Kirke stood to her feet. “I’d say it’s time for them to become butterflies.”
Carissa let out a little laugh. “I hope you mean that metaphorically. I hope we really don’t have to fight these cats… ah ladies.”
“Me too, because they were one of my best teams.”
“Do you think there is any danger?” Carissa asked Kirke. “I mean they’ve been cats for a long time.”
“There won’t be anything permanent but the feline traits will be evident for a while.”
A small crack sounded and then multiplied. The cocoons’ casings started to shatter. Fingers stabbed up and out of the hard shell. Kirke moved over to one and started to help. Carissa and Xen raced to the other two and did the same. The women coughed and coughed and coughed and spat out fur ball after fur ball. When the coughing fits subsided the women rose up fully armed in dated Phi gear. Confusion marred their faces and they tugged at the swords that were strapped to their backs.
Carissa unsheathed her sword in unification with Xen.
“Get behind me Kirke.” Xen growled. His fangs elongated.
The women let out a hiss and showed their pearly white fangs in retaliation. They charged.
The room became a frenzy of clashing swords and tossed furniture. Carissa held her demi-god powers in-check. She didn’t want to blast the whole room to pieces.
Carissa, wound them enough to disarm them.
Roger. She sent back.
Xen with his master swordsmanship disarmed two of the women. Carissa fought with Ginger in what was cramped living space, round and round in circles trying to best each other. The coffee table went crashing. Xen is definitely more graceful at this. She thought. After a minute Carissa tired of the silly dance and released her demi-god power, her sword vibrated, she brought it down on Ginger’s sword and shattered it into pieces.
Ginger hissed and her hands turned to cat paws with long sharp claws. She took aim at her face. Carissa sent a blast of power from her hands and Ginger flew backwards into the old stone wall, the force with which she connected left a deep impression. Luckily Xen owned the hotel and would tend to the repairs before anyone questioned the damage.
Sassy and Minnie were now ready to move again. They came at Xen and Carissa but they didn’t reach them.
“Pauo,” Carissa shouted in Ancient Greek. The women froze on the spot.
“Xen, use your mind mumbo-jumbo to help them remember who they are.”
Xen stepped forward and placed his fingers on the temple of Minnie and then Sassy and when realization became evident through their expressions, he moved over to Ginger and did the same.
“Thank you,” Ginger said. The other women followed her lead with thanks.
“Who did this to you?” Xen asked.
Sassy shifted from where she stood. “One very annoyed witch.”
“Her name was Beatrix and she had a thing for one of the demons we eliminated.” Ginger supplied.
Xen let out a small growl, “I am sorry that I did not find you all sooner.”
“We tried to show our fangs and claws but none of the men found that strange,” Minnie said.
“It was you who saw through it.” Ginger pointed to Carissa. “What are you or more importantly who are you?”
Carissa cleared her throat to answer.
Xen moved back and pulled her to his side. “She’s my wife and the daughter of Ares.”
All three women oohed and dropped into a bow.
“Please don’t do that.” Carissa stepped forward with her hand out-stretched to shake. “I’m Carissa and this is Kirke.”
The women shook her hand and Kirke’s with great enthusiasm.
“We can’t thank you all enough.” Ginger said.
“Well my work here is done,” Kirke announced. Then raised her hands like Endora from the Bewitched T.V. series and dematerialized.
Carissa smiled. “You’ve got to admit she does have an awesome exodus with that whole waving your arms in the air routine.”
The women stood in silence. Carissa’s humor fell flat but she wasn’t disgruntled because it didn’t take much to piece together that they needed time to make adjustments. They’d been trapped for a hundred years and with that came emotional ups and downs.
Xen broke the awkwardness. “How about we get you ladies something to eat and I’ll make a few calls to get you all home.”
Ginger shuffled forward. “Xen. I want back into the Phi Athanatoi.”
“Me too,” Minnie said.
“Well you’re not leaving me out.” Sassy chimed in.
“I never removed any of you. There are only two ways you stop being a Phi Athanatoi warrior and that is a sword to the heart or you lose your head.”
