Tag: moamiswriting

“I’ve caught one,” the fisherman screams, grinning at his hook stuck in the girl’s cheek. “I caught myself a mermaid!”

Her hair is green, algae curled around it. The fisherman’s grip is greed, is lust, when he rips at it to get her closer. Her mouth glints like a pearl and oh, he could sell her after he’s – well, once he’s done with that beauty of hers. “Aren’t you a pretty one,” he licks his lips, “and all mine. I caught you, so you’re mine.”

All at once, her song ends. No sound comes out of her mouth that stays open, teeth tiny and many, sharp in the slick night. She tugs the hook out of her cheek. The fisherman watches, his heart burning from how fast it runs against his flesh, as her wound closes up and a bit of blood drips from her little mouth.

“Yours,” the mermaid says. The sea echoes her voice, an accent he can’t define, oh who cares, she’s just – just prey – and her pupils snap into slits. “Yours?”

The ocean ripples.

The waves tremble.

The wind whispers, smiles, then stills to not disturb the song that rises once more.
“No,” whisper a thousand voices, whisper a million teeth, whispers ten thousands of stares in the water. “We caught you. You are ours.”

People often misunderstand what the old saying about a cat having nine lives means. The cats prefer to keep it a secret, as most humans can’t be trusted with information so fragile and precious, but there are exceptions.

The merchant who shares his leftover fish. The young girl that hides littler after litter of newborn ones in her room until they find new homes. The old man with scars who still has enough kindness to open his shed to let them slip in from the rain. Boys, teenagers, mothers, warriors, brothers – some are trusted.

Exceptions, yes, few nowadays and rare, but honoured all the more.

So nine lives there are indeed. Each cat is born with them and no matter the time or place, they are lost easily.

This is where the story ends for most people.

But for those who are trusted, those who wake up one morning and find a weird taste in their mouth, the scent of a forest never touched by human hands in their nose, and a strange lingering touch of whiskers on their forehead – they know the truth.

Nine lives for this world, is what all our legends used to say.

You, friend of cats, know the ancient, almost forgotten sayings.

You know of cat eyes shining in the deepest night when they shouldn’t be able to. You know of cats staring past your ear, at that forbidden spot right by the frayed corner of your vision, and you fear that if you look, your cat won’t be able to stare it into submission anymore. You don’t look. The cat purrs. You’re safe.

The kittens have all their lives still. They do not look at the edgewalking beasts that whisper through their humans’ house. It will take time until they fall, hurt, learn.

The oldest cats know so much that a touch of their paw will make an entire village shudder. Their quiet voices cast spells. Let them roam. You cannot imagine the things that flee from them as they walk in silence.

Cat friend, you know it in your heart.

You know of the paths they walk that human feet can’t find.

You know of the nights they vanish and return with the scent of blood, earth and salt in their fur, and when your fingers touch their coat, a cold shiver awakes your skin.

Sometimes, they hear things. You don’t know what, but you know enough to let them sit in front of your house or room, paws tucked under, dark stare never leaving an invisible spot in the air.

And when you float between sleep and life, when you’re unlucky enough to claw at the edge of death before you’re ready to go…

Then maybe, friend of cats, you’ll feel a brush of fur along your legs. Maybe, just before you startle with awe in your heart and wake once more, the same pair of eyes that should sleep by your side winks at you from another world.

Humanity’s stupidity may be infinite but here is a little list of traits we have that are also infinite: curiosity, stubbornness (beyond infinite), the potential of kindness as well as cruelty, the ability to learn where we didn’t know or were wrong, and most definitely the ability to achieve something simply because we were told that we couldn’t, so get out of the way, the universe’s most mind-boggling creature is coming to prove you wrong.

“Well, your qualifications look adequate,” the man says slowly. He’s middle-aged, his hair is as grey as his suit, and his mouth sits in an unimpressed line that hasn’t twitched once. The woman with dark eyes next to him hasn’t smiled once, either, and the younger man by his other side hasn’t even looked up at her. He just lazily drags his pencil over his paper.

“But,” the man goes on, dragging the words as if he’s reading them from an instruction manual that constantly deals with defective products, “we’re looking for someone with a unique character. I’m talking inner strength. Would you say that you possess that quality? Would you say that you’ve got enough bite for us?”

