Dandelyon's Worlds

It was starting to get dark outside, and Fluffy’s human was still out shopping. She positioned herself by the door, ready to sprint. It was vital that she get outside before moonrise, though her human wouldn’t like that at all. She’d lose out on several days’ worth of canned food, as a punishment—but it would be worth it.

She was starting to itch when the woman finally came in, burdened with a half-dozen grocery bags. Fluffy was off like a shot, almost knocking her human down, but at least she was outside. She darted under the porch. But the itch was getting worse. She couldn’t stay here, and risk getting trapped.

She darted out the other side of the porch, though she usually avoided that side of the yard—the neighborhood terrorist lived in the next yard. No one wanted to chance being the focus of his attention. And Fluffy least of all, being very much a timid indoor cat.

But she’d had enough. Last month she had set things in motion; this month—

She sat down right at the edge of the yard, where a bush hid her from her human, but not the terrorist next door, and started to clean her paws. The itch grew, and the terrorist noticed her, and started barking from his humans’ porch.

As usual, his humans weren’t home; no one arrived to tell him quiet down. As he leapt the rail to get to her, the moon crested the horizon, and the itch changed to a burn. Fluffy grew and grew, her form twisting and shifting. Her fur changed, the white patches swallowed up in the black, and her claws and teeth lengthened proportionately.

Red-eyed, she lifted a wolf’s paw and swatted the neighbor’s dog to the ground.

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Katie stared at the delicately painted pebbles in her hand. Where had that bum got them? She couldn’t believe any artist would leave something like this laying around. She looked at the delicate depictions of flowers and insects, even a funny smiling face in wonder. “Let me see. You’re saying I buy you dinner and these are mine?”

“They’re real purty!” The man scratched a filthy neck with filthier fingernails.

Katie made a face. “They’re…ok, I suppose. Where did you get them?”

“They were left down by the stream. I found them, fair and square.”

“Just lying loose?” She tried to sound even more skeptical than she felt.

“Well, yeah, just them and this hat and some old brown leaves.”

Katie reflected that the hat, at least, had not been his for long. Except for the muddy memory of four fingers along the rim, it was clean. “Show me where you found them!”

“Ah, miss, if you don’t want to buy them, I’ll have me rocks back, now.”

So she had taken him to Emma’s Diner. Ruth—the owner, ever since Emma retired—had ushered them to a lonely table in the back, and insisted that the man should wash up before being served. Once he vanished into the bathroom, she leaned over to Katie. “What are you up to, buying food for such as that? You’re not—“

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Chloe sat at the shoreline, wiggling a bit to relieve the ache from her arthritis. The searing heat from the sun and sand helped the pain, a little, though the tide was coming in, and soon Lake Michigan’s icy-cold water would wash upward to where she was sitting.

She stretched a hand out, trailed a finger through the wet sand, idly drawing a house, a snug little cottage, with cheerful flowers—a wave came and washed over the lines, filling them, and washed out again, leaving the sand smooth. So much of life seemed like that these days, all of her work washed away by time. Dishes cleaned became dirty; laundry neatly folded became soiled; even things stored carefully could be washed away by time, like the holiday tablecloth that had become a mouse’s nest, and now had holes and stains and mildew where she and her sisters had lovingly embroidered sugarplums (the fairy kind) amid holly and ivy.

If she died today, the sands of time would fill her footprints very quickly; she’d never built anything, never written a great novel or recorded a rock song, never starred in a movie or walked on the moon. Her family would mourn her, of course, but their lives would go on. They would sit around the table and laugh as she and her sisters had laughed, while they embroidered that tablecloth. It had been done in secret, while their mother was working, and earned them repeated scoldings for putting off their homework until after dinner. Chloe smiled for a moment, remembering her mother lecturing them, and her tears on that Christmas morning.
( The tablecloth was old, of course... )
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