Grandma rose and peeked through the dining room door.
It was an instant before she realized what had happened to the cage.
It was empty.
“Singing Sam’s gone!” screamed Grandma. She ran to dump the cage upside down. “Gone!”
The cage fell to the floor, just as Liddy appeared. “I thought it was quiet, but didn’t know why. I must’ve left the cage open by mistake—”
“You sure? Oh my God, wait!”
Grandma closed her eyes and groped her way out to the kitchen. Finding the kitchen sink cool under her fingers, she opened her eyes and looked down.
The Garburator lay gleaming, silent, its mouth wide. At its rim lay a small yellow feather.
Grandma turned on the water.
The Garburator made a chewing, swallowing noise.
Slowly, Grandma clamped both skinny hands over her mouth.
Her room was quiet as a pool; she remained in it like a quiet forest thing, knowing that once out of its shade, she might be set on by a jungle terror. With Singing Sam’s disappearance, the horror had made a mushroom growth into hysteria. Liddy had had to fight her away from the sink, where Grandma was trying to bat the gluttonous machine with a hammer. Liddy had forced her upstairs to put ice compresses on her raging brow.
“Singing Sam, he’s killed poor Sam!” Grandma had sobbed and wailed. But then the thrashing ceased, firm resolve seeped back. She locked Liddy out again and now there was a cold rage in her, in company with the fear and trembling; to think Tom would dare do this to her!
Now she would not open the door far enough to allow even supper in on a tray. She had dinner rattled to a chair outside, and she ate through the door-crack, held open on a safety chain just far enough so you saw her skeleton hand dart out like a bird shadowing the meat and corn, flying off with morsels, flying back for more. “Thanks!” And the swift bird vanished behind the shut door.
“Singing Sam must’ve flown off, Grandma.” Liddy phoned from the drugstore to Grandma’s room, because Grandma refused to talk any other way.
“Good night!” cried Grandma, and disconnected.
The next day Grandma phoned Thomas again.
“You there, Tom?”
“Where else?” said Tom.
Grandma ran downstairs.
“Here, Spot, Spottie! Here, Kitten!”
The dog and cat did not answer.
She waited, gripping the door, and then she called for Liddy.
Liddy came.
“Liddy,” said Grandma, in a stiff voice, barely audible, not looking at her. “Go look in the Garburator. Lift up the metal piece. Tell me what you see.”
Grandma heard Liddy’s footsteps far away. A silence.
“What do you see?” cried Grandma, impatient and afraid.
Liddy hesitated. “A piece of white fur—”
“Yes?”
“And—a piece of black fur.”