An eighty-nine year old man saw them first. No one believed him. Cats wearing sunglasses are somebody's joke or someone's hallucination. And eighty-nine is eighty-nine.
After three nuns saw the cats nodding their heads to a Motown classic in the rear car, welcome committees rode the train at all hours, bearing cans of tuna and pints of milk. But the cats — tails swaying, whiskers twitching — wandered only into cars occupied by small groups or lone passengers. Their cat eyes behind blackout shades looked at who-knew-what. And then, people said, the music played. No one could say from where. Sometimes Aretha, sometimes James Brown. Or Barbara Lewis or Johnny Nash, songs you never hear on the radio.
"They're the urban equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster," one reporter claimed. He assembled a panel of photography experts after a high school boy snapped a few shots of the cats. In the nine photographs, the cats in sunglasses were coolly indifferent — turning away and licking their fur or striking a pose with their noses turned up.
"These pictures may be staged," one expert said with a smile, "but if they are, whoever's responsible is good." The other experts nodded.
A homeless man claimed his cataract cleared up after the cats serenaded him. A woman with crippling arthritis was able to knit again. Reporters called it the first great fabrication of the century, the near-perfect product of an eon's evolution of trickery. When a professor from out of town caught the cats on video swaying to "It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate," Entertainment Tonight ran the story. Disney publicly offered to buy marketing rights from the cats' creator.
By the one-year anniversary of the first sighting, eyewitnesses numbered one hundred seventy-three. At train stops citywide, vendors peddled Soul Cats t-shirts and bobbleheads. The Soul Cats Fan Club gathered at the State/Lake Station burning candles and singing Persuaders songs. They believed the cats would reveal their purpose that night.
Nothing happened.
A year passed without any sightings. And then another. On the third anniversary of the first serenade, a dozen people wearing blackout shades gathered outside the State/Lake Station singing about that midnight train to Georgia. Their harmonies were perfect, their improvisations rousing. The coldest and gruffest passersby stopped to listen, and people held lit lighters in the air.
A reporter in the crowd interviewed a woman holding her small son's hand. "Well," she said, "the cats were popular for a while, but no one sees them anymore. I guess it really was a clever hoax."
Her son, maybe five years old, said, "Nobody sees the tooth fairy."
The mother laughed. "Honey, that's different."
The boy grinned, but his eyes showed his confusion. He looked like someone had told him a joke he knew should be funny, but he just didn't get it.
Stories and poems by Sandra Maddux-Creech have appeared in numerous journals including Zahir, Summerset Review, and Sotto Voce. She lives in Colorado, where she is working on something long.