written and illustrated by Iron Eater

The set always looked different to Howie in the quiet hours after filming wrapped. When the studio audience was gone and most of the crew had left to go live their lives, it was like standing inside a grand cavern filled with television cameras and the lingering smell of someone else’s cigarettes, and even a full-sized human might’ve been dwarfed by all that empty space. For someone like Howie? At least the network was understanding about his many stepladder requests.

The Lookin’ for Some Cookin’ with Chef Reuben soundstage was a fully functional kitchen, in spite of all attempts to the contrary from higher-up sorts, so Howie hopped up on one of the many sets of steps hidden where the cameras couldn’t see and helped himself to a bottle of sparkling cider. He uncorked it and forced himself to pour two proper glasses. He was a television professional, for Pete’s sake, he couldn’t go acting like…well, it was unkind to continue that thought, so Howie just tried to keep from spilling anywhere despite his trembling paws. His overstuffed clipboard was going to get enough of a workout that evening without soaking it through.

Reuben accepted his glass gracefully. He was particularly dexterous for one of the felt-folk, his hands boasting elegant fingers that could flex and gesture far more delicately than the usual stubby digits of his kin; while anyone could open a door or hold a pencil no matter how whimsical their anatomy, Reuben had precision. It was a big reason why he’d been picked to host a cooking show in the first place. Howie also suspected the name had something to do with it—something about a pun involving sandwiches?—since humans especially liked it when felt-folk had fun, snappy names; the bright yellow-gold underbelly might’ve also contributed to the friendly look. Reuben swirled the cider and sipped at it for a few long moments before finally asking the question Howie had been bracing to answer: “The talk with the big man went that bad, huh?”

“Really bad.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

Howie shook his head. “Not really, but we have to.”

“No wonder you asked me to stick around late tonight,” said Reuben. Howie could hear the concern hiding in the depths of that soft, musical voice. That wasn’t a good sign. Reuben never worried about things, even when dishes burned or curdled or otherwise went south during prep time. How could a program delight its viewers if its namesake star was upset? Gentle reliability was Reuben’s bread and butter, right up there with actual bread and actual butter.

“We’re deep in the stink if we don’t change our current course,” said Howie. He hopped up onto the counter to let his feet dangle over the side as he forced himself to drink his cider as slowly as he could stand. “They kept using words like cancellation.“

Reuben startled like a frightened animal. He was one of the felt-folk, same as Howie, but unlike Howie he was the kind of felt-folk that towered over everyone in the audience even when slouching over; that much purple-red fur moving at once could make quite a statement. It was rare seeing someone of his size in such a major role simply because they had trouble fitting into sets meant for human (or smaller) actors. “They wouldn’t! We, we get fan mail!” he cried as he gestured at the fridge. Letters from that week’s tapings adorned the big white door of it, each held in place with fruit-shaped magnets. The crayon drawings of Reuben that kids sent in were always a mutual favorite.

Howie took another pull of cider. “For every nice one we get, there’s two more full of complaints,” he said, glumly.

“Why haven’t I seen any of them?”

“I’ve been screening your mail. Didn’t want you having to read a nastygram on-air and spoil the mood. I’ve just been throwing the gripes into the furnace these days.” Howie hadn’t meant to keep it from anyone, since good management required openness and honesty between all parties, but it kept slipping his mind when he’d first started doing so, and after a while it’d become rote. Nowadays weeding the daily letters carried the same gravitas as putting his keys back on the hook every night. It was the kind of basic maintenance nobody would notice unless it wasn’t done.

Not that these facts made Reuben look any less hurt, which was the awful part. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because they’re all saying the same thing, when you get down to it,” Howie replied. He hated that he’d read enough of them to recognize trends. “The viewers don’t think we’re fun enough.”

Reuben sat back on his haunches; this put him at about eye-level with Howie despite Reuben keeping his behind flat against the set’s tilework. Heavy shadows spread across his shaggy coat. Goodness gracious but he looked so much bigger without the studio lights picking out his every detail; when there wasn’t a camera between them Howie liked how small he felt next to Reuben, and from certain, more enjoyable after-hours chats he knew Reuben could pick him up as effortlessly as a pot of spaghetti. Reuben would do it if asked, too! It really was a shame they (mostly Howie) had been too busy to act on that knowledge. “But my recipes are perfect for parties,” he said. “I make sure everything on the show is something a viewer at home could try themselves, within reason. People can enjoy them. That’s lots of fun!” He ran his palm across the top of his head; his long white hair was still tied back from the day’s filming. “What do they want, just Galloping Gourmet with a different name?”

Their mutual boss—a particularly colorful member of their kind who wore three-piece suits and went by Our Sponsor to everyone, felted or otherwise—had invoked that exact show in all its ostentatious, butter-soaked, fancy-for-the-sake-of-fanciness excess. Howie had watched a few episodes back when he was first drawing up plans for Lookin’, but the appeal had slid right off of him when he realized how unlikely it was he’d ever even know where to find goose-liver pate, much less make anything with it. Globetrotting wasn’t in the budget whatsoever. Even if Reuben wore a dozen colorful ascots over his chef’s whites and found a way to budget his own versions of travelogue footage, Howie knew that wasn’t what Our Sponsor wanted from them.

“The programs scheduled right before and right after us do fine with the viewers,” said Howie. “But there’s charts, you know? Big charts with numbers. And those numbers say people change the channel when our show comes on. Because we’re. Not. Silly.” He punctuated the last few words with flicks of his wrist that would’ve risked flinging sparkling cider across the counter—or at least his sweater-vest—had he not drunk it by then.

“Is that what this is about?” asked Reuben.

“Always seems to come back to it eventually,” said Howie.

Now it was Reuben’s turn to drain his glass. He set it on the counter with a sigh and ran his fingers through his hair again. “It’s a kitchen, Howie. Mayhem’s got no place here. There’s sharp stuff and, and fire. What if somebody got hurt?”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it? Every other show on the network has pranks and pratfalls. Even the educational stuff for the kiddies has a little, and the older the demographic, the more likely people expect the frying pans and dynamite. Or co-stars devouring one another.” Howie shuddered; he’d never seen the appeal of being on either side of that equation, no matter how many people he knew who would always pop back into the studio between takes like nothing had happened. Even if he hadn’t found it gruesome, it struck him as too simple a joke to make for a cooking show. Wouldn’t that send the wrong message about what the viewers at home could expect from their recipes? Humans really ought not to try that at home.

“They knew what I was like when I pitched the show, and what I wanted to make,” said Reuben. “Nice, comforting television, a good break between some louder stuff, showing people how to make tasty food without breaking the bank, that’s what I pitched. I told the suits I wouldn’t be any good for jokes beyond the simplest stuff and they said that was fine, that I look funny, and that’d be all it’d take for the show to work.” He looked down at his chef’s whites, still lightly spattered with skillet fallout. “Do they not think I look the part anymore?”

Costuming had really outdone themselves managing to get Reuben multiple pants, jackets, and aprons in the right size without neglecting to account for his posture or tail. When he had his toque on he looked just like a human chef! Or at least the way a human chef would if they happened to also resemble a floppy-eared ground sloth with a cartoonish two-fanged underbite. Howie had always thought the look was a professional one. “You look fine, Rube.”

Reuben cracked a small half-smile and tucked a bit of hair behind his ear the way he often did when Howie gave him an after-hours compliment about the show, but he kept going. “What makes them complain about our ratings now? They’ve never been great. For this entire season they’ve been not that great, but they’ve been, hm, reliable? Oh, they’re a little on the downswing now, but…they’re not that bad, are they?”

“Apparently the top brass have changed their mind on how much ‘not great’ they’re willing to tolerate, no matter what they said at pitch time.”

“Did Our Sponsor say anything else other than getting the numbers up?”

Howie winced. “You know how he loves talking in circles. It took him the better part of an hour just to get across the idea that our gooses are close to being cooked, and not because of any Christmas special plans.”

“So what do they want us to do, then?”

Howie’s meeting with Our Sponsor had been uncomfortably light on solutions. “At this point they want the numbers to go up, one way or another, and they don’t care how we do it. We’ve got until the end of next month to figure things out. If we don’t? Well…that’s showbiz, I guess.” He took off his glasses so he didn’t have to see Reuben’s expression. “At least we got to try in spite of the circumstances.”

While Reuben’s face was a red-violet blur, it was hard to ignore the way said blur looked so defeated, or hear the disappointment in his voice. “Circumstances, right.”

Said circumstances had determined the trajectory of their respective lives more than any other detail: Howie and Reuben had the inglorious trait of being serious felt-fellows.

Being serious wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was the life of an unfunny clown. While Howie couldn’t speak for Reuben, he knew that he himself couldn’t help it; since he’d been young (or as young as his kind could manage, anyway) he’d been studious and thoughtful, looking for purpose in a world his kin were happy to romp through with the mad whimsy of creatures who lived outside the endless cycles of nature. He kept his hair and tail neatly combed, his felt was brushed until pristine every morning, and he actually wore clothes most of the time. In the old days he would have fulfilled the necessary role of being a foil, a straight man, an immovable object off which others could bounce with their endlessly unstoppable energy, and he probably would have accepted it with a suitably humorous amount of complaint, because somebody had to. That was the felt-folk way.

And then came television.

An all-day network, it turned out, needed more than just a gaggle of goofballs to prance around in front of the cameras. You still needed plenty of those, of course, but you also needed people to run the cameras, to write scripts, to wrangle guests, to balance books, to fetch supplies, to spend long hours making sets and costumes and all things wow! You needed people with an eye for detail. You needed people who were willing to sweat the small stuff. To make the network actually work, you needed people like Howie.

Howie had heard the call of the small screen early on. Oh, how he’d worked to prove himself worthy of it: he’d started out behind a camera before his knack for production made itself known, he’d had a few successful runs as a junior producer after that, and since he’d still get in up to his elbows if something ever went wrong on the technical side of things, Lookin’ had developed one of the most loyal crews in the whole network. People knew he could make the equipment sing. People trusted him when he made requests about the lighting or the way the set’s sound setup was arranged. When a recipe needed ingredients not already in the show’s pantry, he wouldn’t rest until he got them, no matter how many phone calls it took. If they were short on runners he even went on coffee runs himself. It wasn’t like Howie couldn’t delegate, but he knew his fellow kin, and sometimes things were too important to leave them up to whether or not someone got distracted by a butterfly.

Compromise was not in the cards for Howie. He believed in their not-silly-enough little show with the fervor of a man who’d touched a saint. He believed in Reuben, too, and the potential of a calmer, gentler kind of felt-fellow to succeed in a field that expected him to be something completely different from who and what he truly was. That they were both in television (actual television!) watched by humans (real, live humans!) couldn’t be enough, and the talk with Our Sponsor had been proof enough of that, but Howie had thought that by throwing himself completely into his and Reuben’s shared dream, it could’ve counted for something. He needed it to succeed, and so he’d sacrificed almost every ounce of free time he had to the show. The last few months of his life—which was to say, ever since they’d started prepping for the fall season—had felt like years.

Was it all going to fall apart this easily?

