The Old God Dog

When Little Alf was eight years old his father Isaak, the Laughing Man, Son of the Ocean, took him out with sandwiches and lemonade to their beach’s first sandbar. Midway through their picnic, Little Alf spotted a mutt chewing a crab and trundled over to it with half his sandwich. Isaak grinned. When not only the proffered sandwich was taken, but also a chunk of flesh the size of a blueberry from the boy’s ring finger, between the first and second joints, Isaak laughed and laughed and wrapped his sweaty shirt around Alf’s bleeding hand. The boy’s grandmother Elisabet boiled stale herbs and dressed his wound; after his tears had dried, and he drifted towards the seas of sleep in her lap, she told him the tale of Fenrir the Wolf and Odin’s last battle. She had sensed Isaak’s quiet disgust for the boy’s weeping and shared his proud shame. So she moved, like a queen upon a pawn: perfectly timed to Little Alf’s final moments of consciousness, she declared: “True Warriors of the North never cry. Aren’t you a Warrior, little one?” Little Alf dreamed as Odin. All others, even his laughing father, had fled or perished; alone, Alfred Isaaksson stalked through a silent winter forest, seeking the mythical wolf.

It was a sixty-year hunt. The next morning, the dream forgotten, he awoke having shed his Littleness, donning with exhausted vigilance the nimble Boots of Restlessness and the sturdy Spear of Anger. He not only made war with canines, but perfected a quiet disgust for all those too weak for the mythic battle with Fenrir. Dogs stampeded through his sandcastles, pissed on his cars, kept him awake at night -- and he so fought: physically, kicking them away; politically, for leash laws and dog catchers; and socially, sharing every nasty story he heard.

One cold February day during his sixty-eighth year, a hundred-pound brown mongrel lept into the bed of old Alf’s truck as he drank coffee in the local cafe. The proprietor, a genial, perpetually-exhausted man named Rick, pointed out that Alf had left his liftgate down; Alf nodded, thanked Rick, and promptly forgot.

“You seem off,” Rick said. “Never seen you so quiet.”

“It’s nothing.”

Ever since his dream, Alf had been on constant guard against dogs -- and wolves (though he’d never met any) -- and monitored their every movement about him with keen hostility. However, as he got in his truck and drove home, he was so absorbed with the stench of Fenrir emanating from a piece of paper given by his doctor the day before that he didn’t notice a minion of his enemy had slunk aboard. At home, the dog watched the aging man trundle into the cabin and sit in a rocking chair in the living room. The fire next to him mingled with the emerging sunlight to throw orange streaks upon his pale face. The mongrel lurched down to ground and trundled right on after him, through the front door he’d left open, past his knees, to lie down before the fire and sleep.

Olivia noticed the front door had been left open (which only later did she classify as distinctly odd), and promptly closed it. She then turned to the living room. She clapped a hand to her mouth before a cry could escape. It wasn’t the sight of the dog itself that sent the blood from her head and forced her to reach out with her other hand for a chair-back, though the beast’s sprawling bulk in a living room that had been a dog-free sanctuary for as long as she’d known it did shock her. Her first thought upon sight of the scene was that her husband was dead. His gray eyes stared directly at the dog. The light made up his wrinkled white face into that of a corpse. But his foot twitched to rock the chair and he absentmindedly rubbed the hole in his finger and shivered. Olivia sighed in relief. Death skulked her mind: she too had seen the paper.

There were chores to do around the house, and Olivia quickly returned to them. She busied herself, shaking her head and muttering in wonderment under her breath. She cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, vacuumed all the bedrooms, did laundry, dusted, tidied -- all while avoiding the living room. Two questions harried her, one so terrible that she focused solely upon the other in hopes that the first might disappear or go bother someone else. She wondered and wondered: What to do about the dog? She considered sending it back out to the streets, or taking it to the pound, or offering it to family and friends, but in her whirlwind of wonderment, something else surfaced… a yearning she had buried ever so long ago and thereby assumed dead. It’s unearthing, not as some rotten skeleton but a fierce and stubborn passion, both confused her and made her resolute in a course of preposterous action.

