The Big Meow

She stared: she shook herself. Slowly, her fur still halfway fluffed, she stalked toward the litterbox. She stared into it. No footprints. She sniffed. There was no scent there but the slight odor of the last time she’d made siss: no matter how her ehhif, Iaehh, tried to clean the box perfectly, and no matter what the clumping-litter people claimed about their product’s deodorizing powers, that scent was where she’d left it.

No, she thought, and shook her head until her ears rattled. Just a tired mind playing tricks. Very quietly Rhiow went into the apartment through the cat-door her ehhif had installed for her in the glass of the sliding door. Meditation can wait, she thought, her tail wreathing in bemusement. How much good would I get out of it when I’m so tired, I’m hallucinating?

She wandered through the darkened apartment, back into the bedroom. Quietly Rhiow jumped up onto the bottom corner of the king-sized bed, careful not to wake Iaehh up. He slept lightly, too lightly sometimes, since Rhiow’s own ehhif, his mate Hhuha, had died in an accident.

She stood there in the dark for a moment, missing Hhuha one more time, and once again feeling sorry for Iaehh. It’s not good for you to be alone, she thought. How does one do matchmaking for ehhif, I wonder? How do you engineer it so they get out a little more, and meet somebody nice? It wasn’t a question of replacing Hhuha, of course: no one could do that. But at the same time, it seemed important to ehhif life to be paired. Almost as important as it was for People: though ehhif always seemed to keep their emotional lives so compartmentalized…

She sighed, and then yawned. The long night’s work had caught up with her. Let’s get some sleep, she thought. Time enough in the morning to reorganize Iaehh’s social life.

She sat down and had a perfunctory wash; then her head jerked up as she started dozing right in the middle of it. Enough, she thought, and curled up nose to tail. A moment later she was dozing.

And out of the dream, golden eyes looked at her, thoughtful…

The Big Meow: Chapter Two

Afternoon seemed to come only a breath or two later. Rhiow rolled over and stretched out long, blinking at the bronzy light coming in through the bedroom’s Venetian blinds. From outside, she could hear faint clinking sounds; Iaehh was moving around out there. She heard one of the drawers in the little kitchen open, and then the clatter of ehhif eating utensils being taken out.

Rhiow sat up, gazing around the bedroom. As always, it was hard to avoid a pang of sadness; there was still a faint scent of Hhuha hanging about all the furnishings in the place. She was sure that Iaehh was oblivious to this — the ehhif sense of smell was hardly capable of such delicate detection — but every morning, before she was fully awake, Rhiow had to disentangle that faint scent of her own ehhif from the reality of the present physical world, in which her Hhuha was no longer present.

She let out a long breath, wishing that even once more she might hear that small, strange purr-like sound that Hhuha had used to make when she picked Rhiow up and held her, upside down, in the crook of one arm. But there were some things that not even wizardry could do. Hhuha was in her own place now, the right place for an ehhif to be after physical life was done, wherever that might be. And Rhiow, for her own part, knew that the sorrowful moments were the price she paid for keeping the memory of that relationship green. If she tried to reject them, soon she would have no true memory of Hhuha left, but merely a simulacrum, colored by wishful thinking and the desire to avoid pain, not by truth or life. As a wizard, it was with truth and life that her loyalties lay; so she suffered the pain gladly enough, the way you suffered the pain of biting a thorn out of your paw, though in this case the thorn grew back every day. All you can hope, she thought, is that each day the thorn grows back a little shorter…