Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (36 page)

Which doesn’t explain why, blearily sitting on the pot, I see the cat again in front of me.

It is, unlike the rest of the world, perfectly clear in detail. It is covered with rabbit fur, dyed black, and eight inches long. Its legs are well delineated from its body, giving it a crouching appearance. The eyes gaze blankly at me. Neither of us move.

Yes, I would have wanted it as a child: the imitation of life, the softness of the fur, would have enchanted me. My allergies prevented us ever having pets, so I compensated with stuffed animals. I do not want it now, here in the bathroom, inexplicable and surreal.

I almost speak, but what would I ask this toy that sits here chilling me colder than any air conditioning?

Surely when I blink it’ll vanish, but it remains, even when I stand and wipe and flush. My feet are cold, but a bead of sweat crawls its solitary way down my back. I step around it and to the door.

And this time, when I look behind me, it is indeed gone. But the hair on the nape of my neck keeps standing up, bristling hard and insistent.

I see it every night after that. Sometimes during the day. Once, sitting next to my grandmother in the back seat. She and my mother don’t see it, but my grandmother keeps telling the same inconclusive story of her failure to buy it over and over. Most of the time I could laugh her off but this time I was near the boiling point, subjected to the toy’s blank but menacing stare, and I could tell my mother knew it.

"Don’t let her get to you,” she says as my grandmother moved off to the restaurant bathroom.

I sip from my coffee. “I think I’m stressed,” I say.

“
About what?”

I shrug, watching wisps of steam curl up from the surface of the drink.

I let her questions slide off me in that way that only a family member can and, as my grandmother returns to the table, she lets it go.

My mother and I try to infect each other with song memes. I start with Afternoon Delight, she counters with Benny and the Jets. I can feel my grandmother listening in the back, wanting to join in but unable to interject herself in the flow of banter.

It goes on and on. If I Had a Hammer. The Sesame Street Song. Silver Bells. The Wisconsin cheese jingle. YMCA. It’s a Small World After All. The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Copacabana. Yellow Submarine. Kokomo. I Will Survive. Piano Man.

Finally I pull out the biggest gun I know and begin singing Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”.

“
Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me…”

“
Argh,” my mother says. “You can stop right there.”

“
The Carriage held but just Ourselves - and Immortality.”

“
We used to sing that in choir,” Grandmother said. “But with different words.”

And with that the game is stopped, dead. I can tell my mother’s fighting back a smart-ass reply that will spark a fight to last us the next hundred miles. I sink further down into my seat, and rest my cheek against the cold glass. In my head, the words flicker past: “Since then – tis Centuries – and yet feels shorter than the Day, I first surmised the Horse’s Heads were towards Eternity.”

Without looking back, I know the stuffed cat is sitting on the seat behind me.

The nursing home brochures lie ignored on the backseat as my grandmother stares out the window, watching the sweep of wire from one telephone to the next and counting the road markers aloud. The home is on the outskirts of Seattle, in a small town that acts as a bedroom community for the city. Of all the choices, it offers the most freedom to its occupants: my grandmother can take advantage of daily bus trips to the mall and grocery store, and weekly ones to the library and church. She’ll have a kitchenette and her own balcony.

Still, she’s outraged, and all through the trip she needles both my mother and I, looking for weak spots. When she tries it on me, I become amiably stupid, letting all double meanings slide right past. With my mother, she has better luck; by the time we’re in Idaho, my mother, tired and cranky, is ready to explode when my grandmother refuses the third restaurant with her usual timid demurrals.

With a wild swing of the wheel, my mother pulls over onto the side of the road. Red grass spots the landscape here; hills of shale rise up on either side, and a black and white magpie sits on a wire fence, flicking its tail back and forth as it watches us.

“
We’re doing this for you!” she shouts at my grandmother. “You might cut us a little slack. We’re not serial killers carting you off to be cut up. We’re your family, trying to do the best we can.”

My grandmother blinks at her in silence.

My mother leans her head on the wheel and takes a deep breath. I rub her shoulder.

“
Long John Silver’s would be fine then,” my grandmother says.

“
Okay.”

I see the cat as soon as we walk in; a child over by the condiments counter is carrying it around by one front leg. I ignore it.

Both my mother and my grandmother pat my back as we stand in line. I shift my weight forward and focus on the menu.

The cat lies in the aisle, discarded, while its owner stuffs his pockets with packets of tartar sauce. I give them a wide berth.

Before any of us have even unwrapped our food, my grandmother launches into a fresh barrage. “I have a lot of things I need to do, in my house,” she tells my mother.

“
We’re selling your house.”

“
Before we can sell it, there are things I need to do.”

“
Like what?”

“
Paint that front railing.”

“
I’ll find someone to do it. What else? Shayla, write all this down.” She flaps a hand at me in command and I make a face at her. Grandmother sinks back into her seat, flummoxed by the mocking cooperation. She eats her fish burger in silence under the fluorescent glare.

