Little Tyrant

The cat, Stormcloud, was only called Stormcloud at 1109 Water Street.

Four houses down at 1101, she was Tabitha, or Tabs, for short. At the west end of Water Street at 1032, the resident children called her Smoky, and on her evening jaunts across Beach Drive, she was The Marina Cat to every restaurant-goer and sunset-admirer who passed her on her way to the marina kitchens, where the busser Chae-Won had a dish of dinner scraps waiting for her.

This Cat of Four Names was a grey tabby, with seven dusky stripes along her back, a tall, unbent tail, and eleven white whiskers on either side of her dark nose. She carried herself with uncommon self-assuredness for an animal with four names. This was because, in the tabby's heart, she knew her true name. She'd been given it six years and four months ago by a woman named Ursula Farthing. All her life, the tabby would never forget her first name: Little Tyrant.

Little Tyrant had earned her name at the age of seven weeks, shortly after her mother's den was uncovered in the transom of a docked catamaran. The young dockhand who discovered them was exceptionally gentle with Little Tyrant and her six siblings, but she didn't see her mother again after that day, and recalled her only as a warm, grey body with one dark eye and one light.

The day after their abrupt weaning, the littermates were divided up: three females to yacht club members, three males to the seasonal kitchen staff. That left Little Tyrant, the smallest of her mother's litter, who was bundled off to Water Street by the kind young dockhand.

This was where she first met the woman called Ursula Farthing.

Mrs. Farthing was the dockhand's grandmother. She had an old Siberian cat named Cotton; both cat and owner had snowy white hair. Mrs. Farthing wore owlish spectacles and spoke in a thunderous baritone that seemed all the louder for her thick accent. She used this voice whether she was speaking to gardener, grocer, or cat. This was the voice in which the tabby heard her name spoken for the first time, five days after her life passed into the old woman's hands.

She had been having a stretch along the back of the sofa, heedless of her claws, when something struck the upholstery to her right and she leaped six inches into the air.

"Little tyrant!" Ursula stood in the parlor doorway, her right slipper poised to follow her left. "That is not your scratching post! I've always said I'd never declaw a cat, but you little tyrants do tempt me at times. Off with you!"

So, the kitten had run off to find the old Siberian.

"I've a name," she'd told him proudly, and when Cotton heard how she'd come by it, the old cat had agreed that it was, indeed, a very good name for her, and never called her by anything else.

-

It was a Sunday evening, and the traffic was light along Beach Drive. The marina was closed, so Little Tyrant passed the kitchen door without pause and wove her way down to the docks.

She passed the place where the catamaran had been docked six and a half years ago, and then she padded out to the end of the pier and sat, twitching her banded tail.

Ursula Farthing, despite her eccentricities, had made a perfectly adequate cat owner. Their first year living together, she’d taken Little Tyrant on proper outdoor walks in a jinglebell harness to ward off the pluckier seabirds. She’d walk her up Beach Drive, around the marina deck, out onto the pier— and everyone (and especially children) wanted to stop and pet the grey kitten in her dashing, bell-covered harness.

Sometimes, the young dockhand would come running when he saw his grandmother out walking her kitten. He would look troubled at these times, and offer to escort her home. On the days when he didn’t, Ursula would sometimes take strange routes back, or stop for a long while in the back-alley, puzzling over the numbered gates. Soon, the walks ceased.

“This doesn't bode well for us,” Cotton had forewarned glumly. However, both cats were let out more or less every day, and Cotton showed Little Tyrant how to get in under the crawlspace door if Ursula forgot to let them in at night, which happened with increasing frequency.

Little Tyrant lived at the house on Water Street for four years. By the second year, she'd stopped noticing when her water bowl ran dry, or when the food at the bottom of her dish began to molder. Cotton taught her how to drink from birdbaths and slip in at back doors for a nip from a neighbor's dish. So, neither cat went hungry, and Ursula was content to coddle the cats in her lap like children, crooning to them until she nodded off in the dark of her parlor in the same robe and slippers she'd worn all week.

-

Little Tyrant walked up Water Street. She passed 1032, where she was Smoky, and 1101, where she was Tabitha, and stopped in the driveway of 1109, down which Ursula had been ushered two years since by an unfamiliar woman in a white smock. By then, Cotton had jumped ship; Ursula hadn't fed or watered them in months. Even so, Little Tyrant could not help but love the woman who'd named her.

The dockhand, a man by then, had stroked her and said, "I guess you've fended for yourself most of this time, hey girl? You'll be okay." Then he'd set her down outside and locked the door behind him. It was the last time Little Tyrant saw Ursula, or her home, again.

By springtime, another family had moved into the house at 1109 Water Street. The owners called the stray cat Stormcloud. On warm nights, Little Tyrant slept outside their front door, and often dreamt of it opening up to admit her.