Guilt also accompanied her on her duties, and she moved with a nervous agitation, certain that pandemonium would erupt at any given second. All day she cleaned and worked all day, finding tasks long put off. Finally, at sunset, as she sewed her grandchildren’s torn clothes from the summer, physically and mentally exhausted, she sighed a great, sweeping sigh to clear the rubble from her mind, and there sat a tidy little path forward amid the detritus.

When the explosion finally came, she was prepared.

Alf sat in a trance, rocking, for the whole day. At points he made toast and coffee, or stoked the fire (avoiding kneeling on the dog with the patience of a lifetime owner). He had rarely been able to be quiet or still for even a single meal, and yet that day he sat and sat and sat while Olivia, normally a bastion of tranquility, scurried about finding little projects in a way that everyone associated with Alf. If their children had been present, they would have been so rocked by the whole scenario that they too would each have gotten embroiled in a day of odd action and thoughtful consternation; the confusion could have rippled out through the entire family, but was contained by the elderly couple’s isolation.

The sun set.

“Who the hell…?” Alf muttered. He had dozed off during the afternoon, all the time rocking, rocking. He had dreamed his old dream: stalking Fenrir though the twilit forest, closer than ever before. He smelled the beast’s fur; he listened to its slow breaths. Upon awakening, he saw the dog.

“WHO THE HELL LET THIS IN?” Alf bellowed, staggering to his feet. The dog looked up at him. “‘LIVIA!”

Olivia, with all the dignity of French culture in the face of Nordic barbarism, entered from the kitchen. “Yes, dear?”

“How could you let this beast in?” Alf was shaking, eyes narrowed in a bed of wrinkled skin.

Olivia looked him up and down. Smell being her strongest intuitive sense, she sniffed the air. He was afraid. She had held fast to a view of him as he had seemed the day she met him: immense, ever-fierce, with a laugh that rattled through other people. For fifty years she had not known that this was an act, a farce, a facade. She was content with it; she had not bothered to look -- or, rather, smell -- deeply enough. All that time ago, Olivia, broken and adrift upon a private sea of fear, had sought the shelter of the prosperous, bustling port of Alfred. But now? She no longer felt afraid.

“You let it in, Alfred.”

He sagged. “Wha…?”

Olivia feared he might drop, but he simply swayed and blinked. “And we’re keeping it, Alfred. I always wanted a dog. Also, dinner’s almost ready.”

She exited.

Alf gaped at the space she had vacated, then glared at the dog.

Olivia busied herself in the kitchen. An old nursery song her Grandmother sang to her drifted into her head, and then out of her lips: A louetta, jounte a louetta…. She listened with some amusement to Alf’s hoarse shouting resume. He was shouting at the dog now.

“How dare you enter my home, mutt! I should kick you to the curb! There’s no--”

One bark -- one booming, thunderous bark -- exploded from the living room. The silverware and china in the kitchen clattered, the walls reverberated, the rooms and hallways echoed until it became a cascading dirge. An echo, and….

Silence.

A shuffling. Then Alf sat at the table, wide-eyed. They ate together quietly. Alf did the dishes when they were finished and, skirting the living room, brought Olivia a glass of wine on the enclosed porch. They sat in the gathering darkness and watched the stars appear.

“We’ll call him Thor,” Alf said.

“Who?” asked Olivia.

“The mutt.”

“Oh. Yes, Thor seems appropriate.”

Alf took her hand and their hands trembled together before settling. “You always wanted a dog?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, I never asked.”

She didn’t answer immediately, looking back and back over fifty years of timidity, strolling her graveyard of buried desires. She felt excited, like a kid in a candy shop. “That’s okay,” she said, “I prefer it this way.”

Don Sinatra and the Mango Tree

The old man’s snores echo about the maloca. He is seated in the dirt, leaned back against a support beam in the corner of the enormous hut. A doomed mosquito wanders into the cave of his mouth. A fire smolders next to him, exhaling a thin line of smoke that snakes its way up the thatched roof and out an airway a hundred feet up.

A voice trembles through the still air: “Hello?”

A white parrot, high in the rafters, cocks its head. “Hello?” it calls back.

Still asleep, the old man mutters: “Hello.”

