For the first time in months a brilliant glow shattered the milky fog in Foxtail Island, sending the night creatures scuttling for their homes and drawing out birds and squirrels and tax collectors. The quiet, uniform Appleseed road suddenly burst into energy as the people and their little white terriers flocked out of their tiny brick apartments and puttered along the cobblestones. Even the sound of their feet and claws clicking along the road, the sparrows' quiet chatter, the ocean-like waves of the grass in the breeze, was soon swallowed by the morning's serenity. Pudgy orange cats that slumbered on the windowsills stretched their arms and toes as they awoke to the unfamiliar light that stung their eyes.

    On one of the windowsills there wasn't an orange cat curled in a sluggish nap. Instead, a large bundle of hair, nail clippings, vomit, and other substances that I won't go into, dozed behind the pane of cloudy, dirt-flecked glass. The thing stretched, two limbs of matted fur reaching for the side of the window, four little toes spread like leaves. A dirty tail flicked about behind the hairball, and two more limbs raised its backside into the air in a catlike manner. Little motes of dust began to appear in the air around him as the sunlight grew stronger, brighter. The room became hot and stuffy, and smelled of hot earth, but the corpse-like cat relished in it and stretched as long as the window sill, legs, toes, tail, long and straight. His golden eye peered through a tiny slit, overseeing the room like satisfied royalty.

    In one corner, an old black piano gathered dust sleepily, forgotten from another time. In another, a bulbous pot of crimson impatiens sat, in desperate need of watering, though its leaves looked moist and fresh. The floor was draped with an old, moth-eaten, oriental rug, the colors that were once bright and splendid reduced to dull reds and faded gold, tattered at the edges, though the patterns still were crisp. The walls of mahogany were rich and dark. The curtains on the windows were a faded green. A dark, carved dresser. A gold-rimmed long mirror on the wall by the piano. The room once had splendor, but years of abandon diminished it to be nothing more than another room in this lackluster, yet magnificent, Victorian manor.