She takes a moment to let them wait. Makes sure that her grin appears in a motion of careful, practiced confidence. 

She reaches into her bag.

“I think I do.”

She opens her fingers for them.

She shows them the small, fuzzy, brown kiwi.

She listens gleefully when the middle-aged man chokes on nothing during her first bite.

The woman holds up longer, but even her nails are clawing at the table when a the fruit shrinks with every bite, and fuzzy skin disappears together with green fruit right into her mouth.

“What the hell,” says the young man once she’s finished her kiwi, and when she pulls out another one, he gets up to grab her hand. “You’re hired.”

“Think of the children, please.”

She had told them so many times.

“The children. I beg you, all of you. Think of the children.”

They had ignored her, and now James kind of wished they hadn’t.

Their torches light up the cave’s walls, barely pushing back the darkness, just enough for Catherine to read and half-whispering translate the ancient symbols scrawled all over them. James is by her side, one arm around the woman’s neck, and goddamn it, the old hag is still whimpering about children and won’t anyone think of them, please. 

“Shut your mouth,” James growls at her, squeezes a bit. The old woman croaks. She goes still then. Her eyes are fixed on a point over James’ head, going wide and huge and he’s got enough of that. “What is it now, huh? You already insane with fear?”

The rest of the group laughs. Their silver daggers catch the torches’ light, reflect it into the dark.

“James,” Catherine says. “James, be quiet.”

“You know, this is why I’m a hunter.” He pulls the old woman close, frowning when her jaw falls open in silent horror. “Hey, listen when you’re talked to. Unbelievable. But seriously, you people are pathetic. Can’t even take care of a few bloodsuckers by yourself. Aren’t you angry? Huh? They took your children, forchrissake.”

“James.” A gloved hand touches his arm. Catherine’s face is pale like death in the torchlight. “We have to go.”

Something shuffles behind him. James throws a look over his shoulder, the others shifting their torches into his field of vision, but nothing’s there. The old woman lets out a pathetic wail. He shakes her off.

“Crazy old hag. You’re all cowards, your entire damn village. If it had been my kids, I would’ve marched here on my own, killed them all at once – hey!”

The woman is at his feet, digging her clawy hands into his legs where she grips them. “Now you’ve done it,” she whispers. “The children. I told you to think of the children.”

“James,” Catherine says, and then a white hands reaches around her neck and pulls her into the dark. 

“What the fuck – Cat!” 

A torch drops. James whirls around just in time to watch the fire sizzle out on the wet cave floor. For a second, the light illuminates the ground in brilliant, terrifying red.

“Oh God.” He can’t breathe. The torches go out, one by one, each falling when another hand claws into a neck and another man or woman is pulled into the dark.

Then, the old woman is in front of him. Blood pours from her thin lips. James stares, a scream stuck in his throat, as a claw wounds its way through her neck. The last torch blows out.

But the cave doesn’t plunge into darkness.

“The children,” a choir of hundred voices hums. Two hundred eyelids slip open with a wet, sucking squelch. Two hundred small, round circles awaken on the walls of the cave that has never been one but a nest instead, and the scratch of hundreds upon hundreds of stinking nails over rotting stone sway the choir’s soft song into a rhythm: 

“The children, the children, how could you forget the children?”

One day, the wise woman of the village called all the children to her house.

She sat with them in a circle, and they ate and sang together until the moon was high in the sky. The children had never been allowed to stay up as late. They were excited. Their tongues prickled with the spicy soup that the wise woman had given them.

When the fire was just a low glimmer of ash and wood anymore, the woman lifted her hand.

The children that had been laughing and chattering fell quiet.

The woman said: “Show me the palm of your hand, and tell me only the truth. Swear on it.”

“I swear,” said the children. Some whispered it, some barely got out the words, but all of them were shivering because they felt something old and large reach for their hearts. They didn’t know if it was the soup, the woman’s power, the moon, or just their own awe before the world and the night that made them speak truthfully.

The wise woman lowered her hand. She looked at one after the other. Her eyes were warm as the fire, dark as the moon’s shawl above.

