Nobody asked Misfit what happened. Typical.

She will tell it anyway, in full, because someone has to get the record straight.

Misfit is an orange tabby with six toes on each front paw, eleven pounds of professional opinion, and a jurisdiction she has never written down because writing it down would imply it had edges. She has been to another planet. She came back to a bowl of the dry kind. The debt stands.

In July she had three problems.

A border. The garter snake moved the line three times, and she gave up six inches on a Sunday and took them back on a Wednesday, and it was a week before she understood what he had actually been asking for.

A study. Four years of barn swallows, never once caught. She would like the record to reflect that this is deliberate, that a conclusion would end the study, and that some things you keep by not catching them.

A name. For two years she sat three feet from a cat called Pigeon and was quietly, generously embarrassed on her behalf ? until a pigeon landed on the rail between them and said something that took Misfit's entire filing system apart.

The witness is a pigeon. The witness did not embellish. The witness stayed.

Told in Misfit's own voice ? dry, self-important, secretly tender, and entirely convinced she is the only one paying attention ? Three Field Reports, Filed Late is the first installment of a novel in stories from the World of Fury.

Filed under Later. ? Misfit