If Lookin’ vanished overnight, he’d probably land on his feet, since there were always more shows in need of someone to push the pencils or fix the weird hum coming in over the boom mic. Howie wasn’t funny but he was durable, and since he was small he didn’t take up too much space. He wouldn’t have too much of a problem in the grand scheme of things. The problem was with Reuben: felt-folk as big as he was were only tolerated among humans so long as they had work visas to prove they were law-abiding members of some society or another, since it really was easy for a maribou-maned monster to cause some serious damage if they decided they had enough of being someone else’s entertainment. Reuben wasn’t an exception, there, as those same slender fingers that plated hors d’oeuvres so delicately for the camera could also rip up scrap wood like it was so much rice paper. Large folks simply weren’t treated the same as smaller folks. It was the kind of bigoted, heartless, reductive concern Howie hated that he could understand.

Reuben didn’t talk much about what his life had been like before signing on with the network, but Howie knew enough to be certain that Lookin’ was just as precious to him as it was to Howie. Without the show, Reuben’s visa would vanish like cotton candy under a faucet. Without his visa, he’d have to go back home. Who knew what he’d do with himself if word got out that he’d been too much of a downer for humans to tolerate? It’d be a pretty bad look if he had to settle for a bog-standard predatory role. Reuben was such a dainty eater! Swallowing people whole just wasn’t his style.

Even if everything went fine for Reuben once the dust finally settled, Howie would miss him. That was the long and the short of it, wasn’t it? He liked Reuben. They were compatible in ways Howie didn’t bring up in mixed company, which was all well and good, but he liked thinking they had more than just a good chance of having fun fooling around. It was nice having someone who cared as much about television as Howie did to talk to, even if Reuben came at things from a completely different direction. Reuben’s soft-spoken manner had been a balm to Howie’s easily-frazzled mind countless times during the season, and this was hardly the first time they’d gotten together for a chat after a shoot. Sometimes they’d even go out for a round of darts or pool at Skipper’s, a hole-in-the-wall bar just down the street from the studio, and a time or two they’d even gone to see a movie. Reuben was why Howie did anything other than eat, sleep, and work on the show some days; framing things as making sure his star actor got sufficient R&R was the only way Howie could peel himself away from his production tasks. Howie wasn’t used to having friends. He hadn’t realized how much he’d needed another serious person to talk to—one who wasn’t family, at that—until a certain wine-red mountain had lumbered into his life.

“I guess we ought to start with the basics,” said Howie, replacing his glasses before he refilled his glass. He liked to think the briskly bubbly (and, according to the label, strictly non-alcoholic) juice was helping clear his head. In happier times he would’ve been splitting one of the bottles of cooking sherry kept on a back rack so they looked nice for the cameras; in happier times that tended to lead to another reason it was nice to have a friend like Reuben, and Howie couldn’t afford to lose this crucial after-hours working time to being tipsy and frisky. That was the sort of thing they could afford to do at the start of the season, but now? Now they had to be all business, at least until Reuben dragged him down to Skipper’s again so Howie could cool his head. Thoughts of past get-togethers could wait until he went back home. He needed to be responsible for the sake of future get-togethers!

Reuben accepted another refill graciously. “Like why the numbers are bad?”

Howie cringed. “Yeah, that’s a start,” he said. He took his clipboard in both paws and flipped to a page covered in typed-up numbers. The tip of his tail flicked as he skimmed the red pen he’d scribbled between the data points. “So we’ve already established that when we’re scheduled isn’t really the problem. I’ve been going through past issues of TV Guide and the competition’s pretty wimpy in our time slot, so you’d think if people like Felt-Folk Network News before us and they like The Mirabelle and Friends Variety Hour after us, they could at least leave it tuned to the station while waiting for us to do our thing.”

“What’s keeping them from doing that?”

“Viewers say the show is too boring,” said Howie.

“It’s a cooking show, it’s not going to be a mile a minute.”

“You’d think the same about the news, too, but Hopper and company seem to have a good thing going with their journalism focus. People see them doing the expected funny business and they expect it from us, too, and when they don’t get that they get upset. That’s what makes them change the channel.” He ruffled the pages on his clipboard like a magician shuffling cards; the evening mail had included yet another unhappy letter asking where the jokes were. “Too many people think we’re wasting their time.”

Another mouthful of sparkling cider vanished down Reuben’s throat. “Most cooking shows don’t thrive on comedy. We never claim to be anything than what we are. Why are the viewers getting all bent out of shape because I’m not that guy?” He didn’t name who that guy was, but Howie had caught Reuben muttering dire things about how a certain Swedish character actor had set the felt-folk culinary community back by years.

“When everyone’s got a remote control, their clicking thumbs are fueled by first impressions. They see a fluffy guy who’s maroon and yellow wearing a fancy French hat, they expect him to crack some jokes.” Howie sighed. “Like I said, we’re not funny people and we don’t make a funny show. There’s no punchlines. You know that’s okay, I know that’s okay, but the viewers at home? We might as well be so much dirty laundy if we don’t squeeze ourselves into those molds they’ve gone and made for us.”

The bottom of Reuben’s glass clinked against the counter as he set it down out of tail-lashing range. “Kids like us, though?”

“Sure, but kids can only have so much sway if mom and dad would rather watch something else.”

Reuben hummed thoughtfully. “Maybe if we swap time slots with an earlier show, we can make use of our popularity with the junior crowd?” he asked, though he didn’t sound confident in his words.

“Afraid not. Part of Our Sponsor’s bargain with the FCC was that we can’t have anything with imitatable content at certain times of the day, and a cooking show is supposed to make you want to imitate it.”

“Also the fire, and the knives,” said Reuben, glumly. He laced his slender fingers together and whuffed like a bison. “It’d also mean we’d be less likely to actually teach usable recipes to people. I don’t want to make PB&J sandwiches for the camera every day…”

Pages fluttered, hand-written tables danced. “Worse yet, we’d be competing with cartoons, or kidvid in general, and that stuff is chaos.” Howie turned the clipboard around so Reuben could read the torn-out sheet of a legal pad clipped there. “I’ve been doing some side research on what makes good children’s television writing work, and so far the only constant I can find is volume.” That neither of them were terribly loud people went acknowledged but unsaid.

“What about earlier than the children’s hours?” Reuben asked. “Daytime hours, when other stations run their cooking stuff? People who want to watch soap operas aren’t tuning in to the network anyway. I think I’d have a shot going head to head with public broadcast stuff.”

Howie shook his head. “I asked about that,” he said, “but Our Sponsor says we’re stuck with what we’ve got. The schedule is a precision mechanism with which we working stiffs cannot hope to meddle.”

“So precise they’re going to let us die on the vine in a time slot that isn’t working,” grumbled Reuben.

“What about asking the audience for requests? They like you.” Howie gestured broadly. Yet again, his glass managed not to spill through what could only be the whims of the universe itself. He had to be more careful about that. “Improv cooking theater, right? It could work.”

Now it was Reuben’s turn to shake his head, making his ears flop to and fro. “That’s how you end up making candle salad in front of the entire nation, and I’m not doing that. I want to do more with the show than teach people how to recreate rude party tricks.” His frown eased up a little into something a bit more self-conscious. “You know how bad I am about saying no to people.”

“I know, I know, but maybe if you had someone to curate the answers…?”

“That’s still saying no, man. I’d have to.”

Things went back and forth in this manner for some time. Nothing they could think of managed to both hit the brief they’d been given by Our Sponsor and sound like something they were willing and capable of pulling off. The set was soundproofed, so Howie couldn’t hear if anyone walked past while he and Reuben slogged through the sheaf of ever-negative notes; anyone staying this late at the studio was either part of the night crew or was burning their candle at both ends for yet another project clenched in the network’s teeth. Either way, none of them would be of any help to each other at this hour. The unshakable fellowship of broadcast staff only lasted as long as the coffee did.

Howie didn’t have any coffee, and they’d long since run out of sparkling cider. He could do his job while rough and ragged, but Reuben? Reuben needed to look pretty for the cameras. It was time to cut some losses in the name of getting anything done tomorrow.

“Tell you what,” said Howie. He pushed himself down off of the counter and craned his neck up at Reuben. “I think we’re both numb from getting this dropped on us so suddenly, and right now we’re not going to get anything hashed out we haven’t already. You can only put so much of a point on a potato.” He cocked his thumb over his shoulder in the vague direction of the outside world. “Let’s get you changed into some street clothes, head out to the bar, get roaring drunk about it, and then if we wake up the next morning we can see if we can think up any solutions Our Sponsor didn’t already shoot down. No matter what happens, I want to fight for the show. We just have to treat this like a marathon, not a sprint.” He extended the paw not keeping the clipboard tucked up under his arm. “Deal?”

Reuben rose to his feet—making him loom even further over Howie—and shook Howie’s hand with practiced care. “Deal,” he said.

“Great. I’m buying the first round. You gonna need cab fare for after?”

“Nahhh,” said Reuben. His sleepy smile had returned, though he still looked as weary as Howie felt. “I am gonna need you to buy me a cheeseburger for keeping me so late, though..”

“Only the greasiest of bar burgers for you, my friend,” said Howie. He meant it, too; above everything else Reuben was his closest friend, and even if they hadn’t had that hefty benefits package between them he would’ve wanted Reuben to leave the station with a smile. Howie’s bleeding heart would be the death of him if the stress of working for the network didn’t get him first. He’d just have to hope this wouldn’t be the last burgers-and-beer run before everything went to hell.

♠

Howie did wake up the next morning, much to his disgruntled relief, and by the time he lurched out of his bedroom his twin sister, Honeybun, was already in her usual spot in the kitchen of their shared apartment where she filled in the crossword from yesterday’s paper. They had the same reserved colors of hair and fur, shared the same nubby little horns, and wore equally thick glasses; the only immediate difference between them to the casual viewer was the namesake swirly hairstyle Honeybun affected while Howie’s was a more generic men’s feathered ‘do. Both of them had ended up on the production side of the cameras at the same time, which made certain things convenient, like splitting rent. She waved at him with her pencil.

“Fun party last night?” she asked.

He grimaced. He wasn’t actually hung over, thank goodness, but Howie still felt like he was spiritually blotto. “I wish,” he said as he popped some bread in the toaster. “I stayed late to talk with Reuben about what all happened at the meeting with Our Sponsor. The trip to Skipper’s was more of a defense mechanism.”

Honeybun hissed through her teeth. “So it didn’t go so good, did it.”

“Nope.” There was still a little orange juice left in the fridge, so Howie poured himself a glass while waiting on his toast. Maybe he’d get a new carton from the store while he still had the luxury of collecting a paycheck. “The ratings are tanking so bad they’re starting to make the shows around us go downhill. Expect a lot more late nights as we try to brainstorm how to salvage things.” He selected a not-too-big dish from the cupboard, just the right size for buttering some breakfast. “Please tell me you’ve got some better news from the writer’s room?”

“Same as always, Howie.”

The toaster launched its contents high into the air and Howie caught them deftly behind his back. Neither he nor Honeybun paid this any mind; even in their private lives, felt-folk were naturally drawn to doing things showily. “I’m really sorry to hear that,” he said as he took a seat across from her. “What’d they say the problem was this time?”

Honeybun’s tail drooped onto the linoleum. “Where do I even start?” she said with a sigh. She swept her pencil-holding paw across the kitchen; much like Howie, Honeybun liked talking with her hands. “I keep writing jokes I think are perfect for a show’s actors, and it all works in my head, but the instant they do even the most half-hearted of reads it all goes to junk. What good am I to the network if they don’t like a single one of my scripts?” She laced her stubby fingers together as best as she could. “At this rate they’re gonna put me in with the dancing girls.”