“Hello!” cries the parrot, encouraged.

“Hello,” mumbles the sleeping man.

“Hello!”

“Uh, hi,” says the first voice.

The old man’s eyes spring open. He clamps his jaw and crunches the mosquito. He blinks. “‘S that you, Cucumber?”

(The parrot’s name is Cucumber.) “Hello!” says Cucumber.

“Uh, hello,” repeats the first voice. “Mr --?” It is the voice of a child. “Don Sinatra?”

“Yes!” The old man’s up now but still half-asleep; his reply comes out, accidentally, as a bellow that ricochets around the maloca, building until a dozen “Yes!”s stampede out the front door like a herd of startled cows.

Five silent seconds waddle by. “May we come in?”

The Don peers down at the red adidas shorts tied below his gut. “One minute.” From a hook on the beam he plucks a long string tied with woven palm fronds dyed black and white. He wraps the garment about his waist as a kilt. He stalks towards the door, out of sight; just as he is about to leap into the doorway, he realizes he forgot his jaguar mask. He creeps back, retrieves it, fumbles to undo the string. When the inside of the mask touches the skin of his nose, it begins to transform. The sides grope towards his ears, find purchase just behind them in his scalp and suck the rest of the mask to his visage. The features squirm about a bit and then settle. The sleek nose sniffs the stale air; the flattened ears twitch; the jaguar eyes, slitted and green, slide open. The Don works his jaw side to side, licks his teeth with a rough tongue.

“Hello?” The voice repeats and Don Sinatra turns.

The Wise and Wondrous Don Sinatra leaps into the doorway.

A few feet away are two children. The boy jumps back, eyes wide; the girl, having found an interesting ant, hardly glances up.

“Hello, children,” the old man says. A grin contorts his bespeckled jaguar face. He quite likes children, and a fair few seem to end up on his doorstep. It’s that damned Franco.

“Are you the shaman Don Sinatra?” the boy asks. He’s obviously shaken by the reception, but looks boldly up at the snarling jaguar. Perhaps four years old, he is the younger and smaller of the two, with short brown hair and large brown eyes. His left arm trails behind him, holding the hand of the girl, who looks about seven or eight.

“Yes, yes,” the old man says, sighs, and grabs his nose. The jaguar mask comes off with a grand slurping sound. “I used to be. Sometimes I still am. Come on in, then.”

As they enter, the girl peers up and about, taking in the maloca without expression. The boy is too excited and nervous to notice anything. He watches the Don closely as they are led across the room to the fire. Don Sinatra carefully hangs the jaguar mask, thinks for a moment, then disrobes back into his red adidas shorts. He tosses a couple fronds and then a log on the fire. The Don motions for them to sit.

“Welcome.”

“Thanks,” says the boy.

“Hmm… what to do with you?” the Don muses. “Ah! Would you like a Mango?”

“What? Fruit? No. Thank you. We’ve come for business.” There is a weary stubbornness in the boy’s voice.

“Of course you have,” agrees the Don gravely.

“I want you to heal my sister.”

“Ah!” Don Sinatra nods sagely. He steeples his fingers, frowns, winks. “A Mango, my darling boy, is just the thing.”

“No thank you.”

Don Sinatra sighs. “Then that makes this whole thing rather more complicated, you know.”

The boy is pacing back and forth and seems not to have heard; his little brow crinkles in thought.

“What are your names?” Don Sinatra asks.

“I’m Arthur,” says the boy, “and this is Sara.”

“Does she not speak?”

Sara had glanced up briefly at her name.