“Those options never scared us before.” Ginger lowered her eyebrows. “We have a witch’s ass to kick.”
Efthalia lives in Sydney, Australia. Her passion for writing was cultivated by the stories her mother told her as a child. At school she often day-dreamt of exciting new worlds where the heroine had super-powers and would save the day. Her teachers told her on a regular basis to stop making up her own words. That flaw is now her super-power. Making up words, characters and worlds is all part of fiction writing and something she loves doing.
Find out more at www.efthaliaauthor.com.
The Train Case
by Michael Raymond
A hedonistic Siamese cat on an acid-drenched trip through the American Southwest in pursuit of the secret to erasing his past meets a young boy who sends him on a journey that changes his life.
I’m sixty miles outside Flagstaff barreling toward the Valley of the Gods with an angry ferret, a Marxist emu, and an eight-year-old boy when I become aware that my catnip has been laced with LSD.
The impurity of my catnip isn't a conclusion drawn from inductive reasoning, but from the anecdotal evidence that the Volkswagen Beetle I've stolen from the parking garage at Caesar's has taken flight. It’s customary in such situations—in my rare moments of glistening lucidity—to consult the Oracle for insight, but the Oracle is blocked and has locked herself in the glove box and isn’t coming out until I apologize for being rude to her back in Hope.
To be clear, I have no intention of apologizing. Apology is not my idiom.
At least the mesas look nice.
“Life is a glazed mind,” I shout. “Happiness is a glazed donut!” I can barely hear myself, roaring through the troposphere as we are.
There’s a squawk from the backseat. The emu is finally awake. “You skipped Liberty,” she says.
“What are you… Jinkies!” I shout, and I throw the Volkswagen into a swerve to avoid the bearded celestial dragon that’s just dropped out of the sun. The emu crashes into the corner of the backseat. A thump-thump “ow!” comes from the glove box.
The emu recovers and jams her beaky face between the seats. Her face is melting bidirectionally. “You mentioned Life and Happiness, two pillars of Liberal Humanism, but failed to mention Liberty.”
“Liberty is sociopathy!” I cry. “Entertainment ist das neue Opiat der Massen!”
“That’s not even close to what Marx wrote,” she says. “It’s religion, not entertainment. Where are we going, by the way?” she says.
“Valley of the Gods!” I announce. “To meet a Canadian Sphynx who is coming up from Juárez with a pillowcase full of peyote buttons, handpicked in the wild desert gardens of scenic Chee-hwa-hwa, Mexico. Through rigorous application of ancient Tibetan mathematical formulas—and peyote—the Sphynx and I will prove that one can achieve America’s most cherished ideal, illusory freedom, by erasing the past. You see, dear emu, once erased, the past can be rewritten to create any desirable future, and thus achieve illusory freedom. And then it’s goodbye, mom!”
I suddenly feel self-conscious. And paranoid. “Am I rambling, Che?”
“Ceaselessly,” says the emu, “and my name’s not Che.”
Lovely. Of all the hitchhikers I could have picked up in the sunsh
at dustsplat that is Quartzite, Arizona, I had to pick up a sobriquet-sensitive emu, and Che seems like an appropriate name for an emu with a more than passing knowledge of the works of Marx comma Karl. “Hitchhikers don’t make the rules. You’re Che now.”
Che flops back in the seat and crosses her wings, scowling the scowl of a thousand scowling scowlers. Apropos of nothing, Ferret pokes her head out of the glove box. “God is dead,” she announces, and disappears again.
God is dead. Mom is dead. With both of them out of the picture, there is nothing but unforeseen catastrophe preventing me from the freedom I’ll gain by erasing mom from my existence. It’s all starting to make sense now, in a paisleyscopic kaleidoscope way. “Peyote, ho!” I shout.
“Everything you say conflicts with reality,” says Che.
“That’s the beauty of illusory freedom. Reality ceases to matter!” I laugh and blare the car’s horn.
“What will you do if the magic peyote doesn’t fix your crappy life?”
I let go of the wheel and turn around over the back of the seat. I raise my paw to my temple. “BLAM! Siamese brain splats all over Utah.”