The drone of the lights is echoed behind her eyes, painful and dry. I’m ready for this trip to be over.

Every night, in every motel we stop in, it comes.

I will not touch it, but its presence buzzes like angry electricity in my head. It looks up at me, dirty and a little shopworn, as my grandmother described it.

Every morning she tells us the reasons why she cannot go to the nursing home. Last night I caught my mother crying in the bathroom; she waved me away with a broad, frantic swoop of her hand.

My grandmother sits playing solitaire on the table by the window. I stand behind her, watching her play. She builds up stacks of cards to win, meticulous and precise.

“
Not too shabby for an old woman,” she says, squinting at me.

“
I’m sorry, Grandma. If you can think of any alternative, I’m willing to listen to it, but I can’t think of anything and neither can Mom. You can’t live in your house by yourself any more. You almost burned it down and then fell on the steps, all in the space of a day.”

“
You’d have been a little shaky too with all those firemen tramping through your yard!”

“
I know.” I wait, looking at her, but she doesn’t speak to me again.

We come in up I-5, heading into Seattle and the hospital district. It’s late evening, but there is still plenty of light in the sky, this Northwest endless summer day. The Space Needle is poised against the sky to our left.

“
We could go eat dinner first,” my grandmother says.

“
Let’s get you checked in, then we can worry about that.”

“
You could pick the place,” my grandmother says, her voice pleading. A hard lump rises to the back of my throat, but my mother shakes her head, looking tired and old.

“
No.” My mother speaks gently, her hands firm on the steering wheel.

I see the cat on one side, then another. When I look in the back seat, my grandmother sits with it behind her. She catches my eye.

“
Do you forgive me for the kitty?” she says.

I reach over the seat to take her hands. They are cold and brittle, so I rub them in mine.

“
Of course I do,” I say. Looking at her, I ask, “Do you forgive us?”

My mother stops humming as my grandmother releases my hands and leans back in the seat, looking out the window. The unanswered silence in the car is endless. It continues along Highway 520, and then our turn, and another turn.

“
Here we are,” my mother says.

When we pull in and my mother gets out of the car to fetch the suitcase from the trunk, my grandmother leans forward. I see the cat on every side, like shimmers of heat. Through the haze she grips my face, a hand framing it on either side, a touch as light as a phantasm.

“
I forgive you,” she says, her voice shaking. We lean our heads together, matching tears.

I do not know what I expected; it was not what happened. I did not expect to see the cat materialize under her feet, to see her trip, fall forward to lie crumpled like a sodden napkin. The cat vanishes as I scramble from the curb towards her, but she is on the ground. She grabs my wrist, and then my mother’s as well as she leans down.

“
I forgive you!” she says loudly.

The life goes out of her with the suddenness of a stone sinking into water, and she is gone, along with the cat, and now I remember wanting it. Wanting it more than anything else in the world.

It's probably apparent that this story is largely autobiographical. I'll leave it at that, and dedicate it to Nellie Warner MacDonald. You'll be missed. The story won 2
^nd
prize in the ChiZine contest in 2005 and was my first pro publication.

A Chronology of Tabat

The Shadow Wars

Love, Resurrected

A Twine of Flame

Early Tabat

How Dogs Came To The New Continent

99 Statues And A Murder

Modern-day Tabat

The Bear

The Bumblety’s Marble

Dryad’s Kiss

Events at Fort Plentitude

I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said

In the Lesser Southern Isles

The Moon’s Accomplice (novel)

Narrative of a Beast’s Life

Sugar

Legends and Fairytales

The Dead Girl’s Wedding March

A Key Decides Its Destiny

As noted elsewhere, the seaport of Tabat is a major seaport in the world in which many of my stories and the novel
The Moon’s Accomplice
are set. It is located on the south-eastern coast of the New Continent, an area settled by refugees from the Old Continent, destroyed by wars between rival sorcerers, as detailed in “A Twine of Flame” and “Sugar.”

I originally designed Tabat for an online game that never came to fruition. I found, though, that I’d imagined it clearly enough—as I should have, having drawn out and described its major streets and landmarks—that I felt compelled to tell some of the stories taking place within it. I can say with assurance that it has plenty more to supply.

One of the neat things about working with the game was that I could add descriptions that were conditional, that only appeared under certain circumstances, such as a reek of decaying seaweed at high tide or drifting petals in a garden in early spring when a wind was blowing. It's because of that, I think, that I know the landscape of Tabat well – the Piskie Wood, which celebrates an ancient war; the great Plaza which holds the most wonderful waterfall on the continent; the trams which move pedestrians along its terraces; the College of Sorcerers; the Moonway, whose tiles change color with the phases of the three moons. It's my city and I love it. I hope you enjoy your stays there as much as I do.

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