“But you hate chorus line stuff.”

“Yeah, and I hate missing bills more.”

“Don’t talk like that, Honeybun,” he said, placing his paw atop hers. “We’ve both been saving up for emergencies, and it’s not like either of us is fired yet. We’ve just got to keep trying, right?” He smiled at her. Even on his best days Howie looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, much less days that came after nights spent alternately drinking and worrying himself sick over other people’s well-being, so he wasn’t surprised when this gesture failed to comfort her very much. “Why don’t you try writing for Lookin’ for a change? We haven’t turned you down yet.”

She scoffed but didn’t pull away. “You know I’m a lousy cook.”

“That’s why Reuben will still handle the recipes. He’s got a big fat accordion folder of them at the studio, and he claims he has half a dozen more overstuffed folders at his place. Ask him what he wants to do for an episode and he can give you something to write around.”

“I don’t know…”

“C’mon, what could it hurt?” asked Howie. He released her paw in favor of lifting his toast to his mouth for a bite. Upon swallowing, he said, “You already know who you’d be writing for—”

“For whom I’d be writing,” said Honeybun, absently.

Howie slicked his ears back in annoyance and continued. “You already know for whom you’d be writing, yes, and you’ve worked with Blinky before, right? I’m trying to keep the entire crew from vanishing before we know we’re…” He took another crunchy bite of his breakfast and held up what was left of the slice. “Toast.”

It was hard to say it out loud. Lookin’ had always been a smaller, more tight-knit crew, but Howie had been fine with that: their show had a single star who was a real team player, and keeping things lean and simple would allow for some clarity of vision. The problem with small teams was how much even a single loss hurt. Howie had already lost one of his sound crew, one of his grips, and two of his writers to other showrunners over the course of the last month alone, all before the mess with the ratings audit started, and with him working as both director and producer there was only so much he could do to shoulder the burden. Sometimes the show felt cursed. People talked. If he didn’t start getting more people on board soon they were going to pass the threshold of recovery, and even if Our Sponsor changed his mind, that would be it for the show. The network’s dueling soap opera teams squabbled over advertising rights and time slots, safe in their knowledge of renewal. What a luxury! Howie couldn’t promise his crew they’d even reach the end of the season.

The dismay must’ve been showing on his face since now it was Honeybun’s turn to lay her paw atop his. “You know the rules, Howie, only so much moping allowed before work,” she said, invoking one of their household’s not-that-enforced regulations in a sweetly even-keeled voice. “I guess I can talk to some people today. I think they’re about ready to run me out with stakes and garlic, so coming in with new plans for where else I can put myself shouldn’t be too hard for them to swallow.”

“You’re the best twin sister I have,” said Howie. He kissed her paw gentlemanly, making her laugh.

“I’m the only twin sister you have,” she said as she batted at his nose. “But I’m happy to do it. Might as well experiment when treading water isn’t working, right? There’s just one problem.”

Of course there was just one problem. Lately it felt like the story of Howie’s life was just one problem followed by just one more problem. “What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know the first thing about how you’re supposed to write for cooking shows.”

Was that all? Howie could feel his tail smoothing itself out from the frazzled poof he’d been trying to hide. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ve been bleeding enough people lately that I can’t see why Blinky won’t be grateful for another pen and paper. He and Reuben have been pulling some seriously long hours by themselves to make up the slack. Why do you think I was at the station so late?”

“You said you went to Skipper’s.”

“I mean before that.”

“And that you had to meet with Our Sponsor.”

“Before that, too: I was in his office pretty much as soon as filming wrapped. Thing is, I had to wait for Reuben and Blinky to finish up after to share the bad news.” Not that Blinky Hoots had bothered sticking around, nor that Howie blamed him for vamoosing as soon as the situation permitted; Blinky had a wife and kids to take care of, after all. Howie had a soft spot for other felt-folk who actually started families of any sort. Having a sister could do that to a guy. “I’ll let the guys know you want to help so they can prep to show you the ropes.”

Honeybun pursed her lips. “I’ve written teleplays before, Howie. You’re telling me the process needs more than just telling people how to make a recipe? Which Reuben will presumably provide?”

“That’s what we’ve been doing, but apparently it’s not enough.”

“So Our Sponsor had requests?”

The last of Howie’s toast vanished, leaving him to lick the buttery crumbs from his fingers and brush them from his tuft of a beard. “If you can call them that. I was told to give him more razzle-dazzle without any guidance about how to properly razz or dazz. Any ideas?”

She shrugged. “I guess it’s like the song goes: something familiar, something peculiar…”

“When people say ‘something for everybody,’ half the time that means it’s for nobody,” said Howie.

“Sourpuss. Never change,” said Honeybun with a smile. She glanced up at the clock and lay her pencil across the unfinished crossword. “I should finish getting ready. You want to take the train together, or are you already gone?”

Going in to work with a friendly face sounded a lot nicer than the alternative. “I can wait. You’ve already done more than you can imagine, Honeybun.”

“Oh, stop. I should be thanking you for giving me a chance.” She swung her legs out from beneath the table and popped upright. “It’s going to be a few days before I’ll have anything for you, just so you know. Good scripts don’t happen overnight.”

“Wouldn’t expect them to,” Howie said. He extended a paw and she pulled him to his feet. “Let’s go make some darn good television.”

♠

There was an art to telling bad jokes. Multiple arts, in fact: you could say them so quickly you were already on your next topic by the time a listener noticed, you could tell them with such confidence the audience had no choice to laugh, you could lean into their badness and make people groan with smiles on their faces, you could warm people up with a perfect setup and then hit them with a real dog of a punchline. Howie was sure there were plenty more tricks out there that could muster up some chuckles. What he was also sure of was how many awful jokes were in the scripts they had to work with and how Reuben kept bombing every single one.

Howie couldn’t believe the material Blinky kept turning in. For months there had been zero problems getting the kind of safe, comfortable (and, according to the powers that be, boring) scripts in well ahead of time so Reuben could review things and make sure all the timing would line up for broadcast. There was so much timing in cooking shows, be it prepping things beforehand or knowing just when to take them off the stove or out of the oven, and it was only by some miracle that Reuben had ended the last dozen or so shows with an edible meal. Howie was sure the studio medic was ready to strangle him every time something threatened to burn too hot or chop too close. What had once been a well-oiled machine was now held together with metaphorical chewing gum and not-so-metaphorical duct tape.

What was going on? Blinky couldn’t explain it no matter when or how Howie asked; it was like a fuse had fried in that sad little screenwriter’s head. It sure wasn’t Honeybun’s doing, either, since she had no shortage of complaints for how much of a tyrant her owl-shaped collaborator could be, and the most Howie had seen to her name were a few pleasant interludes that were added at the last minute. The audience liked those parts, but said interludes felt too close to the style that risked killing off Lookin’ for Some Cookin’ in the first place, so there had to be more meat on the bone if they expected to last long. Each day saw Howie getting less and less sleep from the furious revisions he kept having to make at the last minute. It was going to give him a bouncing baby ulcer at this rate. Still, nobody ever said show business was easy, and if Our Sponsor felt there was a chance he could turn things around in a month’s time, then Howie was going to try to do it. That he’d started keeping a little caddy full of stomach tablets on him at all hours was neither here nor there: everyone was counting on him, and if there was one thing a felt-fellow with a head for numbers could do, it was count.

It was in this mindset that Howie found himself back at the studio again on a Sunday—not a day he usually worked—with a pen and legal pad, poring over their archived tapes for anything that might help. He had considered calling the Owl residence to see if Blinky was up for coming in, though he changed his mind at the last minute; he was the producer, he was the one signing off on things, and therefore he was responsible for finding a solution, not kicking the can further down the road. A family man like Blinky probably had weekend plans, anyway, and Howie hated the idea of getting in the way of that. Wouldn’t he want that same courtesy if he ended up with kids some strange day? Stranger things had happened.

He kept replaying different sections of the tapes over and over. What did the audience like? What didn’t they? If he could just figure out a common denominator, maybe that could crack the code. They still got some small number of laughs, and the fan mail hadn’t stopped entirely, but the complaints still came. What did people want? What did people want them to be? Couldn’t they just let a skilled cook show them how to make something while telling a few simple jokes and be happy about that? Howie pressed buttons, turned dials, and wrote down anything that might help. When Blinky came in the next morning he was going to have a real tome of knowledge to peruse, assuming Howie’s growing headache didn’t hamstring things at the last minute.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder and he startled so hard he both jumped out of his chair and threw his legal pad, which miraculously did not break anything. The fur on his tail had fluffed out to thrice its usual size. He wheeled around to find himself staring Reuben right in the underbite.

“Sorry, man,” said Reuben with an apologetic shrug. “I tried calling your name a few times, but you were lost in space.”

Howie grasped the front of his sweater-vest like he was trying to keep his heart from escaping. “At this rate I’m going to be Land of the Lost, because things are not looking good,” he said as he tried to calm himself down. Deep breaths, smooth tail… “Why are you here?”

“Probably the same reason as you: trying to figure out how to make things better. Where’s Blinky? I thought he was going to be here based on how you two were talking on Friday.”

“Haven’t seen him,” said Howie. “I thought about calling, but it’s Sunday, you know? Just because I’m shoveling my entire life into the furnace doesn’t mean everybody has to.” He sat back down. “It shouldn’t have to just be our tiny little crew,” he said, wearily. “We’re supposed to be a national network, but they insist on giving the Lookin’ team sub-public-access resources, and I don’t know why.”

Reuben pulled up a reinforced chair and took a seat, himself, his bulk making the chair creak as he threaded his tail through the hole in the back. “You can’t always find explanations for this kind of thing, Howie. Trying to is just going to make you crazy.” He placed his hands on his knees and peered at the bank of paused screens. “So, see anything good in your crystal ball, Merlin?”

“I wish. I think I’m going in circles.”

“That’s too bad.”

Normally Howie would’ve been glad to have some time alone with Reuben. Normally Howie wasn’t one week out from a sink-or-swim deadline with plummeting ratings pinned to him like the Scarlet Letter, so he wasn’t surprised to find himself more frazzled than comforted. When Reuben failed to say anything else, Howie felt compelled to fill the silence. “So you’ve been working overtime with Blinky, too?”

“A little,” said Reuben. “He’s been trying to do some weird stuff with the format—aren’t we all, right?—and I wanted to talk to him face-to-face some, discuss what I thought was working and thought was worth pursuing, real positive energy stuff, right? A guy gets real worn down if all he hears is negatives over and over.”

Tell me about it, thought Howie, though he kept his mouth shut.

Reuben kept talking. “I put together some recipes of a bunch of different skill levels, right? I was thinking maybe if we had one easy one and another that was conceptually related but a whole lot trickier, people could still make things at home, and see how the simple thing builds skills for the fancier one, right?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Okay, let me give an example,” said Reuben. “Say we start off by saying it’s gonna be a brunch day, right? So I show people how to make a frittata.”

“A what?”

“Fancy scrambled eggs with extra stuff added in, kind of like an omelet.”