I flip around and retake the helm. The Volkswagen hits a downdraft and slides across a fetching patch of pink, lacy sky. I haul hard on the wheel and the car yaws toward a raptor of some sort. Steel-eyed chap. Certainly perplexed to see a dazzling, pajamaed feline flying a Volkswagen at this altitude. I peek in the rearview. “What are you running from, Che?”
“Who said I am running from anything?” she says.
“Everyone’s running from something,” I say. “No one goes to Quartzite on purpose.”
“I want a new start,” she says. “That’s all you need to know.”
I bang my paw on the dash. “You want something, too, don’t you Ferret?” Then, over my shoulder to the emu, “Ferret wants a new boyfriend.”
“What’s wrong with the old one?”
I turn around backward in my seat again. “He stole a Volkswagen and flew it to Utah.” I turn back and face front. A mesa is coming up fast. “Judas Priest! Assume the position!”
The car whams into the mesa and skids across the red rocks, tires throwing rooster tails of dust and chewed up sagebrush, finally skuddering to a stop atop a hippie-dippy prayer wheel. With majestic grace I leap over the seat—“Right, out you go!”—grab Che and heave her out of the car.
Ferret opens the glove box. “You’ve killed the emu!” she shouts.
“Jiminy Christmas in the catnip, the emu’s fine.” I lean out and point down at Che. “She’s right there.” I hop out and walk around to Che. “Get up, drama queen.”
Che presses herself up onto her knobby emu-knees. “Jiminy Christmas? Really?” She gets the rest of the way up onto her giant feet. “A minced oath is a sign of a weak mind lacking the courage of its convictions,” she says. She slaps the dust off her wings and looks around. “Where are we?”
“How should I know? Do I look like Ranger Freaking Rick?”
“You are the most reprehensible person I have ever met.” Che snorts kind of sexy-like and storms off.
“I can lick my own nuts!” I shout after her.
Ferret harrumphs and closes herself back inside the glove box, clearly not pleased with this unexpected discussion of my felisticles with a flightless Marxist bird. My adorable Ferret, you wear jealousy like the mantle of the Weasel Empress. This pleases me.
I reach into the car and tap the glove box.
“I say, Ferret my love, is there a mari-joo-wanna cigarette in there? Next to the tin of catnip?”
“Go away. I’m trying to oracle.”
“Please do be a good girl first and drop it out the back of the glove box.” Ferret sighs but does the needful and the joint plops onto the floorboard. Poor Ferret. She truly is the worst oracle in the history of oracles. Not once has she predicted the Lotto numbers. Not once has huffing the sacred gas led her to prophesy a Derby winner. And not once has there been a Bacchanalian ferret orgy. I stretch and scratch myself. Seven or eight furry Andalusian libertines would really get me right.
I escort the joint to the mesa’s edge and stop at the rim. The view of the Valley of the Gods is magnificent.
I give the joint a good long sniff.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” I announce as I light up, “that a stoned Siamese in possession of a stolen Volkswagen must be in want of a spliff.” I take a hit, savoring le fog du cannabisez-vous.
Somewhere down there among those glowing rock spires is a hairless cat with enough peyote to erase the memories of a Serengeti’s-worth of lions.
“Dearest mother, tomorrow you and your history are history.” How appropriate it’s the same day as her funeral. In Los Angeles. 700 miles away. Unattended by me.
I can almost smell my freedom. It smells like…well, really dank weed.
Some fifteen minutes later I’ve smoked myself into a congenial jacaranda haze and that’s when I remember I’ve locked a small human in the trunk of the car. I make an about-face and with long, uneven steps stride back toward the Volkswagen, hoping the trunk came with air holes.
I had picked the kid up just below the Sierra Nevada, sitting in the mining pan of the giant prospector squatting by the freeway in Auburn. He reminded me of me at the same age. A bit raggedy. Jittery eyes. That willowy concave posture bullied kids and kittens acquire. I told the kid he could ride along on condition he rode in the trunk in the train case. It’s a quite lovely train case. Pink and white. Vintage. Something Jackie Onassis would have stuffed full of hair rollers and false eyelashes and taken to Hyannis Port.
