# The Cartographer

Moss found the door on a Tuesday, which was peculiar because doors had never interested him before. He was eleven, grizzled, and had spent his life mapping the neighborhood through scent—turkey on Maple, the hostile Jack Russell on Pine, that one patch of catnip behind the laundromat that made him feel religious.

But this door was different. It sat in the alley behind the bookstore, wood dark with rain, handle polished by a thousand invisible hands. Moss watched it for three hours from atop a recycling bin. No one entered. No one exited. The bookstore employees smoked nearby and never glanced at it.

That night, he pushed through his cat flap and traveled five blocks to investigate.

The handle required paws in ways he'd never used paws before. The door opened onto a library.

Not the human kind. Moss had been in the public library once, chased out by a man with a broom. This place stretched upward forever, shelves spiraling into darkness, filled with moving things—smells that told stories, textures that whispered memories. A tabby slept on a desk made of stacked atlases. She opened one eye.

"You're late," she said.

"I didn't know I had an appointment."

"None of them do." She stretched, showing the white fur of her belly. "I'm Thursday. You're replacing the Tuesday cat."

"I don't—"

"Tuesday got promoted. Wednesday retired. We need a Tuesday again." She leaped down, landing without sound. "The door appears to those who need work. You map. Good. We need maps. Not streets." She touched her nose to his. "Other things. Dreams. The routes between sleeping and waking. The borders between here and there."

Moss thought of the Jack Russell, the turkey, the religious catnip. Small territories. Small concerns.

"I'll show you," Thursday said.

She led him past shelves where books purred, where pages turned themselves in drafts he couldn't feel. They stopped at a blank wall. Thursday sat, waited.

Slowly, a door formed. Moss's door. His alley. His recycling bin.

But through it, he saw differently. The bin held not newspapers but intentions—the bakery owner's worry, the teenager's first kiss, the old woman remembering a ship she took to Ellis Island in 1957. The Jack Russell's hostility was fear, sharp and recent, something about a boot. The turkey was just turkey. The catnip was still holy.

"Every night," Thursday said. "Map what you see. Bring it back. The library grows or it dies."

"And if I refuse?"

The door remained. His alley. His choice.

Moss thought of his human, Sarah, who spoke to him at 3 AM when insomnia came. Who left the bathroom tap dripping because he liked to drink from it. Who believed, incorrectly but sweetly, that he didn't understand her.

He stepped through.

He still maps the neighborhood by day. The same routes. The same smells. Sarah doesn't notice the difference, except that sometimes he stares at corners where nothing seems to be, and sometimes he returns with cobwebs in his whiskers that she can't identify.

By night, he maps other things. The route of a dying man's last dream (peaceful, flying, his brother's kitchen). The border between a child's nightmare and her waking cry (thin, porous, easily patrolled). The growing territory of something nameless in the east, which Thursday watches with old eyes.

He's gotten good at doors. He finds new ones now, teaches kittens who arrive confused and frightened. There's a Monday cat, young, enthusiastic, terrible at her job. Moss shows her how to read the weight of a dream, how to tell harmless from hungry.

Sarah is sixty-three now. He maps her carefully, the changes, the slow shifts. One night he finds a door in her bedroom that wasn't there before, opening somewhere he doesn't recognize. He doesn't enter. He sits beside it, waits, maps the threshold.

When she wakes, he is there. She strokes his ruined ear, the scar from his second life, and doesn't know why she cries.

"Good cat," she says.

He purrs. The door fades by morning. Not yet. Not yet.

But mapped. Recorded. Known.

The library grows.

**The Museum Cat**

Sullivan had occupied the west wing of the Hartwell Museum of Natural History for eleven years. He was orange, overweight, and indifferent to the dioramas of stuffed elk and glass-eyed trout that surrounded him.

He arrived as a kitten, slipped through a loading dock door behind a crate of fossil specimens. The staff debated eviction until the director noted the rodent problem in the taxidermy storage room. Sullivan was granted provisional citizenship. He performed his duties with mechanical efficiency, leaving mice in the break room as tribute, as if fulfilling terms of a contract he found embarrassing.

He had no name until a security guard, reading a placard on loan from the English department, began calling him Sullivan after the composer. The cat did not respond to it. He responded to nothing. He simply existed, a warm object moving through climate-controlled halls where the temperature was kept at 67 degrees for the preservation of skin and bone.

The museum closed to visitors at six. Sullivan's hours began then. He patrolled the corridors with the slow deliberation of something inspecting its own property. He had favorite places: the ledge of the Arctic exhibit, where the painted backdrop showed an ice field extending to a false horizon; the base of the T. rex skeleton, where tourists dropped coins they could not retrieve; the office of the collections manager, who left a window cracked regardless of protocol.

