Technically urban fantasy I suppose, but somehow I don’t think anyone else would agree. ^_~ *grin*

And it is a horribly overdone idea, but I’m practicing finishing things, so thbbbbpt. 😛

Rough, rough, horribly rough…

The Boy in 7C

It’s the same job today that it was yesterday, the same generic clerical tasks that had numbed her mind, but padded her checkbook for years. Only today was different. Today she was being stalked by a small yellow and housecat that apparently no one else could see.

“Oh shoo, please,” she tried to lever the cat off of the notebook it was napping on with a ruler. She didn’t want to touch it. Not when she still wasn’t sure what it /was/. She managed to hook the ruler under the binder and the cat slid off onto the desk with and sleepy mrrp! all without breaking it’s nap.

She wasn’t sure what had prompted the cat’s arrival. She’d first stopped him that morning as she changed trains. Nothing more than a glimpse of yellow with hints of blue stripes that shivered likes leaves when he moved. IT wasn’t until she was walking from the metro station to her building that she saw him out in the open. Or as much in the open as you could be on a Tuesday morning in DC.

He wasn’t quite bright yellow, but only a few shades down the scale and he stood out from the drab grays and browns of her coworkers like, well, like a bright yellow cat. That was the first hint she’d had that he was following her. Her second was when he waltzed into the elevator, without raising so much as an eyebrow from the folks around her.

She wasn’t the time to scream and flail when things got interesting, so she’d just kept on her way and ignored him. As best she could. If he was an evil spirit of some sort, there wasn’t much she could do about him. And if he wasn’t… well, there had to be some reason he’d decided to make her life interesting.

“Mrreow?” She looked over to see him sprawled on his back, looking at her upside down green eyes and paws waving at her as he reached across the space between the desk and the chair. His stripes twitched and danced along his sides.

And so she spent the day trying to do paperwork as the feline did his best to con her into petting him instead. She went home again by the metro and he followed, in the ways of cats, and she fed him tuna for dinner, which he adored.

Later than night her neighbor knocks on the door and claims his cat. It’s a new neighbor and he hasn’t been there long, but she knows enough to give him skeptical looks when he talks about the cat as if it was normal. But he’s nice boy and it’s been a while since she’d had anyone to mother, so she lures him in with promises of a decent dinner and the cat agrees.

When he finally admits the cat isn’t really a cat, he seems surprised that she figured that out for herself. And the fact that the boy isn’t really a boy isn’t much of a leap from there. After a bit of prodding and a lot of skeptical ‘hmmm’s she managed to get out of him that they are just visiting for a bit, unintentionally, and the boy is homesick. And this reminds her of her own children, long since grown and gone.

So she ends up adopting him, of sorts, for the two weeks he’s stick here on earth. And she notices that people treat him much like the treat the cat, they see it, but they don’t really /see/ it and she’s fine with that.

And when he leaves, it’s sort of like watching her kids leave again, which is rough, but it’s a good type of rough. And at the last moment the cat who isn’t a cat decides he’ll stick around a bit longer. Because not-cats live a very long time and she doesn’t have that much longer to go herself.

And when she is on her deathbed, with her family gathered around her, the boy comes back to say goodbye.

And they don’t save her life with mystical powers, and they don’t take her away to travel the stars, and they don’t turn her into a cat, or a child, or a being of light. And nothing extraordinary happens. And the boy and the cat leave, and the cats sings her memory to the stars.