The kid—he fancies himself a writer—agreed to terms and I locked him in the train case with an old Corona electric typewriter, a ream of top quality Italian paper, and a bottle of Mescal.
I was closing the train case when the kid stopped the lid with his hand and held the bottle out toward me. “What’s in this bottle?”
“Mescal. Drink it. It’s good for you.”
“Will it help me write?”
“Absolutely.”
“It smells disgusting."
“It’s the dead worm. Be a man. Drink up.”
“I can’t drink up, and I’m not a man. I’m eight.”
That was Friday. I’ll give the kid credit. He’s been banging away at that damned Corona the whole three days since.
I pop the latches and open the train case. “Lazarus, come forth!” I shout.
The kid sticks his head out of the top. “Lazarus was a friend of Jesus.”
“We’re all friends of Jesus. That was his whole point. Show me what you wrote.”
The kid gives me a thick stack of typewritten pages. I scan the first few. “This is all one sentence. Who do you think you are? William Faulkner?”
“The period key sticks, so I didn’t use it,” the kid explains.
“What’s this drawing on the bottom of the page?”
“It’s an airplane,” says the kid.
I squint at it. “Really?”
“It’s a B-24 bomber. I like World War Two stuff.”
I turn the drawing this way and that, trying to make sense of it. “Your plane’s jacked up, kid. The foreshortening on the wing is a disaster, and this propeller blade is so huge it’ll chop the plane in half. Good luck bombing the Reich with half a fuselage.”
The kid melts like a fudge pop in hell.
I hear the crap coming out of my mouth and realize that me and the kid are hearing the same words—cruel and rotten to the core—but he’s hearing them in my voice and I’m hearing them in my mother’s.
The litter doesn’t fall far from the box, does it, Cat? Way to go: you’re your mom.
So fix it, jerk.
I drop a reassuring paw on the kid’s shoulder. “Listen, I’m not honest with anybody—not even myself—but I’m going to be honest with you. You’ve got some talent. But it’s a hard world. No one’s going to publish you or invite you to the Hollywood premiere of your novel’s movie
adaptation so you can walk the red carpet with a way-outta-your-league Brazilian underwear model unless your stuff is perfect, capische?”
I put the manuscript back in the kid’s hands. “Make it perfect.”
The kid looks up at me. “I don’t want to go back inside.”
“Listen, you want to write, you have to suffer. Alone. Just you in the dark with the certain knowledge that you’ll never be good enough.” I clap the kid on the back. “Now get back in there and make me proud.”
The kid wipes his eyes and his nose, but he crawls back down into the case. Perhaps not my finest moment, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had a finest moment to know the difference. But what can you realistically expect from a stoned Siamese with a dead mother, a snooty emu, a pissed off girlfriend with a blocked oracle pipe, and an eight-year-old boy who may have just written the best goddamn thing I’ve ever read.
I shrug and as I’m closing the lid, a howl lets loose inside the train case that sounds like the souls of the damned being dragged through fire and broken glass. My tail shoots up and my paws shake as I slam the lid, lock it, close the Volkswagen’s trunk, lock that, and then pop a tab of acid to smooth out the warps.
I need to get away from the car.
Ferret is standing in the shade of a boulder like a furry water balloon, shading her eyes against the red-hot azure pouring out of the sky. Che is fanning herself with one of her massive wings.
My tail is as rigid as adolescence.
No one else seems to have heard my mother shrieking inside the train case.
“Let’s go for a hike down that arroyo,” I say. “Sorry about the exposed balloon knot,” I add as I pass Ferret.
Ferret and Che follow me over to where the arroyo starts. It’s a small ditch. A cleft. Pachamama’s arroyo.
I hitch up my pajamas. The only place to go when confronted with Pachamama’s arroyo is in, so in we go.
“Tally-ho!” I shout, and I march down into the cleft.
“Where are you going?” shouts Ferret.
“In!” I shout back, paw in the air.
Hellcats: Anthology Page 14
