by Marie Brennan
The cat did not look like a “Flufferina.” But Ms. Kontos had finally kicked her no-good husband to the curb two years ago, and in hindsight she felt that his detestation of cats should have been a warning sign never to marry him in the first place. No sooner had she closed the door on him than she opened it again to rush out and buy a pet. As a child she had wanted to name a cat Flufferina, and had eternally been disappointed by the sleek short-hairs her family kept acquiring; unfortunately for Ms. Kontos, the kitten she adopted did not live up to the promise of her fuzzy beginnings. Her black fur was perhaps a bit longer than most short-hairs, but not anything that merited the name -- which was, the veterinary technician thought privately, a hideous name for any cat, short-haired or long.
But she smiled at Ms. Kontos anyway as she drew the reluctant Flufferina out of her carrying crate and onto the examination table. “Oh, your poor cat! What happened to her?”
“A dog!” Ms. Kontos cried, dabbling at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “I took Flufferina out for walksies in her little harness tonight -- oh, I shouldn’t have done it; ordinarily we go before sunset, but I was late getting home because of a silly argument at work -- and then out of nowhere, this enormous, horrible dog!” Dennis, her no-good waste of a former husband, had liked dogs, the bigger the better. In the halcyon early days of their courtship she had found them charming as well, but now she had convinced herself that was never true.
Soledad, the veterinary technician, stroked Flufferina in a vain attempt to calm her so the wound could be examined. Flufferina was hissing and spitting, and doing her best to puff up to her name. The fur around her right hind leg was sticky and matted with blood . . . but as canine-inflicted injuries went, she had gotten away remarkably unharmed. Soledad asked, “Was it a little dog?”
“No, it was this huge, awful beast!”
Unwisely, Soledad said, “I’m surprised she’s not --”
She stopped herself before finishing that sentence, but anyone with two ounces of sense could supply the word “dead” for herself. Despite appearances, Ms. Kontos had more than two. She seized her purse in vindictive hands and said, “I got it in the eyes with my pepper spray. And then I beat it with my purse until it ran away.”
That was more steel than Soledad would have expected from her. It soon evaporated, though, with Ms. Kontos wailing, “But what if the dog was rabid?” Her handkerchief, which was ordinarily more in the way of a theatrical prop than an actual tool, was now being wound tight around her fingers. Soledad had always found the woman excessively dramatic, but now she felt some sympathy. People often got very upset when their pets were hurt, and Flufferina had propped Ms. Kontos up during the difficult months after the divorce.
“It’s unlikely,” Soledad said, “but we can renew her rabies vaccination. I presume the dog wasn’t caught? And you don’t know who it belonged to? Then better to be on the safe side. Here, if you can keep Flufferina calm for a moment --”
There was no calm to be had, from either pet or owner, but Ms. Kontos kept Flufferina on the table until Soledad was able to administer an injection of pain meds. With those rendering the cat dozy, Soledad managed to bundle Ms. Kontos out into the waiting room and get to work with the vet, cleaning and stitching the wound. There were punctures on either side of the cat’s leg, with a trailing gouge where Flufferina had managed to pull free, and the size of the wound said Ms. Kontos hadn’t been exaggerating about the size of the dog. Flufferina truly had been lucky to get away alive.
“My poor baby darling,” Ms. Kontos said when she was finally allowed back in. She petted Flufferina’s too-sleek head, trying not to look at the white gauze wrapping the injury. “Oh, my little baby girl, you poor, poor thing.”
Even through the drugs, the cat’s expression said, I am not a poor baby darling. I am a mighty huntress, and if you hadn’t put me on that stupid leash, none of this would ever have happened.
***
A few weeks later, Ms. Kontos was back -- without Flufferina.
“Have you seen her?” she wailed at Soledad.
If anything, she was even more distraught than before. Soledad knew it couldn’t be complications from the bite; Flufferina had already come back in for a two-week follow-up, and the wound was healing nicely. Ms. Kontos was diligent about caring for her pet, and if right now that meant antibiotics rather than brushing her disappointingly un-fluffy fur, so be it.
