Yes.
Your age? A lot older than I can comprehend. About four millennia?
Yes. Though for most of the time I have slept.
Catnaps. She felt his gentle smile in his tone of mind and knew he would never betray her.
Yes.
She lay silent awhile before she asked him, Now tell me. What are you?
Cat. He was both rueful and amused. I must give you a prize, a little china doll. That is the one question that baffles me.
Of course. Otherwise she would have been able to find the answer in his mind. You do not know?
Milady—I feel that there is a dream I have forgotten. I keep trying to find the words for the song, but they are gone. I truly do not know.
She lay with his head on her shoulder. Stroked his cheek and temple and the side of his neck. At her mercy and in her arms, he succumbed to her touch, he fell asleep, as she wished him to. When that had happened, very softly she withdrew herself and made the change. Her dress lay on the bed now. She, a golden cat, stood by her lover’s pillow.
There is magic in the soft, twitching, fluffy end of the tail of a cat. Countryfolk know this and will sometimes cut off a cat’s tail to use in their spells. This act is an abomination. The world that no longer remembers the holy ways of the golden goddess is full of danger for a cat.
Freyja curved the end of her tail so that it resembled the heavy head of a stalk of ripe wheat, her emblem. Softly she brushed it across the lidded eyes of the sleeping man.
Odin, my sweet faithless lover, when you awaken you will be able to see again. Give me no place in your song, do not remember me. And hang yourself no longer from the tree of sorrow, beautiful one. Be happy.
Not far away, the carousel calliope started to sound. The cat bounded to the floor, landing softly on padded paws.
There is still time to stay. Will I regret leaving him?
But perhaps there was no such thing as life without regrets. And a strange new world awaited her wanderings. She pushed her way through the loose screening of the kitchen window, thumped quietly to the ground, and trotted off.
The man would live long and bear her blessing. And it was an odd thing, now at last she felt satisfied.
She slipped away, a golden shadow quick as thought, into the silver dusk. But as she went, she felt the song of the carnival flitting on the air behind her, a fey and raucous magpie melody. We don’t care what the world thinks, the minds of freaks and barkers and vendors sang. We are old, we have been gypsying around this world for a long time. Come see a splinter of the true cross! Come see the pickled brains of the frost giant Ymir. Come see Napoleon’s little finger. Come see a pressed flower from the Garden of Eden, from the Tree of Life.
OLD FOSS IS THE NAME OF HIS CAT
David Sandner
David Sandner is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where he teaches Romanticism, Children’s literature, Popular literature and Creative Writing. His work appears in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, and anthologies such as Clockwork Phoenix, The Mammoth Book of Sorcerers’ Tales, and Baseball Fantastic. He edited Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, wrote The Fantastic Sublime, and co-edited The Treasury of the Fantastic.
Sandner comments: “Old Foss was a real cat—Edward Lear put him in his great Victorian nonsense poetry and drew funny caricatures of him. I’m sure Old Foss, like any good cat, regarded all this attention as only his due. Anyone who has read Lear’s poetry knows it’s very funny, written in a fine high nonsense style that leads directly to writers like Dr. Seuss, and yet it’s quite profoundly sad. That sadness seems based in loneliness. My story attempts to have its own high style, to let nonsense loose, and yet to approach Lear’s loneliness and his famous friendship with his cat. I wanted to achieve something like that balance Lear achieved—I guess so that I could understand it better because I find it so moving.”
Old Foss watched the Old Man out barefoot in his nightshirt ranting in the rain; at least the rain had chased away the boys throwing mud and rocks. The Old Man had black stains along his back and a welt on his forehead, not that he noticed. But as night pushed over the town, growing from shadows leaning along the ramshackle red tile roofs, darkness spreading like ink across a tabletop, Old Foss knew there were worse things than rain or boys with rocks. Soon, the Jumblies would rise from the water’s edge to bring the Old Man to sea in a sieve. And anyone who goes to sea in a sieve, of course, never returns. They sink and they drown.
The rain wept against the glass as Old Foss watched impassively behind the window. The Old Man ran back and forth across the cobbled street, his long white nightshirt soaked and clinging to his ungainly frame, his paunched belly and skinny pale legs. His long bedraggled beard leaked, sloughing off water when he shook his head and bellowed: “Where is my Jumbly Girl?” The Old Man knocked on every door he came to, but no one answered for they knew the old Englishman too well.
At first, when the fugues came on, the locals had only shaken their heads at him, then argued with him in broken English or too fluent Italian, especially when the rain came up fast. They pushed him towards the villa he and Old Foss rented; but when the confusion came upon him he would only look at them uncomprehendingly, or look at their doors long after they had shut them with the oddest expression of thwarted desire, then he would wander away again and knock on another wrong door. For no one could see the Jumblies but him and Old Foss. None could know of his time with his Jumbly Girl but Old Foss and himself. Old Foss and he is how it should be for the Jumbly girl would bring him only death for all her promises. Why couldn’t he see that, Old Foss thought crossly, twitching his tail, and was it really so much as all that to love a Jumbly Girl?
The sun reflected blindingly on the sand and burst across the blue water in shimmers and rolling spots of light, like crystal broken on tile, like sparks shooting and spinning into the air from a roaring fire, like nothing the Old Man could capture on his canvas.
“It’s like nothing, Old Foss, why can’t the poets ever say that? It’s like nothing we can see or say, like something more than we can know, like less than I can rhyme and more than I can show.”
The Old Man dabbed at the canvas anyway with his paintbrushes, trying to somehow put a glimmer of white behind, between, before smears of blue. He swayed his pear-shaped body, shoved into a too tight brown suit, frayed white cuffs showing at the wrists, coat open to display a mismatched plaid vest missing every other button; he moved from side to side considering the canvas from different angles, cocking his head with deliberation. How to capture the certain slant of light, the moment out of joint, when time pulsed below the threshold of meaning before it can be said? He took the painting off its easel, still rickety in the soft sand, and flung it end over end into the sea.