“Not much,” admits Arthur. His hands are clasped in front of him. “Not anymore, that is. That’s part of the issue, you see -- in fact, that displays the issue quite well indeed. My little sister barely talks now, never laughs, hardly eats, and won’t smile. About a year ago, I found her apartment in Vancouver a wreck and so I took her to live with me down in California. ‘The sun’ll help,’ I told her. But it didn’t help an ounce. She was just so… morose. It started to infect my wife, my kids. I didn’t know what to do. I took her to a number of doctors, psychiatrists mainly, but some of those naturos, too; that didn’t do any good. Some seemed to motivate her: she’d come home with a brusqueness (but not her old gaiety) and begin ‘getting her life in order’ and ‘starting afresh’ and whatnot but that simmered out like an untended fire. So it’d been two years, at that point, and I ask myself, ‘Arthur, what else can you try? Be creative!’ and I remembered going on this boat trip up the Amazon River a few years back -- I got a package deal with my resort in Cartagena -- and our guide Franco telling us about you. I didn’t believe him at the time, obviously, but, well… I was desperate, and so I called him up and he arranged everything: We stayed with him out in the forest and fasted for three days, after visiting this maloca in reality an’ all to get permission from your family. Then Franco prepared the… concoction and we drank it and sat beside the river and waited to see the reflection of a god.”

“And did you?” the Don asks.

“Oh yes, it was Sara who spotted him --”

“-- her,” interjects Sara. “She was laughing.”

“... who spotted her,” continues Arthur, “and somehow she got bigger and bigger -- Franco shooed us towards her and then we… entered into her mouth and were walking along the bottom of the river.”

“Did you drown?”

“No, we were fine. We walked back up to the shore and everything was very similar to how it was before but so much… louder, fiercer. I experienced the forest like…. Anyway, Franco was gone but he’d said to just go ahead and follow the path to your maloca. And now we’re here.” For a long moment little Arthur looks completely lost; his brown eyes gaze in a stupor. They focus on Don Sinatra. “So,” he continues, regaining some of his composure, “can you heal her?”

The Don is silent for a long time. He looks from one child to the other. “You’re not really children, are you?” he asks.

“Of course not,” replies Arthur. “This whole child-body business is a bit strange and inexplicable for the both of us, I’m afraid. We weren’t told this would happen. We didn’t even notice it until we stood outside there, but I think it happened when we entered the mouth of the god.”

“Goddess,” corrects Sara.

“Did you enjoy your expanded experience of the forest, children?”

“Yes,” says Sara without hesitation.

“I don’t know,” says Arthur.

“Well then. Reflect on that for a moment, my darlings, that journey. Now, let’s look back further, to the root.” The Don leans forward earnestly and stares into Sara’s eyes. She looks away. “Don’t retreat, child. I want you to reflect on your time in wherever it is you were. What were you feeling?”

Arthur speaks with a crispness of tongue; Sara, on the other hand, drawls her words out slowly, as though dragging them with tremendous effort from mud. She says: “I felt... miserable.”

“I see. Go on.”

She stares back at him, looks down; small tears well up in her eyes. “Lonely.”

“Ah,” says the Don sadly. “Ah, yes, I see. Disconnected, my darling?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s a clear enough prognosis: Your spirit is starving.”

“Starving?” says Arthur.

“My spirit?” asks Sara.

“Indeed. Your spirit craves succulent life juices! You’d better come with me, then, and have a Mango of Spiritual Sustenance.” The Don leads them out the back door into the forest, where it is complete darkness.

“What happened to the daylight?” Arthur asks.

“It got bored and cavorted off,” explains the Don. “Now, children, this is the Garden of Life.”

Arthur reaches out and takes Sara’s hand.

“I can’t see a thing!” he whispers.

“All for the best, darling,” the Don says. “Trust your feet and just listen.”

~

Pale light breaks the foliage before them and suddenly they’re at the top of a hill. Sara gazes at the full moon and the million stars around it, wondering what seems so odd about them. After a moment she realizes that they’re moving, very slowly, and not in a streak across the sky, things in the sky usually move, but in lazy circles, figure-eights, or perhaps they’re floating about randomly. She shakes her head and looks about. Long grasses wave at her; to their left is a large tree with thin green leaves and fat yellow fruit sagging in the branches. A thin river snakes in the distance.

“It looks so small from here,” says Arthur.

Sara shakes her head. “Don’t you know where we are?”

“We’re in the Amazon,” Arthur says defensively. “That’s the River, that’s the Rainfor..  wait…” He gazes around at the dancing fields. “Where’d the forest go?”

“We’re back home,” whispers Sara.

“Oh.”

Don Sinatra lets them have another moment to themselves, then points at the tree. “And this, my darlings, is the Mango Tree of Spiritual Sustenance.”

