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Raven

Raven, Emerging from a Box
Raven, Emerging from a Box
An early short story that originally appeared in Cat Tales in 2005.)

Ever since my husband installed a Vocobox â„¢ in our cat in a failed experiment, he (the cat, not my husband) stands outside the closed bedroom door in the mornings, calling. The intelligence update was partially successful, but the only word the cat has learned is its own name, Raven, which he uses to convey everything. I hear him when I wake up, the sound muted by the wooden door between us.

“Raven. Raven. Raven.”

Beside me, Lloyd murmurs something and turns over, tugging the sheet away, the cold whispering me further awake. When I go out to feed the cat, his voice lowers as he twines around my ankles, words lapsing into purrs. He butts against my legs with an insistent anxiousness, waiting for the dish to be filled. “Raven. Raven.” Kibble poured, I move to make our own breakfast, turning on the coffee maker and listening to its preparatory burble.

“I don’t know what I expected,” my husband mutters as he drinks his coffee in hasty gulps. “That cat was never very smart for a cat.” He glares at Raven as though blaming him for the failures of the world at large. The Vocobox is his own invention; his company hopes to market it this fall, and a promotion may hinge upon it. The last laurels my husband won are wearing thin; if the Vocobox is a success, he’ll be able to rest a while longer..

But when he first proposed installing it in the cat, he didn’t say it was still experimental. “The kids are gone, and you need some company,” he’d said. “The cat loves you best anyhow; now you can talk to him, and he’ll talk back.” He gave me a slight smirk and an eyebrow curve that implied that without him I’d be a dotty old cat lady, living in a studio apartment that smelled of pee and old newspapers.

“I’ll be late again tonight,” he tells me now. “And when I’m concentrating, I’ve found leaving my cell off helps. If you need something, just leave a message. Or call the service, that’s what we pay them for.” He’s out the front door before I can reply.

Every morning seems the same nowadays. My husband’s heels, exiting. The immaculate lawn outside. On Thursdays, the housekeeping service remotely activates the grass cutting robot. I see it out there, sweeping through the fresh spring grass that never grows high enough to hide it. A plastic sheep, six inches tall, sits atop its round metal case, someone’s idea of creative marketing. But the robot is done within the hour and then things are the same again. Back in the box.
I go into the living room, activate the wall viewer, and lose myself in reality television, where everyone has eventful lives. Soon Raven curls up on my lap. “Raven,” he murmurs, and begins to purr.

The mouths of the people on the screen move, but the words that come out are meaningless, so I hit the mute button. Now the figures collide and dance on the screen; every life is more interesting than my own.

At noon, I push the cat off my lap and have a sandwich; at dinner time a hot meal appears in the oven. I take it out myself, pour a glass of Chardonnay, take the bottle to the table with me. When did I become this boring person? At college, I studied music, was going to sing opera. I sang in a few productions, fell in love, became a trophy wife, and produced two perfect trophy children who are out there now, perpetuating the cycle. All those voice lessons wasted.

On the EBay channel that night I look for a hobby. There’s knitting, gardening, glass-blowing, quilling”¦ too many to choose from. I remember quilling from my daughter’s Bluebird days. We curled bits of paper, glued them down in decorative patterns on tiny wooden boxes. What was the point? I drink a little more wine before I go to sleep.

When he comes to bed, my husband snuggles up, strokes my arm. He murmurs something inaudible, the tone conveying affection. This only happens when he feels guilty. From the recently showered smell of him, I know what he feels guilty about. This must be an assistant I haven’t met yet.

When I don’t speak, he says “What’s the matter, cat got your voice box?” He chortles to himself at his clever joke before he lapses into sleep, not pursuing my silence. Out in the living room, I hear the cat wandering. “Raven.”

“You’re like a cliché,” my husband says at breakfast. “Desperate housewife. Can’t you find something to do?”

The cat’s attention swivels between us, his green eyes wide and pellucid with curiosity. “Raven?” he says in an interrogative tone.

I watch my husband’s heels, the door closing behind them, the deliberately good-humored but loud click, once again.

“Raven,” the cat says as it looks up at me, its voice shaded with defiance.

“Dora,” I say to the cat. I’m tired and sore as though I’d been beaten. The room wavers with warmth and weariness.

“Raven.”

“Dora.”

“Raven.”

“Dora.”

I can’t help but laugh as he watches my face, but he is not amused as I am; his tail lashes from side to side although every other inch of him is still.