Soledad herded Ms. Kontos into a chair and got the story from her. Someone had broken a window in Ms. Kontos’ house the previous night -- no, she didn’t know who -- just a terrible crash -- and some of the furniture was knocked over; it must have been a burglar, though it didn’t look like they’d taken anything -- but that didn’t matter; what mattered was that Flufferina must have gotten out, and now Ms. Kontos could not find her.
“I looked everywhere,” she moaned. “First in the house, because I was sure my little baby wouldn’t want to go outside without her harness, and I thought it must have scared her so much that she hid, but I didn’t find her, and really I looked everywhere, so then I started looking outside --” She’d been talking too much, breathing too little, and running on a severe shortage of sleep. Ms. Kontos swayed, and Soledad put out one nervous hand to make sure she didn’t topple out of her chair onto the floor. “I thought -- you haven’t seen her, have you?”
The local veterinarian’s office was not an animal shelter, but Ms. Kontos clearly wasn’t thinking straight. “Let me get you the phone number,” Soledad said.
The animal shelter hadn’t seen Flufferina, either. Soledad coached Ms. Kontos through the procedure for making posters and putting them up around the neighborhood; what she did not say was how rarely those things worked for cats. Dogs, sure, people called those in, because dogs were not meant to be roaming around without a human nearby. But people were used to seeing cats out on their own business. And if Flufferina had gotten injured again, she might curl up under a bush somewhere to lick her wounds, and never be seen at all.
Some cats were homebodies, though, and bolted back to safety at the first opportunity. “Go on home,” Soledad urged Ms. Kontos -- partly to get her out the door, so that Soledad could get back to her actual duties. “You might find her curled up in her favorite spot right now.”
Ms. Kontos did not find Flufferina curled up in her favorite spot. Not that day, nor the next.
On the third day, however, Flufferina came slinking home. Uninjured, though she got hauled back to the vet to be sure; with that confirmed (and the broken window thoroughly boarded up until it could be repaired), Ms. Kontos planted her poor frightened little baby girl in her lap as if she would never let go again.
The cat was not frightened. The cat was not a baby. The cat had been through unspeakable trials, and her expression said, For this, I will burn the world.
***
There would be no more nighttime walks. There were very nearly no more walks at all, with Ms. Kontos terrified that Flufferina would be attacked again, or that she would somehow dematerialize out of her harness and this time vanish for good. But Flufferina did not take well to being cooped up inside without respite, and so the walks resumed -- but only on the weekend, when Ms. Kontos could walk her during the middle of the day.
Ms. Kontos tensed up when she turned a corner and found a man approaching, but not only out of fear for her poor little baby darling. She had readily told all her friends and acquaintances that her ex-husband Dennis was a good-for-nothing waste of space; what she had not told them was that he’d been rather worse than that. Not physically abusive, but something more insidious, marinating her in a low-grade miasma of fear and insecurity that left her in doubt of everything, her own strength above all. Leaving him had taken even more courage than pepper-spraying that awful dog and beating it with her purse.
But courage of any kind came to her only in bursts. The habit of timidity had been there before Dennis, and now it stained her down to the bone. It meant that even on a quiet residential sidewalk in the middle of the day, she was nervous about encountering a strange man, and she almost crossed the road to get away from him.
But his eyes went wide at the sight of Flufferina -- now thoroughly recovered from both the damage of the bite and the indignity of having her leg shaved so the vet could treat it -- and he promptly sank to one knee, holding his hand out with his fingers curled. “Sorry,” he said to Ms. Kontos, though his attention remained on Flufferina. “She’s just such a beautiful cat. But I should have introduced myself first; I’m Marcus.”
“Laura,” Ms. Kontos said reflexively, clutching the leash. Flufferina was poised on wary paws, not approaching the outstretched hand.
“And who’s this lovely lady?” Marcus said. He had very good cat manners, not staring Flufferina in the eye, and hunkering down to make himself smaller.
The same flawed instinct that said Laura Kontos should have known not to trust that no-good Dennis because he didn’t like cats now made her relax. Surely this stranger could not be all bad -- even if he choked on a snort when she said, “Flufferina.”
One cautious step at a time, Flufferina approached his hand. She stretched out her nose to sniff his fingers, with a delicacy that suggested too hard a sniff might set off a bomb. Something about his scent was familiar to her, and yet not. Eventually she drew close enough for him to pet her, and then he proved to be very good at that, unerringly finding the spot behind her ear that she most liked to have scritched. While Ms. Kontos beamed down from above, the cat rubbed herself along Marcus’s shin, and he bent his head and whispered in her ear, too softly for Ms. Kontos to make out the words.
