The Legend of Bastet

The Plum Room had a deep and furry purple carpet, milky purple walls, an ominous purple closet with a few token purple childrens' pajamas, purple... to keep it simple: the number of things in the room that were purple was in the neighbourhood of all of them. There were precisely two things in the room that were not purple. The frame of the seven-foot-tall painting on the east wall was light brown, thankfully; however, its only occupant was a plum the size of a smartcar on a field of purple grass under a purple sunset. It was most likely that the muse of this endeavour had been a wily purple river gurgling from the mouth of wine bottles, lingering in the fertile mind of the painter, flowing through his blood and cascading out his brush. Noemi adored the painting. The other entity in the Plum Room that was not purple – and every bit as unshakeable a fixture as the grossly mesmerizing painting – was a cat, which was calico, and thereby slightly purplish when it was nighttime and no lights were turned on and it was sleeping in the middle the cavernous purple bed as it was when Noemi arrived the night before.

Noemi had known that it would be there, had dreaded it, in fact. Bastet – the creature's name was Bastet, in honour and irony of the Egyptian goddess – bordered on the gargantuan. When Bastet had appeared in the cabin many years before as if from the bowels of some other god who had had a bit too much to drink and far too much to eat during a feast of some sort the previous evening, her grandfather Teague had told Noemi, then nine-years-old, and her younger brother Malakai the story of beast's journey to the Plum Room (after speculating aloud over and dismissing the god's-bowels theory). Bastet, Gran-Tea claimed, was in fact a stunted mountain lion that had, by a lucky turn of fate he had explained in superfluous detail, been locked in an elementary school. Lucky? Kai asked; Yes, was the answer, lucky for her. Gran-Tea had continued in diligent precision to relay the consequences, with the reaction from his grandchildren transforming from wondrous impatience to traumatized horror.

 The agile, bony fourth graders and their more succulent teacher hadn't given the feline goddess much resistance, but once the word spread Bastet, crazed by her lust for human blood, had quite the time breaking down the door of the next classroom, the third graders having barricaded it with little chairs and desks. However – their grandfather winked cheerily at them – the mountain lion prevailed by circling their finger-painting-bedecked fortress and climbing through an open window the third grade teacher was smoking out of. They had all played a big game of tag – you're eaten. At this point young Kai began to sob in deep, quiet torrents and Noemi had held him close, staring at their grandfather in terror. If Tea felt any guilt, it culminated only in his trailing off somewhat. He took a tea break and left Noemi and Kai alone in the Plum Room with Bastet's undulating, purring bulk for a very long five minutes.

When he returned he dove back in immediately, fresh with a second wind: half a dozen teachers mounted a valiant but doomed counter-assault, an unsuspecting janitor listening to Bob Dylan on his headphones lost a leg and the plump, lovable nurse – whom he insisted must be as lifelike as possible to save the effort of Noemi's and Kai's imagination and so plied Noemi for details, including the name, of their own school nurse, Miss Judy – lost her sanity and embarked upon her own short-lived, needle-wielding rampage. Every good story, Gran-Tea said, needed a light side story, just to relieve the pressure. At the cusp of the climax, he had again paused to insist that his story contained the two most crucial ingredients: a happy ending and a moral. The happy ending was that Noemi's cousin Michel had tamed the child-devouring monster by a great feat of courage and wit and brought it back to live in their family cabin because Noemi's uncle Joel (pronounced like Noel, their grandmother insisted) had some ridiculous mountain cat hair allergy.

With her brother in his arms, Noemi mustered for the first time what would become a dangerous and comforting weapon of her future: reason. How, she asked, had this occurred in her school without her knowing? Tea explained very patiently about humanity's flawed grasp of the space-time continuum and how time, like a plum, was circular; this, coupled with each individual's separate yet intertwining realities, made it possible for Bastet to have made it to their home after eating dozens of their classmates without it actually having happened in their realities as of yet. Just wait, he said, winking once more.

With that, Tea left his two grandchildren to grapple with the secret moral of the story, asserting this to be the only work of the listener of stories – inherently lazy souls, listeners, he never stooped to such a level. He was wrong about that, of course, as exemplified by how this story would belabour Kai's imagination for years to come (including inducing an ill-fated trip to see the presumed-soon-to-be-late Miss Judy after breaking out in tears several months later on his first day of the third grade after he caught a whiff of tobacco from his teacher's jacket). Malakai learned quite a lot from the story: for instance, Michel became his new hero. Tea began calling a bewildered but unperturbed Michel the Cat Whisperer, and the name, following a bit of molding, stuck: he became Mitch the Cat. The pseudo-moral Kai invented stuck as well, long beyond his agonizing fourth grade year in which his anxiety grew into the monster his imagination prophecied. He grew convinced that some catastrophe awaited those around him. Noemi had never figured out what encompassing world truth the story held for her, but it had provided her with one useful and lasting lesson:

 Don't – mess – with Bastet!
And she didn't.