The Cat

The cat is not a cat.

He certainly looks like a cat. He's pillow-soft with a tar-black coat, slick as oil. His paws fall silently. If you pet him a certain way he'll even sound like a cat, but don't be fooled. He is not a cat. Not really.

He used to live in the hedgerow, next to a house where a little boy lived with his parents. He was a shadow deep in the hedges, and he ate the fear of tiny creatures and even the tiny creatures themselves. Sometimes, the boy would bring him scraps of chicken, and so he ate those too. He would never come out when the child called for "kitty," for he was not a cat, but the chicken was delicious and the boy was kind. It was not hard for the shadow in the hedges to learn to love both.

There's nothing particularly remarkable about the boy, except perhaps for how residual magic clings to him like a second skin. It's not enough to do anything with, not really, but it does mean that he gets lost. A lot. The magic builds and builds, like snowfall in winter, and then the boy will have slipped into a liminal space. Usually, he will emerge some hours later, a little dazed and confused but no worse for wear. His parents worried—naturally—and so they get him a cat to guide him home.

The thing you must know about this first cat is that it was a real cat, and therefore fickle as only a real cat could be. It lounged in sunspots and knocked things off of ledges. It purred one minute, and then hissed the next. The boy loved this cat. The cat tolerated the boy. Yet each time the boy wandered through a crack in the universe, the cat would get up—sometimes immediately, sometimes an hour or two later—and fetch him back. Its soft-footed comings and goings were always watched by the shadow in the hedges, who did not care much for the cat's labor but perhaps envied the reward.

And then, one day, the boy slips away and doesn't come back. One hour passes, then another. The shadow in the hedges stalks a cricket through the brambles while the real cat stalks down the garden path. Evening falls, and neither cat nor boy return.

This would not do. The shadow in the hedges loved that boy, and it would not tolerate this failure from the real cat. So it is not a formless monstrosity that pokes out of the hedgerow branches that moonless evening, but a single tar-black paw, followed by a sleek feline body that tapered in a swishing tail. His eyes are gold and over-bright. He melted just a little too much into the shadows.

His boy is found in the crack behind the vending machine down the street, past the half-realized dreams and forgotten things that others had long-since tossed behind. He can twine around his boy's ankles now, and purr when he is scratched. He can curl his tail lazily behind his boy's knees as they make the trek back. It is a quiet uneventful journey, because the unsavory things in this oft-forgotten pocket of the universe are afraid of his too-sharp teeth and jagged claws.

This is the first night that the shadow in the hedgerow becomes a cat. It is not the last.

The Boy

The boy's name is Riley.

He hasn't been a boy for some years now, actually. He's grown a considerable amount, and now he's left the house with the hedgerow to go to university. One day, he'll send people up to the stars, but for now, there is physics homework to puzzle through, sweaters to rescue from beneath his cat, and a particularly stubborn piece in his string quartet's piece that he just can't quite seem to get.

With no soft-washed sweater to lie on, Kane pools like a ribbon across Riley's lap. He should be a senior cat just from how long Riley's had him, but he's as spry as ever, with a suspiciously clean bill of health.

Additional Credits

Apartment Floorplan by Monologue