Howie considered scrambled eggs, mostly unburned, to count as fancy, but he played along. Reuben was always talking about foods Howie had never heard of in his entire life as though they were everyday snacks people had all the time. For someone better-traveled than Howie was, that could very well be the case. How much had Reuben moved around before getting that visa of his? “Okay, so you frisk the tada or whatever it was you said. What’s the fancy version?”

“That’s gonna be a nice quiche. It’s tricky because you have to make pastry crust, and baking is a whole bunch of tricky chemistry even in the simplest of times. I’d want to show off how similar the frittata mix is to the quiche filling, then talk about ways to fill out the rest of that breakfast without breaking the bank. Orange juice and things. With gas prices still pretty fricked, we want people to be able to get as much as they can from a single trip to the store, you know?”

Previous episodes of Lookin’ for Some Cookin’ had touched ever so lightly on being thrifty, but it was usually couched in the guise of being economical. This was the first time saving money had been so directly addressed. Howie thought of how many slices were left in the breadbox back in the apartment and nodded. “So if people know coming into the show that there’ll be at least one thing they can make on a budget, they might stay tuned in longer. And staying tuned means the ratings don’t dip, which means Our Sponsor takes his foot ever so slightly off our backs.”

“Yup.”

“You’re a genius, Reuben,” said Howie. “I’ll get Blinky and Honeybun on that first thing tomorrow. Please tell me you have more golden ideas like that one hiding up your sleeve?”

Reuben scrunched up his snout around his teeth. “I wish. Everything else I’ve tried has been a bust.”

“How so?”

“I tried writing other professionals in the field, see if they had any tips for us. A little networking for the network. Almost nobody wrote back, and those that did, well…” He heaved a sigh with such force it blew Howie’s hair back and knocked his glasses askew. “Did you know the La Choy Dragon is just a guy in a suit?”

Howie had thought that was obvious. Humans had made puppets for a lot longer than they’d known about the felt-folk, so it wasn’t like they were being cruel about it, but sometimes people made mistakes. Maybe bigger guys like Reuben were more likely to see kindred souls in unlikely places. Since those commercials hadn’t been on the air for the better part of a decade by then, it was possible the mists of time had made the more artificial elements of said mascot character easier to overlook, too. The kind thing was not to say anything directly. “He never cooked those noodles directly, anyway,” said Howie.

“Even if he didn’t, he was on TV longer than we have been, that’s for sure,” said Reuben.

The echoed-recipe idea was fantastic, exactly the kind of thing Howie could see himself watching on his own time in some magical land where he had time to actually sit in front of a set. What it did not cover, unfortunately, was the thing Our Sponsor had grilled Howie over those three long weeks ago. “So what do we do about the silliness problem?”

“I told you, Howie, I don’t like the idea of trying to be silly, loony, goofy, or anything other than perfectly professional in the kitchen, especially not if we’re trying to teach people. It’s not responsible.”

“Can’t you try to crack a few jokes?”

Reuben shook his head, making his hair (now hanging loose, since he hadn’t been in front of the camera that day) and ears sway. “No can do, man. You’ve heard what happens when I try. Blinky could be giving me the Divine Comedy and I think I’d flub my lines.”

“I don’t think the Divine Comedy is meant to be very funny,” said Howie. “It’s not even the best comedy they’ve got.”

“So why even call it either of those things? Argh!” Reuben covered his face with his hand and growled in frustration. Howie had never heard him make that sound before. He wasn’t sure if he was interested in it or terrified, and the eye-watering stress on top of everything made it even harder to sort out his own thoughts. “This stupid place, man,” said Reuben. “It’s more civilized, sure, but I swear it’s even crazier than back home when it wants to be. Half the time I just don’t get its rules at all. And no matter where I go I’m just not funny enough.”

This was, Howie was certain, somehow all his fault. Wasn’t Reuben part of his crew? Moreover, wasn’t Reuben his friend? Howie should’ve been looking out for his team, leading them through the dark times towards a promising tomorrow, and it should’ve been him and him alone in the crosshairs of Our Sponsor’s demands. Instead he was jeopardizing Reuben’s citizenship status, and Blinky’s family, and Honeybun’s career, and his own…well, who cared about what Howie was going to lose? Except no, that was no way to think, because he’d be losing all those good people if he fumbled the bag this late in the game. A producer/director needed to produce a good idea and direct people how to best see it to completion. Too bad Howie had neither of those things.

Reuben liked him the same way he liked Reuben. He knew that much. The extent and intensity of that like was a mystery, but it was there, and the only reason they hadn’t pursued more than the precious few sherry-fueled interludes they’d shared was because Howie couldn’t shake the feeling that it was bad taste for a man in his position to be messing around with his sole star. Maybe it didn’t matter when there was just one guy on Reuben’s side of the camera? It’d be technically more ethical if Reuben did lose his visa and was no longer answering to Howie on set, not that Howie cared too much about that, but one reason they’d grown so close was because they were around each other all the time. If that was no longer the case, would Howie still have time for Reuben? Would there be enough of whatever it was they had to last if they weren’t in each other’s coat pockets all day? Even if they had something special, would Howie be able to step away from work long enough, and often enough, to maintain it? Did Reuben even know Howie felt this way about him? Howie honestly didn’t know. He should’ve been bolder, or clearer, or something. He should’ve gone to more movies. He should’ve done anything.

A sharp, acidic pang bloomed in Howie’s stomach, making him wince. There was no getting any more work done tonight, not in his current state, so why make himself more miserable? He wanted to drink an ocean of coffee. He also wanted to get roaring drunk. One of those things was easier to do when you weren’t that much taller than a yardstick.

Howie pushed himself out of his seat. “I gotta get out of here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.“

He powered down the equipment through sheer muscle memory and returned the tapes to their waiting storage containers. This made for a great excuse not to look at Reuben, though he could feel Reuben’s sleepy eyes following him from behind that curtain of hair. Funny how quickly a once-welcome talk with a close colleague could turn sour. Funny how that wasn’t even the right kind of funny at all, and yet it felt like the only kind he’d ever be able to manage. They were doomed.

By instinct he nearly flipped off the lights. Instead he balled his paw into a fist and thumped it into the wall next to the switch, making Reuben’s ears perk up in concern.

“Howie? What’s gotten into you, man?”

Now was not the time to entertain someone being genuinely nice to him. Howie needed to feel the wind in his fur and the sidewalk beneath his feet and, eventually, some of Skipper’s middle-gradest hooch on his tongue. The alternative was snapping like a rotten rubber band. “Look, I need to go walk around some and clear my head. If you want to talk later, you’ll find me at the bar. If not? You’ll see me Monday. Goodnight, Reuben.”

With that, Howie turned on his heel and, leaving his legal pad wherever it had landed, walked out of the archives.

♠

Howie sat on a tall stool at the bar counter and kicked his heels despondently. The ground was so far away like this. Felt-folk furniture had always seemed too big to him when he was younger; it hadn’t been until he’d met his first humans that he’d figured out just who the chairs and desks and what-have-you had originally been meant to serve. For every giant like Reuben there were dozens of three-foot-tall TV crew who relied on stepstools and ladders to get through the day. Even if it had been the right size, it probably wouldn’t have comforted him much.

He unwrapped another set of Alka-Seltzer tablets and crunched them dry, forcing himself to swallow the bitter mouthful in a single gulp. He was well past the point of waiting for them to dissolve in water. Who had time for that sort of thing when their world was collapsing around their whimsically tufted ears? The muted hiss of the TV behind the bar wasn’t helping him keep his mind off of how close he was to getting booted from his dream project. It really was a shame he couldn’t stand smoking, since a cigarette or three probably would’ve done wonders for him in his current state. Skipper’s sure wasn’t short on ashtrays.

The bottom of his glass was far too visible. He’d just raised his hand to order another gin and tonic when the bartender slid him a fancy cocktail that Howie recognized from one of the first few episodes of Lookin’, back when they were still trying to appeal to the dinner party crowd. A salt-sugar mix sparkled along the rim. He looked up, puzzled, and the barman cocked a thumb in the direction of the bar’s larger booths.

“The big guy over there said you could use one of these.”

Howie followed the pointing of that thumb with his eyes. Sure enough, there was a familiar maroon-and-yellow face occupying a corner spot. Reuben waved when he noticed Howie looking at him. There was no one else at the table, just as there was no one sitting to either side of Howie at the bar. It was like they were two distant planets in their own separate orbits. How long had Reuben been back there? Howie had been so wrapped up in his own private pity party he hadn’t noticed his friend and colleague—and, he was honest enough to admit, object of crush-like attention—come in. Reuben probably could’ve sat there all night if Howie hadn’t been told he was there. Personal experience had shown Howie that that particular evening was a pretty miserable time to drink alone.

Drinking alone, Howie decided, was for schmucks.

“Thanks, man,” he said. He slapped a few bills down on the counter. “I gotta go talk shop. Will this cover everything?”

“If it doesn’t, I’ll put the rest on your tab. I know you’re good for it.”

Howie nodded firmly. Of course he was good for it! A terminally un-silly guy like himself had to be good for something, and it turned out people really liked it when someone was willing to sit down with the accounting every so often and make sure the books were sorted out. He scooped up the drink, hopped down from his seat, and went to join Reuben in the moodily lit corner. The booth, like most of the furniture in Skipper’s, required him to jump a little to slide into it, but once his keister hit the old cushioned leather he was kicking himself for sacrificing so much of his time to the far harder stool-top. It didn’t hurt that he was now seated directly across from someone he actually liked. If their remaining time together was limited, he’d rather spend it together.

Reuben had pulled his tail up and out of the way of passers-by, which meant it took up most of the rest of the booth, and he had to shift it a bit so it wasn’t taking up too much of Howie’s space. He waited for Howie to get situated before saying anything. “Your head feeling any clearer yet?”

“Yes and no,” said Howie. He sipped at his cocktail. While not his usual blend of spirits, he had to admit it was pretty good. “Sorry I blew up at you. It’s not been a good time. I mean, you knew that already, I just…wanted to apologize. And let you know that I know it’s not your fault.”

“Figured it was something like that,” said Reuben. “You’ve been fraying at the seams ever since since this mess got started. Are you okay?”

“Probably not,” said Howie before he could stop himself. He wanted to be a pillar of strength, a regular Rock of Gibraltar, and if Reuben had asked him a mere hour or two ago Howie probably would’ve been able to fake it. Now it was almost eight o’clock on a Sunday night, he’d worked all that day and Saturday, and all he had to show for it was a raging tension headache and some shards of sodium bicarbonate between his teeth. What was he going to tell Honeybun? He slumped over until his chin rested against the table. “I think I’m working too hard.”

With a deft flourish, Reuben scooped up the brandy snifter next to him, swirled its contents to appreciate their aroma, then took a dainty sip before setting it back down next to him. Watching him move was hypnotic. Howie wasn’t sure how someone with hands that graceful could get through the day without flickering their fingers all the time. “I don’t need a crystal ball to figure that one out, Howie,” said Reuben as he rested his own chin in his hand. “You gotta take some ‘Me Time’ every so often. A spring wound up too tightly breaks.” He took another showy sip of brandy. “You don’t want that, do you?”

“What I want is a long vacation a thousand miles away from any phones or faxes, but by now I’m worried that if I stop for so much as a moment I won’t be able to get up again.”