“Speak what you wish to raise in your life.”

Everyone was silent for a long time.

The woman turned her head towards the first boy.

“Family,” the boy mumbled. Then, a bit louder, clutching his empty soup bowl, he looked at everyone with honey golden eyes, wide with kindness. “Mine and others.”

The old woman said nothing. Only her head moved from then on, and it pointed to the next, the next, one after the other.

And the children spoke.

“Health.”

“Knowledge.”

“Happiness.”

“Imagination.”

“Adventure.”

“Fun.”

“Strength.”

“Animals.”

While the children said their words, the old woman drank them in. She let then settle into her memory, anchored them where they were safe.

One day, when the children were of age, she would ask them again.

Some would have changed. If they had lost their path, she would remind them of their old words, of the dreams their hearts had forgotten about. That there was a way forward, in whatever direction it may run. If they had found another way for themselves, she would gift them their once-adored word still, so that they had something to always return to and would know that once feeling something did not mean that you wouldn’t ever feel something else.

And if the children still chose the same way, then it would be their time to raise something.

So the children spoke their words. Only two were left now and before the woman could turn her head, they spoke at the same time.

“Hell.”

“Myself.”

The other children shivered. For a long time, nothing moved. Even the fire seemed frozen in the moment. Finally, the woman tilted her head.

“What do you mean?” she asked the two. She hadn’t asked anyone else.

The first child stood up, hands curled into fists, eyes burning. “If anyone gets in my way, I’ll bring all of the world down on them!”

“I’m scared,” whispered one of the children.

The woman looked at the other child, whose eyes were calm as the dark sky above. “And you?”

“Myself,” said the child once more. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

The first child laughed. “That’s stupid. Just yourself? What can you do with that! When I’m older, the world won’t stand a chance against me.”

Before the second child could speak, the old woman stirred. She reached out for the child’s fingers and took them into her own. The other children watched, wary and confused.

“Before you raise any of your dreams,” said the old woman, a smile on her fire-warmed lips, “I want all of you to remember this.” And when the child who stood glared at her, she took its hand as well until it sat and put its head against her shoulder.

“Raise yourself, children, and you will stand against anything. Raise yourself, and the whole world will rise with you. Hell and heaven and every fear will fall if you hold yourself upright and look to the stars. And if you cannot rise anymore, stand. Stand. The horizon has been born for thousands of years, every morning and every night. Admire its strength, when you are weak, but do not forget:

You are the dawn. You are the dusk.

The world will follow. Raise all that you are, before anything else.”

They bought the puppy for Christmas. The fire that warmed it was almost like its mother’s fur, the blankets it rested on so close to its sibling’s touch. Small fingers caressed its body. The food was exciting, rich, strong on its tongue. The puppy decided that it would love these ones forever.

They threw it out on Easter. Snow covered the streets. The road was grey, the sky was grey, its nose felt grey and scentless. It had wanted to become strong for them, had done everything to grow quickly. Its fur was thin still, its paws too big for itself and too small for the world. It howled for hours. Nobody returned.

The woman that found it was different. Her hands weren’t small. Her house was tiny and the scents whispered spices across the puppy’s tongue, twisted its ears inside out and back again. She gave it food, and while the puppy ate, her old veiny fingers wove patterns over its head, and she mumbled words it didn’t recognise in a language that sounded like wind and water and the fire’s wrath.

The puppy stayed.

It wasn’t a puppy anymore.

It ate, it ran, it drank the scents and locked up the magic that the woman poured over its fur when the storm roared outside the windows.

October came. The puppy wasn’t a puppy wasn’t a dog anymore. New snow had fallen.

The woman took one look at it and went to the door, opening it wide. “Run and take from them what you want,” she said, smile black and white from teeth and those that were missing. “But after that, you are mine, and the strength I gave you will be faithful to me, and my fire will warm you for as long as your fur returns to my doorstep.”

The hell hound bared its teeth, crossed the threshold, and lifted its heavy head. The scent had never faded from its memory.

They met their puppy again on a dark October night.

And only the small fingers still reached out to it the same as before, and spoke its name in an awed whisper of “there you are”; the large hands that had pushed it aside and filled it with the cold were now, finally, cold.