He leers happily down at them. “Pick a Mango, children.”

Arthur looks at Sara; she shrugs.

“Oh, I see!” the Don says when Arthur picks his, and “ahhh…” when Sara hers.

“What?” Arthur asks.

“That is very significant, little Arthur. You see the slight yellowing on the rotund side of your mango? Yes, yes, quite indicative.”

“Indicative of what?”

Don Sinatra winks, and then sighs. Sara has noticed he does this quite often and still has no idea what either means. “It’s just not quite ripe enough, you see. Never will be, no matter how hard it tries -- and oh it shall -- for now you’ve plucked it, of course. The matter shall settle slowly.”

Arthur sits in the grass, frowning.

“What about mine?” Sara asks.

“Yours,” replies the Don, inspecting it, “has several tell-tale implications of the most profound sort regarding the temperance of your underlying nature. So it does.”

“What’s my underlying nature?”

“Why,” continues the Don with a soft cry of surprise, “don’t you know it, child? Can’t you feel it in the Mango? The softness! The colour! A gorgeous specimen, indeed, very fine to look at and containing oodles of lovely juices -- but,” he takes a great sniff of the fruit, then holds it out for Sara to do the same, “the smell is a bit off. We’ll find that it’s got some rotten bits it’s hid ever so well.” Sara frowns down at the mango cradled in her grasp. “But now, as with your brother, it is plucked and its fate is set. You may as well eat it, or else toss it to the ants. But, as you both well know, seeing as you’ve made the very long journey from wherever it may be that you’re from and from whatever bodies you may jig about in out in what you so innocently dub reality into these dainty little ones, the choice is yours to make. Will you eat the fruit you’ve plucked, my darlings?”

“Sure, I guess so,” Arthur says. “Do you have a knife? Here, Sara, I’ll cut out the rotten bits for you.”

“Okay,” says Sara.

The Don intones, with the finality of an epitaph: “No.”

“But you said hers is rotten. What if we trade? Or -- I can pick you a new one, Sara.”

“No, how absurd. You only get one Mango of Spiritual Sustenance, you know.”

“But now I don’t really want mine either, not if it’s unripe.”

The Don ignores him. “Children, children. Before we eat the sacred Mangoes, I must tell you that they are, in fact and in deed, sacred. So I shall: they are sacred. Fruit is one of the purest essences of life we can ingest. And these, being magical sacred dream fruit, grown with the greatest care from this existence, such as it is, and the greatest love from my own self, such as it is, are even more so infused with the unripe and rotten juices of life! Plus, you picked them yourself.” The Don’s smile stretches his face to such unnaturally taught degrees that his eyes are lost behind a jam of wrinkles. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” replies Arthur.

“No, it doesn’t!” the Don barks, amused. “It’s all nonsensical, of course, that’s the fun.”

Arthur sets his mango in his lap with great deliberation, and turns a cold and steady eye upon the Don. “When are you going to make my sister better?”

“I’m not.”

Arthur takes a deep breath and anger flashes in his four-year-old’s eyes. “I was told you could.”

“Oh, you silly boy. That was a lie. I can’t do squat for her that I haven’t already done.”

“But you haven’t done anything.”

The Don glares at Arthur, who glares fiercely back at him. “Are you blind, child? I offered her a mango.” He looks to Sara. “How are you feeling, my darling?”

“Excellent,” she replies. Arthur blinks in confusion at the sight of her smile. “Very… peaceful.”

“And yet you haven’t even eaten your Mango!” the Don cries.

“It’s ever since we entered the forest, Arthur. Something inside me shifted. All the thoughts and worries and anxieties that were bouncing around my head -- I became so aware of them, and then… they just sort of settled.”

“Yes, you’re one of those. I could tell the moment I saw you. You know, you can have that peace anytime you like -- and anywhere, though some places are more challenging than others. But! that’s where the healers are most needed. Don’t you want to be a healer, my darling?”

“Yes,” says Sara.

The Don looks back to Arthur. “Look -- there is one thing you can do for your sister; one thing and one thing only and you’ve gone through ever so much just to do it, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have. Tell me what it is!”

