fortuna
I locked the two cats in my bedroom, so that I could stare at the living room floor in peace.
The birds started small, just like she did. Baby sparrows, fallen from the nest, their nests neatly snapped as Fortuna laid them on before the back patio door. Her kill was almost dainty.
After that, I found a live bird in the garage, nestled in a temporary haven between the step in the concrete and the garage door, feathers strewn around its hiding place. I picked it up and took it outside, and I petted its feathers. Just another sparrow, the kind you’d find anywhere. After a few minutes, it chirped twice and flew away.
My mother blamed herself. We had a bird feeder in the back garden, its post wrapped in metal to keep the squirrels out (ha!). And when the birds would come in, they would pick through the mix of seeds to get to their favorite treat, spilling some of the rest on the grass below. By the bushes. And when the birds would run out of seed, they’d fly to the ground to pick at it there. Our cat was less than a year old at that point, but she displayed talent for the hunt. And she liked birds. Moving from the city suburb to northern Idaho did not hinder this. Especially since, courtesy of our new houses’ last owner, the house came with a series of dog doors.
Fortuna was a beauty. Her fur was short, black, and glossy, her body small and lithe. Some cats chase string when you dangle it. There was nothing that Fortuna wouldn’t chase. She’d go for blades of grass, keys, phone cords, even my wooden practice daggers (courtesy of martial arts training). She’d scratched and bloodied my hands several times, whenever I was stupid enough to try to make her pounce on the toys I offered. Always enthusiastic, never cruel.
We were a dismayed, though, when we found the dead bird scattered around our new house’s bedroom halfway through the remodel. From what I could tell, it had been another sparrow, but this time all we found were feathers and a head. Another followed that, in another room. Then she’d managed to catch herself a starling.
Back to the living room. We had tiled and carpeted the floors. The rooms had gone from a hideous 80’s pink-walls-with-a-green-carpet to boring beige, which in a house of this make was really all that could be done. Asian furniture in cherry graced the corners, and managed to make the giant iron wood-furnace less hideous. Nothing there could distract from the large black duck.
Black, gray, and very dead, it reclined on the new carpet just past the tiled entryway. Its neck held a particular angle that suggested that it had been snapped. Feathers were missing from its tail, torn out and played with all along the hallway.
And to think, I’d been petting that cat…
and now, for something completely different
I now live in a town between a lake and several mountains, with a booming, thriving population of under seven thousand. Having grown up in Seattle, this is a bit of a change, though welcome. The little town has some very… interesting aspects. The Seattle-ite in me is aghast that there is no recycling service. The tomboy in me delights that wearing my nice, long skirt with combat boots is an entirely respectable choice. My internal weapon enthusiast noted that the thrift shops sold gun racks in their entryways. And the bookworm in me is amazed that pulling into the library mid-morning, we were pressed to find a parking space. I’ve never seen a busier library.
Granted, the selection of books isn’t huge, but there’s plenty of interesting things to read. I’ve taken to finishing a book a day recently, and after three days of three different fantasy novels, I decided to take a short break from the genre. My manic, unreasonable side presses that it would be fun to start at the end of the fiction section and work my way up the ranks, so that I might someday say that I’ve read every book in the library (it will never happen; you have my full permission to point and laugh). I picked up the last book, a contemporary novel: The Other Shulman, by Alan Zweibel. I opened it, read the first two chapters there, checked it out and brought it home.
My mother had decided to make the trip with me, as she also wanted to visit the library. In her case, it’s partly for books, partly because of some design work she’s doing. My mother reads nonfiction, and prefers biographies.
Still, I couldn’t help but read a few lines of my book to her, and mention that to get myself out of the fantasy groove, this book is about an overweight middle-aged guy trying to redefine himself by running a marathon. She liked the lines. I read a few more, when an especially good part came up. The novel really is hysterically funny, real and casual enough that she was certain that it was nonfiction before I pointed out the big ‘fiction’ tag on the spine. I went to go avoid working on my NaNo writing, curled up on the carpet, and continued my book.
Around page forty-five, there is a section about this poor man, trying to gasp in air, somehow recover his breath in the second session of his marathon-training program, walking, walking, taking longer strides… and then a girl jogger passes him, a young, cute blond with a tattoo just above her pant line. And he takes off like a creature possessed, trying, striving in a euphoria of vivid, poetic, and humor-streaked language describing his attempt to pace her, just so he can see more of that tattoo. I began snickering, shaking, and then fell over on the carpet laughing so hard that tears squeezed out of my eyes and my mascara ran onto my cheeks.
“Don’t do that. I’m warning you.” My mother was reading a cookbook, watching me intently through her reading glasses.
I had another mental image of the events from another angle. I couldn’t reply; my throat had almost closed up, my chest ached.
She pounced. “Back! Back! I’m reading this now! Don’t you have writing? Go! Go! Do your writing! It’s my book now!”
“Mom!” I accompanied my wail with poorly executed attempts at snatching the book back. My martial arts instructor would be ashamed.
“I’m reading this. You’re on page forty-six.” And my mom curls up on the carpet where I had been crouching and turns back to the first chapter. “Look, I’m already enjoying it. Go write your book.”
This, I think, is the peril of having a very young artist-mother who also enjoys books. From experience, this is going to result in having my library book go mysteriously missing every few days, only to wind up perched inside a sofa cushion, or inside my mom’s sock drawer. I’ll come back from the restroom, only to find that in the middle of the climax, my mother has gone back to chapter five and is again snickering about the marathon-trainee sprinting desperately after the woman with the tattoo.