He had watched three directors retire, two guards fired for sleeping in the Africa gallery, one doctoral student weep beside a display of extinct mollusks. He had seen the dioramas accumulate dust that was itself a subject of curatorial debate—authentic grime versus simulated time. He had watched the lights click off on schedule, leaving the halls in darkness interrupted only by emergency exit signs glowing green at the margins.

A mouse ran past the prairie dog exhibit. Sullivan observed it without moving. The mouse stopped, aware of the shadow, then continued. Sullivan let it go. He had eaten already, a can of food left by the night janitor who spoke to him in Polish, a language Sullivan did not recognize as distinct from any other. He waited for the janitor to finish mopping the paleontology hall, then followed him to the loading dock, watched the cigarette lit outside, the figure disappearing through the door.

At 2 AM Sullivan entered the new acquisition, a room of contemporary photography the board had approved over staff objections. The images were large, color prints of vacant suburban streets at dusk. Sullivan sat before one for fourteen minutes. He then turned, walked to the water fountain, licked at the drain where moisture collected, and proceeded to the basement.

The furnace room was warm. He curled on a pallet of unused educational brochures and slept without dreaming, or dreaming in a manner inaccessible to himself upon waking, as the temperature held at 67 degrees and the building's systems maintained their automated vigilance over objects that would outlast the interest in preserving them.

In the morning, docents arrived. Sullivan was observed in the lobby, washing his face. Children pointed. He ignored them. A guide explained his presence as "part of the museum's history," which was accurate and sufficient. He moved toward the cafeteria, where he would receive a portion of egg from a cashier who found him depressing.

The day continued. The dioramas remained static. The air recycled. Sullivan occupied his positions in sequence, a living component of the institution, receiving no salary, accruing no benefits, owed nothing upon termination, which would arrive without ceremony when his kidneys failed or he wandered through the wrong door and could not find his way to the familiar smell of formaldehyde and dust.

He was, for the present, in place. The museum functioned. The cat functioned within it. There was no agreement between them, no contract, only the fact of coexistence in a building where time was represented as a sequence of preserved specimens and the living moved through it temporarily, leaving no record of their passage, or leaving this record, which is itself a kind of taxidermy.

# Moonlight

The alley behind Mrs. Chen's bakery was where Luna first learned to be brave.

She was small for a six-month-old tabby, her orange patches scattered across white fur like autumn leaves on fresh snow. The other alley cats called her "half-baked" because she'd been born in that very bakery, rescued by Mrs. Chen from a flour sack where her mother had hidden her.

Now, with the bakery closed for the night and Mrs. Chen gone to visit her daughter in the city, Luna was on her own.

The first snow came early that November. It found Luna huddled beneath a wooden pallet, watching her breath turn to silver in the moonlight. She thought of warm ovens and the gentle hands that had once scratched behind her ears. A lump formed in her throat, but she swallowed it. Bravery, she remembered Mrs. Chen whispering once, is not the absence of fear. It is the warmth you choose to become despite it.

Three blocks away, a retired firefighter named Gus was also watching the snow. His wife had loved cats—"especially the funny-looking ones," she'd always said with that laugh that crinkled her eyes. Since Miriam passed in spring, the house on Birch Street had grown too quiet. Too full of undisturbed sunbeams and empty chairs.

Gus spotted Luna during his midnight walk, something he'd started doing when sleep wouldn't come. She was trying to catch snowflakes, leaping awkwardly with her too-big paws, tumbling into drifts that sparkled like the sugar Miriam used to sprinkle on cookies.

He laughed. Actually laughed, startled by the sound of it.

Luna froze. Then, impossibly brave, she walked straight to this giant of a man and pressed her cold nose against his weathered hand.

Gus smelled like woodsmoke and kindness. Luna smelled like flour and hope.

He carried her home in his coat, talking all the while. "Miriam would have loved your patches, little moonlight. She always said orange cats had the sun inside them."

That winter, Luna learned to chase the red dot of sunrise across Gus's kitchen floor. She learned that healing comes in quiet moments—Gus reading aloud as she purred on his lap, both of them finally warm.

And on the first day of spring, when Mrs. Chen returned to find a note on her bakery door ("Your flour-sack miracle saved an old man too—thank you, from Gus and Luna on Birch Street"), she pressed it to her heart and smiled at the orange streak of sunlight bounding through newly green grass.

Some bravery, Luna understood now, is simply choosing to leap—into snow, into trust, into love—and discovering you were falling toward home all along.