Don Sinatra sighs gravely. Shadows chase each other across his face. “I shall tell you,” he says.

“Well… what?”

The old man leans forward, the children lean forward; when he speaks his voice is a hoarse whisper. “Eat your own damn Mango!” He lies back in the grass and winks at Sara.

Sara nods. “Please, Arty.”

“And you too, sweetie,” the Don urges. “Even the rotten bits -- especially the rotten bits! After that, we watch the stars dance.” He yawns as they bite into their mangoes. “Then we take a nap and you go back to your silly reality.”

“What then?” asks Sara. “What if I go back to the way I was?”

“Well of course you will. Your old habits will return, and your loneliness along with them. For such as you, loneliness with always trail you a mangy old dog. It’s your choice how to treat it -- so far you’ve been terrified of it and been obsessed with pretending it doesn’t exist. Stop that. It’s but a shadow of yourself, dear girl, your deepest, darkest shadow. So love it, dear girl, give it all the compassion you can. Let it be and live your life, even if it’s whining at you: go out into the world and listen and talk and dance and laugh and sing and eat and read and sleep and keep an eye out for other people’s mangy dogs so you can scratch them behind the ears. And if you ever need me, Sara, you know where to find me. I’m but a dream away.”

They are all silent for a while. “Thank you,” says Sara finally. She’s feeling quite sleepy, having eaten her mango down to the pit and then licked her fingers. “Goodnight, Don Sinatra.”

“Goodnight,” mumbles Arthur.

“Goodnight, children.”

~

They awoke hand-in-hand beside the river. Arthur guiltily removed his hand from hers and then made a show of scratching his moustache. “Well, that was strange,” he said.

“What happened?” asked Franco.

“He invited us in,” began Arthur.

“And he took us to our old home.”

“And he fed us mangoes.”

“Good, very good. Sara. How’d yours taste?”

“A bit nasty,” she said with a grin, “but I kinda liked it.”

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.

Walter and Thor III

 150 words, submitted:

Once upon a time, Walter took Thor fetching on the sandbars during winter. 

On the fourth sandbar, the tide turned. 

Eventually Walter asked, “Why are we out here, Thor?” 

Thor barked, at Walter and through the fog towards shore. Walter's gnarled hands patted his soaked jeans. Thor swam back through the tidepool; Walter retrieved Thor's ball and followed. The water, now to Walter's chest, stole his breath; seaweed encumbered him. 

On the third sandbar, Walter sat, huddled. "Where...?" Thor barked and barked, he licked Walter's face and begged. 

On the second sandbar, Walter turned back to sea. He accused Thor of leading him astray. Thor got in Walter's way and barked hoarsely. 

A woman materialized behind them. 

“Dad!” she cried. “Oh, Dad!” 

Walter retreated. “Who are you?” 

She took his hand. 

Back home, Walter had a bath. Thor lay by the fire and watched Eileen pace, whispering into the phone.

Walter and Thor II

209 Words:

Once upon a winter, Walter took Thor fetching on the sandbars.

On the fourth sandbar out, Walter peered about into heavy fog and Thor sensed something was wrong.

“What are we doing out here, Thor?” Walter asked.

Thor barked at him. Then he barked towards shore, loud as a foghorn. Walter's jeans were soaked from the tidepools. His gnarled hands trembled. Thor swam back across the tidepool. Walter saw Thor had left his sqeaky tennis ball, so he picked it up and followed. The water was almost to Walter's chest; seweed encumbered him.

On the third sandbar, Walter sat and huddled. Thor barked until he couldn't bark anymore, then he put his head in Walter's lap and begged him to get up.

“Okay,” Walter said, “I trust you, Thor.”

On the second sandbar, Walter confusedly tried to go back out to sea. He accused Thor of running off, he wept and he whimpered. Thor nuzzled Walter and licked his face.

A woman came out of the fog.

“Walter!” she called. “Oh, Walter!”

“Who are you?” Walter asked.

She took his hand. “I'm Eileen. I'm your daughter.”

Walter took a hot bath back at the cabin. Thor lay by the fire and watched Eileen pace and whisper into the phone.