“And that is why I bought you a drink. If you don’t unclench a little you’re going to break something in your brain and forget what a good time feels like. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”

Was Reuben flirting with him? On any other day Howie might’ve thought so, but most days didn’t see him having a little baby breakdown in front of a TV star twice in a row, and no matter how minor the second one had been (or was being, he supposed), that was still a pretty rough look. What he wouldn’t give for a mulligan on the day. If he’d known his time in the archives was going to be a wash he could’ve just called up Reuben and gone bowling or something.

“I’m responsible for so many people, Rube. If it was just a case of losing a glorified beauty pageant that’d be one thing, but if we’re canceled we’re canceled, poof, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.” He fished the fruit wedge from his cocktail and ate it. “What if me unclenching means it all falls apart?”

Reuben shrugged. “Sometimes these things happen. Big reason I pay my union dues is so they don’t happen any more than they have to.”

“But what about your visa?” blurted Howie.

“Is that what’s been bugging you?” said Reuben. He chuckled to himself like he’d just been told a story about an unbelievably witless, but no less cherished, family member. “I don’t know about you, Howie, but I’m the kind of guy who likes contingency plans for his contingency plans, and the instant I landed this role I started hunting up an emergency backup. If Lookin’ doesn’t work out, I figured I could go for a fallback with the educational team. A cooking show is basically already there, right? Working with kids isn’t my dream role or anything, but I like the little squirts, and since I’m so big they’re not going to have me be the only adult on set at a time. I know some people who would love to get another not-so-scary monster in their cast. I’d be fine.”

“And everyone else?”

“You have no idea how thirsty they are for new blood on the educational team. Like I said, I know some people. They love serious sorts like us over there.”

Did Howie want to change gears this late in the race? Was the better move to work smarter, not harder, when it came to giving his best years to the network, finding a smaller pond where he could be a bigger fish? Fifteen minutes around Blinky Junior had left him ready to climb the walls, so probably not, but Howie owed it to himself to at least think it over a little. “Call me stubborn, but I think I want to tough it out in a prime-time-adjacent spot a little longer,” he said. “The show’s not dead yet.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Reuben. He didn’t sound as loud as before. Was it a lack of enthusiasm? Was he just saying that to be nice? Was he—

It was a Sunday evening and not many people were in Skipper’s, so a big man like Reuben would naturally try to keep his voice down if there was no reason to shout over a crowd. Good grief, even when he was buzzed Howie couldn’t escape his own head at times. He gulped the last of his drink and struggled to ratchet himself down a notch. “It really is a good idea,” he said. “Your mirror-recipe quiche idea. Quiche and…Frito pie? Fritter?”

“Frittata.”

“Frittata. Frittata. Maybe once I see you make one I’ll remember the name better.” Howie straightened up in his seat. Skipper’s also smelled like other people’s cigarettes, but it was a more lived-in stink to him, one from people relaxing between one of their troubles or another instead of trying to hold it together in pursuit of the next deadline. He’d never had much use for the self-actualization books Honeybun sometimes brought home from the library, but Howie knew himself well enough to know he had to want to be able to relax if he ever was going to be able to do so, and he needed to chase that little spark of positivity from before if he expected to find that want in himself on such a frustrating day at the end of a frustrating week.

“Maybe once you eat one it’ll help, too,” said Reuben. “Remind me about it once we have a free minute and I’ll make one for you.” Now he was definitely flirting.

Howie was going to sit with that knowledge and enjoy his cocktail before acting on anything. “Sounds nice,” he said, trying his best to make his smile go all the way up to his eyes. “But I mean it about the dual-recipe thing. I think it’ll make Lookin’ for Some Cookin’ more, what’s the word, what’s the word, approachable! Approachable to the general audience.”

“Now all we have to do is make sure people don’t tune us out while waiting for the credits to roll.”

“Reuben, my man, there is nothing you can do to make the typical TV-watching American do a blessed thing. All we can do is lay down the tracks and hope nobody derails the train.” He held up his glass. “A toast to the future?”

The side of Reuben’s snifter clinked against the rim of sugar. “Skål.”

Whatever that meant it sounded cheery enough to Howie, and he let himself nurture a hair-thin sliver of hope.

He did his best to ignore the clock; it had been late for a workday but early for an evening when Howie had hauled himself into Skipper’s, and now every passing minute threatened to make things feel as late as they were. Most people thought nine o’clock was a bedtime for children and grandparents. Most people didn’t have such gruesomely early start-of-day assignments. Howie had learned the hard way what happened if he tried to stay out and party like he was his actual age. Drinks and bar snacks weren’t exactly a proper meal for someone who had to be up before dawn, either, but he had to let himself have a little bit of fun. What was the point otherwise?

A little bit of fun with Reuben was dangerous, because it reminded Howie how much of a good time they had together back before he’d let work devour his life. Even something as simple as the cheeseburgers they’d shared back when the ratings audit first started had left Howie smiling for days. He didn’t want things to end, not yet. Monday marked their last week before the do-or-die point, and after that they’d risk getting thrown into the rock tumbler that was the network’s HR department. Howie knew he was already going to be a zombie come tomorrow, so what was a little extra time between friends? He wanted one more good evening.

They’d fooled around before, yes, and those scant few times were just enough to know they had promise together, but it hadn’t been anything too wild. He didn’t know how things would go if they had more privacy than being drunk on cooking sherry while cleaning the set after hours. It sounded like the right time to find out. How did you actually ask for that kind of thing, though? Howie’s past partners had been spur-of-the-moment things, friendly sex that just sort of happened because it felt right at the time. He’d never been a flowers-and-chocolates kind of guy. Was Reuben? What was the right way to ask a close friend and not-quite-lover if they wanted to go somewhere private? Where would they even go? Howie had enough money for the subway and a little extra if he wanted to settle up his tab then and there, but he didn’t have enough for a hotel room, and his apartment was barely big enough for himself and Honeybun; he wasn’t sure if Reuben would even fit through the front door, much less if Howie’s tiny little bedroom could house such a guest. And what if he was putting the cart before the horse because Reuben wouldn’t want to be propositioned like that, anyway? Howie hated being short on answers like this.

If he stayed until he thought up the perfect solution he’d never leave. Maybe he just needed to make a move and see what other people did about it before reacting accordingly. That’s what good leadership was at least some of the time.

“I really needed this,” said Howie, “but it’s getting late.” He stood up and checked for his wallet and keys. “Thanks for the company, Rube. You’re a lifesaver.”

Reuben stood up at his full size to escape the booth, then slouched over to his usual height once he managed to free the last bit of his tail. He placed a hand on Howie’s shoulder once Howie finished shrugging into his jacket. “Hold up.”

“What is it?” asked Howie.

A nervous grin creased Reuben’s face. “You, uh, you wanna head back to my place, man? I live near here, and I got a couch if you need a place to crash.”

That answered that question. “You sure?” asked Howie, since he wanted to hear it out of Reuben’s own mouth before he’d believe his luck.

“I think you could stand to chill out some and get a change of scenery before you use up the last of your weekend. You’re always complaining about how long the train ride from work to your apartment is, anyway.”

“It’s a pain,” said Howie with a nod. “I’m not going to pass out the minute we get in because I’ll have had to walk for blocks on much shorter legs than yours, am I?” He’d learned the hard way to never take human-written directions for granted, nor to assume when people said a place had bicycles to rent that they expected a rider who would never, ever be able to reach the top shelf unassisted.

“I promise, it’s pretty close.”

Howie matched Reuben’s grin, though his was more confident. “Then sure, you can show me your record collection or something.”

“Good news,” said Reuben as he followed Howie out the door, “I got a lot of those.”

♠

True to his word, Reuben really did live just a few blocks away from Skipper’s; it was the kind of walk Howie could see being part of a bracing daily routine, at least compared to his usual subway ride across town. The apartment itself was over a used bookstore. That Howie was more interested in following Reuben up the stairs than peek through the windows at the treasures within was sign enough he was better off getting his drunken self inside. Nothing to see here, completely empty city street, just two felt-folk doing silly little felt-folk things…

Inside Reuben’s apartment things looked much like any other home in the city, save that some of the furniture was even bigger than the human-sized stuff Howie was used to, and a lot of it was lower to the ground. Bookshelves stuffed with cookbooks, gardening manuals, and airport-reading potboiler thrillers lined the walls. There was an overstuffed chair by the window with a pair of headphones left in it, the latter connected by a big curly cord to an elaborate hi-fi stereo set; glancing over the promised LPs, he’d only ever seen that much vinyl in the same place at a record store, and couldn’t figure out what the hair-dryer-shaped thing plugged in nearby was for. A fish tank of remarkable size sat caddy-corner to a boxy TV on a stand, both surrounded by clear space big enough for a big guy with a big tail to move around in without knocking anything over. That the whole place wasn’t drowning in red and yellow fuzz was a small miracle. Howie would have to ask Reuben about the kind of vacuum cleaner he used.

The promised couch, adorned with an antimacassar, took up the center of the living room, and Reuben seated himself there after hanging up his coat. He patted the cushion next to him. “C’mon over.”

Howie plopped himself down. The couch barely sank at all from his weight; its legs were so short that his legs actually reached the carpet. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt the floor beneath his feet when not actually standing on it. It was hard not to drift off right then and there. Forget the vacuum cleaner! Where did a felt-fellow have to look to find furniture that looked this good and felt this comfortable?

Some questions, however, were a little more pressing than asking Reuben about his appliances or carpenter. “You weren’t just offering me your couch for the night, right?”

Reuben lifted the hair out of his eyes to stare at Howie as though Howie’d claimed he was the secret heir to the Queen of England. “I mean, if you want, sure, it’s all yours, but I kinda thought you wanted to mess around some. ‘Cause I sure do,” he added, answering Howie’s question before he could form so much as a single syllable of it.

“I am very fine with messing around,” said Howie. “Very, very fine. Maybe more than that, if you want.” He straightened up with all the bravery the bottle could give him and rested his paws against Reuben’s upper arm. “I like you a lot, Rube. I want to see where things go while we’ve still got a chance to try them.”

A finger pressed against Howie’s lips. “No doom and gloom while you’re a guest. Let’s just worry about each other. Live in the moment.”

“Tragedy tomorrow, right?” said Howie, the bend in his snout mangling his consonants a bit.

Reuben nodded. “That’s more like it.” He pulled his hand away only to cradle Howie’s cheek against his palm. Reuben ran his thumb along where Howie’s felt hadn’t quite sprang back into shape. “Now let me help get those creases for you.”

Kissing Reuben was a little tricky because of the underbite, to say nothing of the general size difference thing, and Howie had come to enjoy that trickiness. In spite of the peppermints Reuben had grabbed on the way out he still tasted faintly of brandy and peanuts. There were worse traces to find on a man’s tongue. And what a tongue! It was long and thick, and wickedly moist, but still as soft as chamois (though not, Howie was mostly certain, actually made of chamois, or the aftertaste would be different). Reuben seemed dead set on finding out what Howie had eaten for lunch that day. From anyone else it might’ve been gross, but from Reuben? This was just what Howie wanted.

He closed his eyes and leaned into their half-embrace, losing himself bit by bit in the feeling of fingers running through his hair and behind his ears. His own stumpy paws could never hope to match that delicate touch—Howie almost never thought of them as hands for this reason—yet still he tried. Petting a neck about as thick around as one’s torso was sexy, right? Reuben didn’t seem to mind.

