Simmy was a one-person cat, and I was it. She was also an adept of the astral.

When I won a scholarship to study in the Middle East, she disappeared for the entire time that I was gone. Oh, my housemates could tell that she was still around: the litter box was used, the food bowl emptied. But see her, they didn't.

Simmy, you see, was Busy.

She was my first cat, a petite brown tabby Manx with a stumpy little tail. (One of her nicknames was Bunny Butt.) Like most Manx, she was a powerful jumper. When bats would get into the house—a perennial problem wherever witches live—she would jump for them as they wheeled around the room, and never failed to catch them out of midair.

I'd been gone for about a month when one morning I dreamed that Simmy was sitting on the foot of my bed in my room in Jerusalem. I very much had the impression that while her body was laying inert in one of her secret hiding places, her soul had out been roaming the world in search of her Human. Found me she finally had, after a month of searching.

But that didn't mean that she wasn't pissed. She was sitting on the bed with her back to me.

Simmycat eventually did forgive me when I finally got back stateside, but let me know in no uncertain terms that it wasn't to happen again.

I was careful to see that it didn't, and Simmy Batbane lived to the ripe old age of 21.

My kitty is a Manx kitty,

one with a stumpy tail.

My kitty is a Manx kitty,

one with a stumpy tail.

She is the cutest kitty of all;

it's not her fault she comes from St. Paul.

(How heinous!)

My kitty is a Manx kitty,

one with a stumpy,

a little stumpy,

a short and stumpy ta-a-il.