Mittens rests.