Online, I look at the ads. Nannies, housekeepers, maids…I am a cliché. I embrace my inanity. Desperate housewife indeed, being cheated on by an aging husband who isn’t even clever enough to conceal it. This is my reality. But if I explain it, I start the avalanche down into divorce. I’ll end up living in a box on the street, while my husband will remarry, keep living in this expensive, well-tended compound. I’ve seen it happen to other women.

“Raven,” the cat says with tender grace, interposing himself in front of the monitor. Facing me, he puts his forehead against the top of my chest, pressing firmly. “Raven,” he whispers.

Sunday, while my husband’s out playing golf, the phone keeps ringing. “Caller’s name undisclosed,” the display says. And when I pick it up, there is only silence on the other end. The third time I say “He’s out playing golf and has his cell phone turned off, because it distracts him. Call back this evening.” and hang up.

He scuttles out in the evening after another of the calls, saying he needs to go into work, oversee a test run. Later that night, he curls against me, smelling of fresh soap. Outside the door, Raven is calling.

“Another cat would take the implant better,” my husband says. “I’ll get a kitten and we’ll try that.”

“No,” I tell him. “He’s too old to get used to a new kitten in the house. It will just upset him.”
“I’m trying to do something nice for you.”

“Buy the other woman a kitten,” I say, even as dire predictions scream through my mind, commanding me to silence. “Buy her dozens. I’m sticking with this one.”

He rolls over, stunned and quiet. For the rest of the night, I lie there. Outside, the night continues, limitless. I pass the time imagining what I will do. Nannying is, I hear, pleasant work. I’ll sing the babies lullabies.

He’s silent in the morning as well. In the light of day as we sit facing each other across the Formica table, I reach down to extend my hand to the cat, who arches his back and rubs against my fingertips.

“We need to talk,” Lloyd finally demands.

“Dora,” I say.

“What?”

“Dora. Dora, Dora.” I rise to my feet and stand glaring at him. If I had a tail, it would lash back and forth like an annoyed snake, but all my energy is focused on speaking to my husband.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Dora. Dora. Dora.” I almost sob the words out, as emotions clutch at my throat with an insistent clutch, trying to mute me, but I force the words past the block, out into the open air. We stand like boxers, facing each other in the squareness of the ring.

Lloyd moves to the door, almost backing away. His eyes are fixed on my lips; every time I say my name,his expression flickers, as though the word has surprised him anew.

“We can talk about this later,” he says. The door closes behind him with a click of finality.

What can I do? I settle on the couch and the cat leaps up to claim my lap, butts his head against my chin. He lapses into loud purrs, so loud I can feel the vibration against my chest, quivering like unspoken words. He doesn’t say anything, but I know exactly what he means.

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NaNoWriMo 2015: Day 3

Image of bookshelves filled with books about writing
Also accomplished: organized some of the study bookshelves. Here we’ve got F&SF writing stuff plus podcasting equipment (top shelf); lingusitics and writing (middle shelf) and WMST and lit crit (bottom). It’s nice being able to find books when I want to refer to them.
So far I’m cranking along. Part of the impetus is a Thanksgiving trip, which effectively means I’ve got 20 days, not 30, to finish. But I’m well on track so far, with over 6000 words banked so far. Here’s some of them, taken from Hearts of Tabat:

“I need your help,” Sebastiano told Letha, “but oh”¦” His breath caught at the thought of her seeing what he had seen. “It is too much to ask.”

She came down the steps as he spoke, reached out and took his hand.

“Tell me,” she said, looking up into his face and the sound of the love and worry in her voice undid him. He collapsed to his knees, burying his face in her skirts, and sobbed like a child of five whose worst nightmare has come true.

She held him without speaking, let him sob away all the horror and terror of those moments and the coppery stench of the blood and the horrible way its sheen changed as it dried. Finally he drew away and she released him. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, pressing hard on his eyeballs, as though to extract what he had seen.

“A murder,” he said. “No, a slaughter, really. And they think it was a Beast.”

“Beasts do not murder,” she said. “They may kill in the moment, but they do not plan and enact such acts.”

“This one did. I think. I don’t know.” In his head he ran through lists. “Are there any creatures that thrive on death?”

“There are the Mandrakes, which suffocate and then try to put their infants in place of the human child,” she said. “There are the fairies, which sting so many travelers, but they must be provoked or drawn by injury, usually. You mean a creature that is fed by killing. That is not a Beast, Sebastiano. That is sorcery.”

He knew the truth of her words the minute he heard them. How had he not realized that before? Perhaps some clouding spell had overlaid the house? A golem, constructed by sorcery, using Beasts. Was that possible?

He must have spoken his thoughts aloud, because Letha replied to them, her voice tart as a winter apple. “Of course it is. What else does Tabat do with Beasts but use them to fuel magic?”