Howie was working up the nerve to ask Reuben if he wanted to lean back to let Howie take charge a little more when the phone rang. It was a wonder he didn’t hit the chandelier. Reuben was nice enough not to say anything as Howie scraped himself back together and wheezed until Reuben hung up the phone again. No words had been exchanged that Howie had heard, but then again, Howie had nearly launched himself through the already-drawn blinds, so perhaps his attentions had been elsewhere during the brief conversation.

“Who was it?” asked Howie as he untangled his earpieces from his horns. Thoughts of Honeybun worrying over him bubbled up just long enough for him to swat them down; he was a grown adult, and so was she, and it wasn’t like they had to read each other bedtime stories to get to sleep anymore. Knowing her, she’d probably fallen asleep at her writing desk again. One way or another she’d only have one more week of that left.

Reuben grumbled. “Just a telemarketer,” he said. He shook his head in displeasure, making his ears sway. “On a Sunday night, sheesh.”

“Way for them to ruin the mood.”

“Not for long. Watch.” Reuben took the phone from its cradle and placed it on the console. A distant dial tone buzzed from the earpiece. “Voila. No more interruptions.” He then picked a record from the shelf, slid it from its sleeve directly onto the turntable, and dropped the needle. The air was soon filled with smooth Al Green tunes at just the right volume for a quiet Sunday night’s listening. “And no nosy neighbors, either,” added Reuben.

“You’re a genius,” said Howie.

“Gotta be prepared, man. It’s a chef thing.” He looked Howie over. “You okay?”

Bolstered by soul music and the promise of privacy, Howie nodded. “Just a little high-strung.” Now it was his turn to pat the couch cushion. “Making out would probably help with that.”

“Probably.”

Thankfully for them both, it actually did.

Reclaiming that boldness from before took Howie a little time, but only a little: he was leaning into Reuben again in a matter of minutes, and in the space of one more song he’d gotten Reuben to lean back across the couch with his head against one armrest and his tail draped over the other, Howie lying across his chest. Every time Reuben took a breath it lifted Howie into the air a little bit. What would that be like if Howie could actually touch his fur instead of the weave of his cable-knit turtleneck? He’d rubbed against the stiffening rise in Reuben’s slacks before, but what did it actually look like? Just how far down did the yellow stripe along Reuben’s chin and throat go, anyway? There was only one way to find out.

He broke their kiss to whisper in Reuben’s ear: “I want to see you naked.”

The warm, slightly minty breath carrying Reuben’s soft laughter tickled at Howie’s hair. “Cool,” said Reuben. “I want to get naked.” He let a hand drag from the small of Howie’s back to rest against a fuzzy buttock. “You should get undressed, too.”

Howie sat up, still astride Reuben’s midsection, and gestured at himself. “I’m already not wearing any pants,” he said, in case Reuben had somehow missed it. Howie never wore pants. Like many felt-folk, his pelvis was as smooth and featureless as a tennis ball, aside from his tail, so public decency laws permitted him to go without covering up. Regulations about wearing shoes were equally bent when a felt-fellow was concerned. Less laundry to wash was more frugal, anyway.

Reuben chuckled. “Yeah, but that’s normal for you. Get the shirt and vest off and it’ll be different. Trust me.”

Never had a sweater-vest been removed with such alacrity. A pull-over required different skills than a dress shirt, however, especially while trying to keep from falling out of his carefully balanced straddle. Unfastening his buttons was suddenly the most difficult task Howie had ever encountered in his life. Whether because he was still tipsy or suddenly nervous again, he simply couldn’t make his paws do what he wanted them to do. How annoying.

“Do you want help with that?”

At first Howie had simply been grateful for the offered aid, but it didn’t have to just be that. He took Reuben’s hand and laid it against his front, Reuben’s fingers brushing the topmost button. “Please.”

Reuben was hardly a greenhorn when it came to working in television, and he took direction well. He tugged at Howie’s collar just enough to let him push the shaped plastic fastener through the buttonhole, revealing a hint of Howie’s sternum. He took his time, but he didn’t dally: each button was pulled free after just enough of a wait to make it a relief. The way Reuben sometimes paused to touch Howie elsewhere or play with the tuft of fur that fluffed out from Howie’s scrawny chest was fun, not frustrating. When Howie’s shirt finally fell all the way open he felt more exposed than he ever had back before he’d first bothered with shirts at all. Reuben was right: it was different. Howie shrugged out of his button-down with a happy sigh.

“My turn,” said Reuben, and Howie grudgingly got off of him.

Some felt-folk had bodies shaped so fancifully that they needed special clothes, assuming they chose to wear any at all, but Reuben was not one of them: he was a big man, very big, but his general arrangement of parts didn’t need too many accommodations beyond his size and maybe some extra sleeve detailing on the seat of his pants for his tail. Costuming was adamant about him wearing his apron while filming, though, as somewhere under all that fur he possessed actual, factual junk. Between his build and his posture it usually didn’t show, but if he was standing up all the way and in a friendly mood? It was nearly impossible not to notice. Howie had yet to see the full thing in person—though unless his luck took a turn for the catastrophic he knew he was going to find out very soon—but he had fond memories of Reuben showing off through his dress trousers before, and he’d clumsily manhandled that same hidden mass a few times. A vague idea of what awaited him was had.

When Reuben stepped out of his polka-dot boxers and propped one leg up on the couch like a sea captain, all vagary left the building.

Howie had a working knowledge of what all went into the typical dick: you had two balls, and a shaft, and a fleshy bit at the tip, and he was a fan of all those things when they were available. Reuben’s went well past available right into industrial wholesale. Measuring parts of people was extremely rude when not for medical or tailoring reasons, but Howie still suspected he owned forearms that were shorter than Reuben’s prick, and possibly thinner, too. Since the golden yellow patch on Reuben’s chin went all the way down, it meant his balls were the same color and only slightly less fluffy than everything else, though the gold fur gave way to light orange, and then tongue-pink, flesh that became smoother and shinier the further things got to the tip. It was hard to resist whistling in appreciation, so Howie didn’t resist. What was a hi-fi system for if not muffling a little catcalling between friends?

“Whew. No wonder Costuming makes sure you’ve always got at least two layers on.”

“Ha ha, yeah.” Reuben flopped back onto the couch, belly-up, with one leg dangling off the side and his tail once more commanding the armrest. “What’s my next move, boss?”

“Hmmm…” Howie paced slowly in front of the couch, making squares with his thumbs and foredigits (after that trouble with the buttons they didn’t get to be called anything else today) like he was blocking a shot. The FCC would have him nailed up by his ears if he even thought about getting Reuben near a camera like this while on the job, but off the job? He could ham it up a little. He also had some plans forming. “You want to start with that thing from last time?”

“Do I ever,” said Reuben. He spread his hands invitingly. “Come on up.”

That thing had been rushed but wonderful, and Howie was eager to see what could happen if they took a little more time without worrying if someone would barge through the door in search of their lost purse. He sat himself down on the rise of Reuben’s broad chest and leaned back, his ankles resting on Reuben’s shoulders. Good lighting and good music were doing wonders for elevating the whole milieu. This was so much better than perching on a filing cabinet.

Reuben adjusted his head—not much of a problem for a guy with as much neck as he had—and dragged his tongue across the featureless patch between Howie’s legs. Howie groaned happily. This kind of thing had to be context-sensitive, since he’d never had so much as a wistful thought when sitting in a chair or even riding in a bumpy bus, but a single lick from Reuben was enough to send an electric thrill down Howie’s spine and make his tail poof out like a bottle brush for the umpteenth time that day, but in a good way, for a change. The second lick was even better. Howie wasn’t sure what one was supposed to call this, exactly, since he didn’t have anything to eat out or suck off down there. Being eaten off, maybe? No, that sounded like he was being used as dinnerware, and that was not the kind of thinking he wanted anywhere near his conscious mind right now. Whatever Reuben was doing, he was very good at it, and Howie was happy to lean back and trust someone else to do their job for a little.

On their first attempt at this Reuben had held onto Howie’s hips to keep him from falling. Now that Howie was better seated, this freed up Reuben’s hands to go roaming: he squeezed at Howie’s inner thighs, stroked along the base of Howie’s tail, and (most importantly) touched and twiddled between laps of that wonderfully oversized tongue. Howie was willing to be convinced those were erogenous zones no matter how boring he was during his day-to-day routine. Not that he’d ever had trouble getting himself off when the mood struck, of course, but the clumsy fumblings of a paw were nothing compared to the deft touch of a professional chef.

A knot of tension formed in the pit of Howie’s stomach, not the kind of tension that made him reach for the Alka-Seltzer again but something more like a fuse being lit, or a sneeze preparing to tickle. He trembled. He tried, paradoxically, to push away from Reuben’s mouth, and thank goodness Reuben was so forward-thinking and alert because he held Howie in place until one final swipe of his tongue sent Howie teetering over the edge. For the first time in entirely too long, he came.

“Wow,” said Howie, too lost to the stars in his head to say more.

He lay limp in Reuben’s arms as he caught his breath. He felt like pudding. No, not pudding. He felt relaxed. He’d done it! He’d managed to chill out for the length of one entire sexual act! With how the preceding month had gone he felt like he deserved a medal for that. If Howie got one, Reuben deserved one, too, but what would his say? Good Sex Guy, maybe. Someone who was better at writing could handle that one if it ever came down to it.

“Very courteous of you to let me go first,” said Howie once he was able to string together words again.

Reuben gave him a cuddle. “That’s just proper hospitality. You are my guest. Besides, you needed it.”

“Did I ever.” He glanced over his shoulder at Reuben’s still very big and very hard dick. “You’re not getting rid of me until you let me return the favor, you know.”

“Oh no, how awful,” said Reuben with a grin.

Howie shuffled around to face Reuben’s fearsome member and slid down his stomach until he was in Reuben’s lap, Reuben’s sunset-colored shaft rising between Howie’s legs. It was so warm! Very warm. Nice and firm to the touch, too, but with a little bit of give in all the right places, and a texture that made him want to keep touching it. It even smelled great. The tricky part was how much there was of it. Howie was used to jerking guys off and sometimes giving a little head if he was in the mood for it, but those had nearly always been guys around his own height. Reuben was anything but that. Back in trade school Howie had known a guy who could eat an entire baguette in one bite, and even he might have balked at this. Howie absently ran his paws along the underside of Reuben’s shaft as he tried to figure out the best way to go from there for both of them.

“Do you need me to sit up?” asked Reuben, his voice sounding far away from Howie’s current perch.

Howie waved a paw and shook his head. “No, no, I’ve got this. Just let me think a little. And, uh, tell me if you don’t like anything.”

“Of course.”

Getting his mouth around that behemoth directly was a health and safety hazard, and his own tongue was too small to get the job done if they wanted to get any sleep at all that night, though Howie still stole a few tastes for novelty factor. Reuben’s dick pressed hotly against Howie’s front even after taking his mouth away. What could he do with a living hobby-horse like this that would be fair compensation for that unforgettable first act? As Howie leaned forward to pull Reuben closer to him the answer came to him: when life gave you a hobby-horse, you rode it.

