White Cat, Black Dog : Stories

Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Contents The White Cat’s Divorce Prince Hat Underground The White Road The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear The Game of Smash and Recovery The Lady and the Fox Skinder’s Veil Dedication Acknowledgments Other Titles About the Author Landmarks Cover Cover Title Page Contents Start Copyright Print Page List v vi 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 vii 259 260 ii 261 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 White Cat, Black Dog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
 Copyright © 2023 by Kelly Link
 Illustrations copyright © 2023 by Shaun Tan
 All rights reserved.
 Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
 Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
 The following stories are previously published:
 “The White Road” (A Public Space, January 2020); “The Lady and the Fox” (in My True Love Gave to Me, edited by Stephanie Perkins [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014]); “The Game of Smash and Recovery” (Strange Horizons, October 2015); “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” (Tin House, June 2019); “Skinder’s Veil” (in When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, edited by Ellen Datlow [London: Titan Books, 2021]); “The White Cat’s Divorce” (Weatherspoon Art Museum, August 2018)
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Link, Kelly, author.
 Title: White cat, black dog : stories / Kelly Link.
 Description: New York : Random House, [2023]
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022010395 (print) | LCCN 2022010396 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593449950 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593449967 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
 Classification: LCC PS3612.I553 W48 2023 (print) | LCC PS3612.I553 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220614
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022010395
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022010396
 Ebook ISBN 9780593449967
 randomhousebooks.com
 Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
 Cover design and illustration: Owen Gent
 ep_prh_6.0_142879849_c0_r0
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 
 
 The White Cat’s Divorce
 
 
 Prince Hat Underground
 
 
 The White Road
 
 
 The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear
 
 
 The Game of Smash and Recovery
 
 
 The Lady and the Fox
 
 
 Skinder’s Veil
 
 
 Dedication
 Acknowledgments
 By Kelly Link
 About the Author
 
 
 _142879849_
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The White Cat’s Divorce
 (The White Cat)
 All stories about divorce must begin some other place, and so let us begin with a man so very rich, he might reach out and have almost any thing he desired, as well as many things that he did not. He had so many houses even his accountants could not keep track of them all. He had private planes and newspapers and politicians who saw to it that his wishes became laws. He had orchards, islands, baseball teams, and even a team of entomologists whose mandate was to find new species of beetles to be given variations on the rich man’s name. (For if it was true that God loved beetles, was it not true He loved the rich man even more? Was his good fortune not the proof of this?)
 The rich man had all of this and more than I have space to write. Anything you have ever possessed, know that he had this, too. And if he did not, he could have paid you whatever your price was in order to obtain it.
 All men desire to be rich; no man desires to grow old. To stave off old age, the rich man paid for personal trainers and knee replacements and cosmetic procedures that meant he always had a somewhat wide-eyed look, as if he were not a man in his seventies at all but rather still an infant who found his life a cascade of marvelous and surprising events. The rich man had follicular unit transplantation and special creams to bleach age spots. For dinner, his personal chefs served him fish and berries and walnuts as if he were a bear and not a rich man at all. Every morning, he swam two miles in a lake that was kept by an ingenious mechanism at a comfortable temperature for him throughout the year. In the afternoons, he had blood transfusions from adolescent donors, these transfusions being a