Julie tried to remember what she had done with John’s plastic cat as she stared a hole into the door through which Margot had left minutes ago. She wasn’t even sure if she ever brought it back from theGaleries. Not that it would be of much help, but it stumped Julie to feel how little she knew about cats. She had transformed into one without so much as an instruction manual or even a hint of what to do. It frightened her to think that she didn’t know how to behave like a real cat. She had, of course, leapt out of bed and trotted around the studio, even meowed, but there was certainly more to be understood about this feline existence. Were she to meet one of her new kin, she might have been outright embarrassed.

Julie’s grandmother had a cat at the country house inMontebourg. Julie didn’t remember its name, but she did have some memory of the cat itself and how it spent its days. Its dark fur made it look like an evil spirit when it stepped between the rocks of her grandmother’s vegetable patch. There was not much more to the memory, as it was an elusive cat. It would often disappear days on end, leaving the family to worry, only to reappear without any penance, not unlike a distant relative.

Julie panned away from the studio door and jumped back up on her bed, nesting herself in the crevice between the duvet and the pillow. She looked at the two dancing figurines on her bedside table. One black and one white figure curled into each other, resembling the long-necked silhouettes of the ancient world’s section of the Louvre. Clay pots and drawings of cats displayed in the Egyptian section of museums, sitting next to the menacing faces of Iris and Anubis. In those halls, the cats seemed more mysterious than their gods. The gods, in their eternal fashion, looked resolute and distant, but the cats’ presence was much more sentient. Modest pottery of a robbed world carefully tucked away behind the glass walls and guarded by an ever-apathetic guardsman. What honorable lives those guards lead unknowingly, working in the company of the eternals. Surely the pharaoh’s priests had something dif