He thought of that era, the heady years after Napoleon Herbert’s fall, before the birth of his own generation, when his parents and their friends had been young. Josephine’s voice reminded Alfonzo of his mother. It made him think of an ambient, collective nostalgia for groups of shaggy animals, large and small, shoulder to shoulder, swaying in the twilight summer of Central Park and humming songs together. They united then in what they were against, but they did not know that their enemies would go after their ability to think of what they were for. It was believed that that era contained a momentary electricity that had dissipated as quickly as it had been generated. They thought they were making a new reality. And they did. It’s just that what they ended up making was nothing like what they’d dreamed.

The last song on the album always got him. It was Josephine’s most iconic. The hope and power and longing she transmitted with just her piping was almost impossibly poignant. Her delivery was a howl, a hollow envelopment. Her voice made a womb big enough to hold everyone who listened. The mouse was a keening mother. A war mother. An exile mother. A mother made of monochromatic stripes brown, red, and purple. A wailing mother.

Alfonzo’s eyes grew hot. He tried to breathe them cool. Just breathe it out.

Far off, at the other side of the cavern room, the front door clicked, and Vivi and her friends entered in animated conversation, carrying sacks of food. Vivi’s buoyant gaggle invaded the fancy home like they owned the place. For all intents and purposes they were its current possessors. Alfonzo’s melancholy skittered away like dust-bunny fluff.

Vivi gave Alfonzo a flurry of details about the others as they unpacked groceries. He caught what he could. There was a badger who took care of the grounds but also had a law degree. There was Tania George, a fluffy brown lynx from Montreal whom Vivi described as an amateur witch and a professional cuddler. Alfonzo asked if professional cuddling was like a sex thing, and Vivi just rolled her eyes.

“He’s a dumb joker,” Vivi explained.

Roberto Snowy was a scruffy dog artist who had spent years traveling the world.

The final creature Vivi introduced was Flann, whose last name Alfonzo didn’t catch, a sleek pig sailor who was the captain of Cappuccino’s boat. The boat itself was named The Man Ray.

“And what about you?” Flann inquired.

“Vivi didn’t tell you? She and I used t-to…,” Alfonzo stuttered.

“He and Mitchell are best friends in the city,” Vivi volunteered. “He’s involved in the leak.”

This was how it had always been with Vivi. She befriended the kinds of animals who turned Alfonzo shy and defensive. She was never just herself, but always a part of a larger entity. She gravitated toward the exotic, the beautiful, the radical.