I’m also finishing up edits for the story that will appear next year in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “Red in Tooth and Cog.” A recent publication is As the Crow Flies, So Does the Road in GrendelSong.

If you want some NaNoWriMo inspiration, here’s a post about why if you’re writing, you’re doing things right. Here’s a fun but low-pay call for submissions that might spark some ideas.

(Want some more inspiration? Check out one of my writing classes, either on-demand or live.

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Some Words From This Morning

The Versimilitoad Escapes the Pendulum of Doom
The Versimilitoad Escapes the Pendulum of Doom in the 2010 Clarion West classroom.
This is from the BFFT (Big Fat Fantasy Trilogy) that is my current work-in-progress. I have the first book completely blocked out now, so I’m going to fill in all the blank spots, then block the next and do it and so forth. Anyway, this is from early in the book and is the first appearance of Teo, who is a major character. I’m actually switching my Clarion West writeathon goals over to novel chunks to make them a bit more in alignment with my highest priority, which is finishing this trilogy.

He’d been born with a Shadow Twin. Teo was the only person in the whole village who could say that, and he was the only person who’d had a Twin that almost all of them (except Teracit, who claimed to be old enough to have once shook hands with the original Duke) had ever encountered.

He was sitting in the cliff face that overlooked the river, in an icicle-choked crevice. The sun was rising. He’d crept out early, saying he was going to check snares, but truth was, he liked sitting and watching the world go pale grey, then violet, then gold and lavender, sumptuous as silk embroidery.

Often he wondered what his life would have been like if his Twin had drawn breath after the womb. History said that men and women with living Shadow Twins to assist there went on to do marvelous things. Verranzo and his Shadow Twin had each done a marvelous thing: Verranzo had founded Verranzo’s New City, far to the east on the coast, and his Shadow Twin (female, as Teo’s had been, for a Shadow Twin always took the opposite gender of its sibling) had gone south, with the Duke of Tabat, and founded a city in his name.

Teo’s would not found cities, would not draw on any of a Twin’s reputed powers: toe extend life or augment magical abilities. Verranzo’s Twin had been able to tame creatures with her voice alone.

Snow swans flew across the river far below in a glitter and beating of wings. He’d snared one of them last year and his father had beaten him, because you never knew when a creature like that, a swan or eagle or wolf, might be a fellow Shifter or Beast, and exempt from being hunted or trapped accordingly.

His swan had not been intelligent, but it had been lively when he’d freed it as Da had ordered. It beat at him with clublike wings as strong as Da’s fist, and its head darted at his face and hands like a snake, hissing and clacking its bill. He cut it loose and it waddled away, then leap up against the moons, its wings driving it upward, frosted with starlight. It honked derisively at Teo, poor bruised Teo who couldn’t shift, and therefore couldn’t tell what was or wasn’t a fellow Beast.

If he’d been Human, he would have been famous, might have been taken to Tabat to serve the latest generation of Dukes. But he was a Shifter, even if a failed one, and Humans hated Shifters, even more than the Beasts they habitually enslaved. So he and the other villagers must keep quiet, passing themselves off as unremarkable in the eyes of explorers and priests, here in the frontier territory that belonged to neither city.

Sunlight glinted on the river’s frozen mirrors, far below, dazzling him. Despite the worry that rode his shoulders “” why, just today, were others avoiding his eyes? And what had happened in the night to his youngest sister, little Bea, who’d been struck with fever the last four days. Fever didn’t come often to the villagers, but when it did, it could kill.

Teo and his sister were all the children his parents had. No wonder they had haunted Bea’s bedside day and night.

Someone was crossing the river; his uncle Pioyrt, in Beast form, an immense, slope-shouldered cougar, with two grouse gripped tight in his jaws, his whiskers drawn back to avoid their feathers. This time of tear hunting was bad and they’d eaten porridge and baked roots too often lately. At least one bird would be reserved for broth for Bea, but the rest might be fried with roots for something more appetizing than usual, crisp bits of meat and perhaps even a trip into the spice sack for a couple of peppercorns to grind or a pinch of dried orange peel. His mouth watered.

He raised his knees, wedging them against the rock’s cold, slick bite, to lift himself upwards, grainy snow crunching under his gloves and boots as he scrambled onto the top of the cliff. He paused to look once more out over the world. The clouds shawled the mountain that rose of the valley’s opposite side, its flanks white with snow, slicks of purple and cobalt streaking their sides. The river was a gray and blue snakeskin, laced over with the black skeletons of trees.

He sighed and turned his face homewards.

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