With a wiggle and a twist he managed to seat himself right at the root of Reuben’s shaft, his thighs squeezing around the lowermost yellow part and his feet braced against Reuben’s big, soft legs. If he stretched just right he could get his paws on Reuben’s balls, which even more than the rest of his junk had the perfect texture for groping, fondling, and all other forms of general playing-with. The happy noise Reuben made when Howie gave him a two-fisted grab implied Reuben wouldn’t mind Howie exploring those options; that was useful information, and Howie allowed himself a bit of fiddling around as a treat for making such good progress, but he didn’t want Reuben to not mind, he wanted Reuben to come. He gripped Reuben right around the glans and shifted his hips forward against Reuben’s base as he pulled down with both paws. Gently at first, since he didn’t yet know Reuben’s tolerances, Howie’s pace quickened little by little until he was bouncing along like a bronco buster. That he was hanging on for dear life like a rodeo star seemed appropriate.

A full-body handjob seemed to be the kind of thing Reuben responded to. Howie heard him hiss and moan with pleasure, and the one time Howie dared glance over his shoulder he saw Reuben had thrown his head back with one hand over his eyes like he’d caught a case of the vapors. That was a good performance evaluation if Howie had ever seen one! It spurred him to work even more furiously, and Howie kept up that frenetic pace until he felt the brush of a huge yet nimble hand against his back.

“I’m real close, man,” mumbled Reuben.

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Howie said. He dared another lick at the risk of smacking himself in the glasses again. “Finish the job, Reuben.”

Reuben’s legs shook, his toes curled, and whatever tensions he’d been building arced over Howie’s shoulder to spatter against Reuben’s cheery goldenrod underbelly.

Egad! It had been long enough since he’d been with someone whose genitalia wasn’t just theoretical that he’d almost forgotten what a statement they could make, and a guy as big as Reuben could make one whopper of a statement. Howie recalled the comments of partners past and pressed his thumbs against Reuben’s base along the underside, coaxing out anything that might be left there. He was rewarded with a whine and the need to wash his paws for his trouble. It was nothing compared to Reuben’s own sticky spot, and it tasted a little like Reuben’s dick but moreso, so Howie considered that one a mixed blessing more than a casualty. He did need to wash his paws, though.

“Here, let me see those,” said Reuben, who had recovered enough to sit up a little. Howie splayed his fingers (recently re-promoted from digit duty) for Reuben, who startled him by slurping them until they weren’t about to leave tacky fingerprints everywhere, if not technically clean. Reuben then did the same with his own little wet spot. Between the length of his neck and the length of his tongue it was like watching a highly questionable anteater. If a man had to ejaculate, Howie mused, there were worse things than being tidy about it.

They lay together on the couch in silence until the record reached its end, at which point Reuben sat up again, careful not to dislodge Howie.

“Bedtime?” Howie asked.

“Yeah,” said Reuben. “It’s way closer to midnight than I expected, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve got an early call tomorrow.” He waited for Howie to roll off of him before standing up. “We’re already locked up, and I fed the fish, so I’ll get the lights and the stereo and we’ll be prepped for dreamland.”

Howie stretched and nodded. “Let me swish with some mouthwash and I can help get the couch made up,” he said.

This earned him a snort from Reuben. “Swish if you want, but I’d like it if you came to bed after. You should sleep on a proper mattress. I can share.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, but I want to. Just wash your hands first, Captain Stickyfingers.”

Prepping for bed took no time at all even with two of them needing to trade off using the washroom. Reuben’s part of town made entirely different night noises than the ones Howie was used to, but it turned out that didn’t matter when he had someone big, warm, and ever so fluffy to cuddle as he drifted off to sleep. For being such a new development, Howie felt like he belonged tucked up into Reuben’s arm like a teddy bear. He did notice that the remnants of the come streak he’d help put on Reuben’s stomach was missing, though, and commented as much.

“Spot cleaning,” said Reuben. “You grow up having this much hair, you either pick up a few tricks to make living with it bearable or just shave it all off to save yourself the trouble.”

“I thought the water wasn’t running for that long while you were in there,” said Howie around a yawn.

“It’s a bit late for a shower. Well, for drying out all the way after a shower.”

Howie’s sleepy thoughts drifted back towards the hair-dryer-shaped thing by the hi-fi set, which suddenly made a lot more sense. A pair of really good headphones probably didn’t care how loud the dryer was or how long it was blowing so long as the insulation on the speakers was of high enough quality. Someone with ears as big as Reuben’s probably had lots of fascinating opinions about how to survive the gauntlet that was everyday acoustics. “That makes sense.”

“Like I said, you adapt or you buzz it. Can’t keep doing the same thing over and over if it doesn’t work, y’know?”

If Howie had been more awake he might’ve objected to such an on-the-nose remark, but he was moments away from being out for good. He just needed to finish up one more thing. “Thanks, Reuben,” he said, dreamily. “You’re the best chef a producer could ever have.”

“Happy to be of service, boss. Goodnight.”

Howie wasn’t sure if he managed to say goodnight, himself, because the next thing he knew the world was black and comfortable.

♠

What should have been a lovely, afterglow-tinged morning was interrupted by the shriek of Reuben’s alarm clock—which had made it to its fourth snooze by the time it was silenced, or so the cheeky little counter on the side claimed—and the realization that they needed to be at the studio immediately. It struck Howie as a special breed of unfair that he’d spent the night with a skilled chef and wasn’t even getting breakfast; not knowing where Reuben kept the bread, or if he even owned a toaster at all, meant Howie was rushing out the door on a completely empty stomach while Reuben was still busy brushing out his fur. Something deep in the pit of Howie’s gut told him this was going to be the least of his problems that day.

He felt bad about barely giving Reuben so much as a kiss before leaving. He felt bad about a lot of things, really, and they were all conspiring to ruin the lingering good vibes from last night. Alas, a producer didn’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for himself when there was television to be made, and so Howie took just enough time to change into a fresh shirt at his locker—a serious man of the felt-folk knew better than to not prepare for a mess while on the job, since some days it felt like he was a magnet for them—before filling up a cup with awful break room coffee and rushing down the hall as fast as he could without scalding himself.

Honeybun intercepted him on his way to the studio and kept his stride; both of them were good at summoning nervous energy. “Howie! Where were you? I called everywhere!”

“I was at Reuben’s,” he said. He knew he’d forgotten something last night. Would it have been better or worse if they hadn’t taken the phone off the hook? “We were out late at Skipper’s after I’d had my fill of overtime, and he lives walking distance from there, so he let me crash for the night. I’m sorry I forgot to call about it. I’d had a few.” Howie ignored the look Honeybun shot him. He’d give her the whole truth later, since the two of them had never been too shy about one another’s private lives, but now was not the time; if he didn’t have himself in place in ten minutes or less he might as well not have come in at all.

“You should be sorry about it,” said Honeybun. “Last night I got a call from Blinky—”

“Screenwriter Blinky?”

“Ex-screenwriter Blinky. He told me he can’t take the pressure the small screen demands of a writer, so he’s moving cross-country to work with his cousin in theater, and he’s taking the rest of his scripts with him. He meant what he said, too. I looked.”

Howie somehow managed to neither stumble nor spit out a mouthful of coffee at the news. If he just kept walking, maybe he’d forget how to stop. “Those were meant to last us the rest of the week! I was here all day Sunday working on them! We were going to be doing another read-through before taping today! What are we supposed to do now?”

“You’re supposed to thank your dear sister for having made copies of Blinky’s stuff for research purposes,” said Honeybun. She thrust a three-ring binder at Howie’s hands. “I salvaged what I could, paired it with the notes you left behind in the archives, and tried to punch things up. You should probably flip through that sooner than later.”

“I can’t believe he’d try to sabotage us like this.”

“It’s not sabotage, Howie, it’s burnout. He’ll send me a card once he gets his family situated.”

A red flag the size of a Winnebago unfurled in Howie’s brain. “Won’t there be legal problems if we use material Blinky didn’t formally surrender to the network?”

Honeybun looked smug. “That’s my secret weapon: I threw it all out for the finished product, except for the most basic stuff we’d personally worked on together. It was some real chainsaw surgery.”

“So next to none of this is proven work…?”

“Our Sponsor wants fresh ideas, so he’s gonna get fresh ideas. Now look through it! I’ve got Princess making cue cards for today, but we can’t rely on those forever.”

The binder was heavy with photocopied papers, themselves bristling with annotated sticky notes, and a few pages had clearly been ripped from the legal pad he’d abandoned in the archives yesterday. Some of them looked more dug out of the trash than others. Howie was hesitant to give it more than a passing glance while on the move; if it fell apart, he could see himself wasting valuable time scrambling for pages as they inevitably drifted into the path of everyone else who needed to use the same hallway. One thing did catch his eye, however: “Why does it say I have lines? My place is behind the camera, not in front of it.”

“What did I say about trying fresh ideas? Worst that can happen is we get canceled. And that’s going to happen no matter what unless we take the right shot in the dark.” Honeybun rapped the binder with a fuzzy knuckle. “You and Rube have good chemistry, so I figured I’d lean into it.”

“But we’re not funny.“

She scoffed. “And I overwrite for funny people. Just do what you can and see what the audience thinks.”

There had been a great many scenarios Howie had imagined were waiting for him at the network building, but none of them had involved acting. He tried to skim the first page of the binder as best he could without dumping his coffee on himself. The basic skeleton was familiar, since he’d spoken with Blinky the week before about what recipes Reuben wanted to work with and new ideas they could try, but usually a Lookin’ for some Cookin’ script was just Reuben doing his best out there by himself. Honeybun’s revisions put Howie into something of a master of ceremonies role, someone to greet the audience and introduce both Reuben and whatever he was going to be making before the show really got rolling in earnest. Did people really want this? Howie spent so much of his waking hours actually making television that he neglected to watch it very much; Honeybun could claim pretty much anything and he’d believe her out of lack of a reason not to.

Something else caught Howie’s attention as he hurriedly leafed through the script. “It’s a two-recipe show?”

“Yeah,” said Honeybun. “I caught Reuben late last night when I swung by to clean up Blinky’s crater, and he said you two had been doing some after-hours work of your own before you stressed out, blew up, and walked off. He said he was going to go find you in a little, but before that, he gave me your notes” —and here Howie realized she was carrying a familiar-looking legal pad with her— “and described that mirror idea. I just kind of wrote around what he told me. What’s a frittata?”

“It’s like scrambled eggs but fancier.”

“Who says scrambled eggs aren’t fancy?”

Howie couldn’t help but crack a smile. “See, this is why you and I aren’t chefs.” He paused long enough to talk to the lighting and sound crew before turning back to Honeybun. “Do I need to get changed?”

“Talk to Makeup and they’ll probably want to hit you with a brush and a curry comb for the cameras, but it’s very important you stay dressed like a substitute history teacher.”

“Hey!”

“Keep the clipboard and headphones, too. You have to look the part of a guy in the trenches.”

“I thought I had to look like a substitute history teacher?”

“You can manage both at once,” said Honeybun.

He read over a few more lines. “I still don’t get why you’re sticking me out there like this. I’m not star material and never have been. You know this.”

Honeybun placed her paws on his shoulders and leaned in, peering at him over both their sets of glasses. “I know you’re not a funny person, and neither is Reuben, and I’m not a funny person, either. What I am doing is putting you in a funny situation. Just read the cue cards, go with the flow, and don’t think about anything other than hitting your next mark. Can you trust me on this?”