“Thank you,” he said when he finally stood up, groaning a little at having knelt too long. “I should let you get back to your walk. Have a lovely day.”
“You too,” Laura Kontos said, timidity returning now that his attention was on her. She’d been more comfortable when he was murmuring what she assumed was the usual baby-talk to Flufferina.
He continued on. So did she. She did not look back, and so she did not see that he turned to watch her go.
She did not look down, and so she did not see the cat’s expression, which was very thoughtful indeed.
***
This is what Marcus had whispered in the cat’s ear:
I am so, so sorry. If I had the time, I would explain to you what happened, but your owner would wonder too much. The short form is that I transferred my affliction to you -- I didn’t realize it was gone until I failed to change last week. I’ve been trying to get rid of it, but not like this. I’ll wait outside your house at the next full moon, and I think if you bite me, it will transfer back. I hope you’ll forgive me for the insult to your feline dignity.
As the weeks passed, the cat regrettably known as Flufferina sat in her favorite spot with her paws tucked neatly beneath her body and her eyes slitted in thought. An insult to her feline dignity? That fell infinitely short of describing it. She’d been enjoying a brief wash after a snack of kibble, the house quiet around her now that the human was asleep; then she’d stood up, stretched, walked through a moonbeam -- and her life had fallen apart.
Now at least she knew how to put it back together again, and with luck, no one would ever realize what she had suffered.
But the man with the good fingers had said he was trying to get rid of his affliction. He didn’t want it: the newfound strength, the heightened senses, the sharp teeth and claws and all the things humans lacked. The cat shared his opinion, but for different reason; unlike the hairless apes, she didn’t need some outside force providing her with those things. Nature had already made her a mighty huntress, and only the timorousness of Laura Kontos kept her from unleashing her power on the birds and small rodents of the world.
The cat rose in the night and nosed open the door to where the human slept. Her soundless paws lofted her easily to the heights of the bed, where she curled up and thought some more.
***
“Are you sure?” Soledad said, accepting the carrying crate.
“Oh, yes,” Laura Kontos said. Her eyes were oddly bright. “I’m planning on moving out to the mountains, and Flufferina isn’t really an outdoorsy cat, you know? And she’s gotten so anxious since the attack. She doesn’t cuddle with me like she used to.” In truth the lack of cuddling was more recent, and Laura had a deep-seated suspicion as to the cause. Cats could smell things, after all.
Although giving up the pet she’d wanted for so long sent a pang through her, Laura felt it was for the best. Flufferina had helped her get through the difficult days after leaving Dennis, when it felt like she’d never make it on her own . . . but she wasn’t that uncertain, fearful woman anymore. She was even ready to ditch Dennis’ last name and go back to being Laura Thompson.
Flufferina didn’t seem to mind being handed off. When Soledad opened the crate, the cat immediately came out and butted her head against Soledad’s hand until the technician began scratching behind her ears. Like Marcus, she knew just where to use her fingers best.
“I’ll give her a good home,” Soledad promised. Silently she added, and a better name.
“Thanks,” Laura said, and petted Flufferina’s head one last time, which the cat patiently endured. As her sleeve pulled back, the edge of a bandage peeked out.
Then Laura Thompson walked out the door. She had become a mighty huntress, and she was ready to begin a new life. One outside the inconvenient confines of suburbia, in a place full of trees and fresh air and small prey to crunch in her jaws.
And the cat’s expression, now free of any canine taint, was content.
© Copyright 2023 Marie Brennan
About the Author
Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for inspiration. She recently misapplied her professors' hard work to The Night Parade of 100 Demons and the short novel Driftwood. She is the author of the Hugo Award-nominated Victorian adventure series The Memoirs of Lady Trent along with several other series, over seventy short stories, and the New Worlds series of worldbuilding guides; as half of M.A. Carrick, she has written the epic Rook and Rose trilogy, beginning with The Mask of Mirrors. For more information, visit swantower.com, Twitter @swan_tower, or her Patreon at www.patreon.com/swan_tower.