Could Howie trust her on this? Lookin’ for Some Cookin’ was filmed before a live studio audience (who, he noticed, had already completely filled out the available seats), but it didn’t actually broadcast in real time; they could potentially fix the worst gaffes in post if everyone worked at lightning speed the minute the cameras turned off. Everything else was going to be luck of the draw. Howie had only gotten to where he was today by taking chances—on moving to a human-centric city, on going into television, on agreeing to let Reuben take him home—so he owed Honeybun that much.

Speaking of Reuben, where was he? Howie had stopped long enough to give him a goodbye peck that morning but had otherwise torn out of there like a cartoon roadrunner. It was, thankfully, pretty easy to spot a fluffy cranberry mountain in a starched white toque in a studio full of far, far smaller people. Reuben caught his eye and waved before going back to tending to getting some made-before-the-show examples actually made. He was the chef, with his face in the title card and all the promotional material and his name stapled to every recipe, so it was his hams in the fire more than anyone’s. He looked as chill as ever. If Reuben was on board with it, Howie would just have to be, too. 

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he said.

“That’s the spirit!” said Honeybun. “Go make some magic!” She slapped him on the back with a lot more force than he expected, making him stagger and stumble. They’d both been able to bonk each other since they were kids, and if she felt like he deserved a little not-too-roughhousing in exchange for making her worry herself sick, maybe he needed to get some common sense knocked into him. He owed her the biggest apology lunch a working stiff’s paycheck could buy once they survived the taping. Maybe Reuben would know a good place.

As Howie unhooked his glasses from his horns for the second time in as many days, he put himself firmly into director/producer mode. It was time to make some darn good television.

The clock ticked down and Howie was everywhere on set at once. He endured the Makeup people fussing over his hair and chased away the Costuming people trying to convince Reuben to swap into yet another apron. He signed off on sound checks, talked to the camera guys, and double-checked that all the tools and ingredients were where Reuben needed them to be. He made sure the cue cards were legible. He verified the presence of the medic and the many fire extinguishers around the set. He drank so much coffee. When the critical hour actually came, he clambered up the stepladder they’d placed on his mark and called for quiet on the set. People listened, because for all his flaws and foibles, Howie knew how to command a crew, and he wasn’t yet ready to go down with this ship.

As he held up both paws for the first five-second countdown of many, Howie tried not to think about whether the magic they’d be making would spin straw into gold, or if he’d end up a toad at the end of the day.

♠

The week of work before what Howie had come to think of as the final day passed in the blink of an eye, though with how tired he was by the end of the day he couldn’t ignore how hard he (and, no doubt, everyone else in the crew) had pushed to reach the finish line. Reuben’s idea of cooking two related recipes of two very different skill levels clicked with the audience, and Honeybun’s idea of having him and Howie bounce off each other was even more successful: the first few letters about the new format had liked Howie’s no-nonsense persona, how his lack of cooking skill made it easy to relate to him, and how having him in front of the camera made it feel like the viewers at home were getting to peek behind the scenes, despite Lookin’ for Some Cookin’ having just as much spit and polish as it always had. Sometimes the kids drew his picture, too. Howie wasn’t sure if he liked being typecast as the Goofus to Reuben’s Gallant, but he could always hash that out with Honeybun later.

Howie did not have some secret reserve of comedy prowess hidden deep inside. After a few attempts on Monday and Tuesday, Honeybun had cut scripted jokes entirely, focusing instead on the natural whimsy that happened when two or more felt-folk came together to put on a show. That got laughs. Laughs meant better numbers. Better numbers meant continued survival. At the rate things were going Howie was even daring to think ahead a little; Reuben was dead-set against taking sponsorships from food or kitchenware companies, but maybe there was room for cutting a deal with the fire extinguisher company they used? Nothing said quality like being able to keep up with a working chef.

Once Friday’s production was in the can, he and Reuben found themselves waiting in the hallway outside Our Sponsor’s office. Howie wrung his paws. They’d done the impossible, but was the impossible enough? He felt like he was in freefall, and unlike less than a week ago he wasn’t fiending for cocktails and stomach tabs. That he was no longer capable of influencing things was liberating, in a way; he’d done his best, and he could do no more, and now all he had to do was learn whether or not he had a metaphorical parachute. Whether sink or swim, soar or splat, nothing could change the fact that the entire Lookin’ team had succeeded in their goal of making some darn good television.

Reuben drummed his fingers on his knees. Being an actor he had less experience with waiting around for executives to remember he existed, so it was no surprise he was nervous. Howie placed a paw on Reuben’s arm and squeezed.

“First time face-to-face with the big man?” he asked. When Reuben nodded, Howie patted the spot where he’d squeezed. “He runs the show and signs the checks, but remember: at the end of the day he’s just another guy.”

“I dunno, I’ve heard rumors,” said Reuben.

Howie had heard rumors of his own, but swapping them in front of Our Sponsor’s secretary felt like a faux pas. Instead he returned his paws to his lap and tried not to swing his feet too aggressively. “Just keep your ears open and your mouth shut, unless he asks a question, and if he asks you to look at a chart you’d better actually read it.” He fussed with his hair a bit, though he needn’t have bothered; Makeup had developed a fondness for blasting him with high-strength hairspray once they decided his shaggy ‘do was the right kind of disheveled for his “scruffy professional” look. He’d only gotten out of getting his tail sprayed up by reminding them of how many times it risked getting singed during a typical day of shooting. Howie and Reuben were hardly agents of chaos, but that didn’t mean chaos didn’t try coming for them anyway.

A panel on the secretary’s desk buzzed and she waved towards the door. “And now for a word from Our Sponsor,” she said, completely straight-faced. How much did they pay her to say that? Probably not enough.

Inside, Our Sponsor had turned his big overstuffed chair to face away from them, wheeling it around only when they closed the door. His many-colored mane was bright against his dark suit. A rolled-up chart on a stand stood next to a Reuben-sized desk, and judging by the collapsed pointer atop said desk, Howie knew it was going to have some form of statistics on it. He prayed that they were good.

“Sit down, boys, sit down,” he said in his blandly crisp Mid-Atlantic accent, waving at a pair of chairs in front of his desk. His eyes goggled slightly as he talked. “Reuben and Howie, right? I want to talk numbers with you two.”

Soar or splat, thought Howie. “Of course, sir,” is what he said, instead.

“Let’s not mince words,” said Our Sponsor, and Howie’s tail puffed with anxiety as he awaited the rest of that sentence. “I wasn’t sure how you’d take to your little assignment at first, and those first few weeks had me worried, but after a wobbly Monday you two have knocked it out of the park. Good work!” He took up the pointer and extended it with a snap of his wrist, then caught the ring on the pull-chart with its tip. This revealed an especially incomprehensible graph that did not, at first glance, adhere to the laws of time or space. “Now, some of these are just estimations until the newfangled Nielsen people get back to me, but you can see here how viewer retention has gone up, up, up! No more dead zone between our two heavy hitters! That makes the brands happy, boys, and when the brands are happy, I’m even happier.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Howie, part of him still waiting for the other shoe to drop even as he was cheering on the inside.

Our Sponsor slapped at part of the graph that vaguely, if Howie squinted, looked like an upward trend. “What’s got me pleased as Punch and Judy is how much of your old audience you kept on. These little experiments, sometimes you see them having to dump the entire old viewerbase, and that’s a shame, boys, a crying shame. We here at the network want people to know they can count on us to be predictably unpredictable, so they know what they’re gonna get and when, so any time we have to tell someone they can’t find the same old chuckles where they always have, well, it just breaks my heart.”

Howie, who knew better than to voice doubts on the presence or absence of a heart in a studio executive, nodded in silence. Reuben followed his lead.

“I’m glad you dumped the weird gimmicks for the new format. Whoever told you to be on-screen deserves a raise, Howie, because you two have chemistry. Two people mean there can be little stories, some real personal drama, even when it’s just a master trying to guide their helpless apprentice. It’s only been four days since that quiche episode aired and the letters department has been glowing.” Our Sponsor chuckled to himself. “It’s just classic comedy: you put a big guy with a little guy and let the jokes happen naturally.”

Reuben and Howie exchanged glances. Had it really been that easy? Was a little shake-up all it had taken to save the show? Howie broke his own rule and asked a question without being prompted. “So are we clear to come in to work on Monday?” he asked.

“Hm? Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

“When you last had me in here, you mentioned that things were looking pretty dire, and major changes—the kind that weren’t just changing a time slot—were the only thing that was going to save the show. Did we manage to keep the show? And our jobs?”

“Who said anything about losing your jobs?” asked Our Sponsor.

Either shape things up or ship them out! he’d said to Howie during their previous meeting. We can’t go broke fixing something too broken! “I was under the impression the network would be terminating our current contracts if we failed to produce results, sir,” Howie said, straining to keep his voice even and his manner polite.

“No, no, we would’ve thought of something, but I wanted you to solve things yourselves before we got any outside hands in the mix. You’re the ones who make the magic happen, after all.” He collapsed the pointer between the palms of his paws with a snap. “Getting things done on the inside means we know how to fix up future shows that start flagging, and you boys were a perfect little guinea pig for the better-television-making experiment.”

Howie really, really hoped he could excuse the circumference of his tail on the weather or something, because it had fluffed out to enormous proportions. “Experiment?”

“Gotta look towards the future, kiddo! Tomorrow’s just a day away!” Our Sponsor cocked his head, then thumped his desk like he’d remembered something. “Ah, that’s right, we weren’t going to tell you about it as part of the experiment! Well, cat’s out of the bag, you all did great and we’re very proud. They say we felt-folk are incapable of managing ourselves and you’ve proved ’em all wrong. When can we start directing other flagging shows to your doorstep, and how much extra is it going to cost?”

“We’ll, uh, we’ll get some numbers together by next Friday,” said Howie. He’d yet to figure out if this counted as soaring or splatting, but in the case of the latter he’d definitely managed to bounce.

“And our writing team will need a raise,” added Reuben. “We might need to run some clip shows until they can catch their breath from the crunching we’ve been doing.”

Howie nodded. “Which will also be part of the numbers, sir.”

“Perfect,” said Our Sponsor. “Just one more thing, though, something I noticed when I was giving things a watch myself…”

They both leaned forward towards him at once, Reuben’s ears perking up like a rabbit’s in the process. “Yes, sir?”

Had Our Sponsor noticed how they spent their time together? Did people gossip about those nights out at Skipper’s, or the occasional after-hours visits to Reuben’s place for dominoes (and otherwise)? Was there something about that on-air chemistry of theirs that could read a little different if you squinted? Felt-folk didn’t care about men carrying on with men the way the rest of America sure seemed to, so would that be a problem with people outside the network? Howie had to stop inventing new problems for himself to worry about when there were plenty of real ones more worthy of his attention.

Our Sponsor stood up, folded his paws behind his back, and said, in his most lives-in-the-balance-of-his-whims voice, “What in the name of all the buttons in the box is a frittata?”

“So long as you keep us on the air, sir, we can keep answering excellent questions like that one in ways both portentous and polite,” said Reuben. Howie wasn’t sure if that was more like what had been requested or less like it, since he wasn’t up on his Sondheim by any means, but by the way Our Sponsor was nodding, he’d gladly accept being a pioneering Trojan horse in the name of getting unfunny people into the hearts and minds of viewers everywhere.

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