From: /OU1=BRA0041_@mhs-merlin.attmail.com To: snowcat@total.net Subject: Advice Notice (Sample) Date: Monday, May 11, 1998 3:58 PM (internet:snowcattotal.net) Learning To Fly --------------- A palpable darkness lives in the heart of this cat. It is a viscous brew of fear, uncertainty, self-loathing and other black, parasitic things that feed on the soul. Like a hairball roiling and churning in the gut, it grows a little each day and promises to be messy when it emerges. The metaphor ends there, because when this dark thing spews forth it will not be a simple matter to clean it up with a rag, a dustpan, and an embarrassed, "Pardon me!" It almost came out today. I was standing on the edge of the world, wondering how it would feel to fly. I am not good with heights, which is a laughable fear when you consider my heritage. My snow leopard ancestors lived on the slopes of the Himalayas, rubbing faces with the sky, and I get squeamish ascending a stepladder to clean the gutter. I have an affinity with gravity - it is the singular, immutable element in my existence. There is a small comfort in knowing that even while entropy devours everything else in my life, the laws of physics will never change for me. I stood with my hands on the rail, swallowing back my terror and trying to become one with the floor and the metal bar that I was clutching. I could not bring myself to look down, my stomach clenched and my feet tingled whenever I entertained the notion of doing so. I contented myself with letting the fresh wind brush through my thick fur. A glance over at Trish showed that she was not likewise inhibited. She was lost in her own world as her amber eyes followed the ebb and flow of traffic on the street thirty stories below. Trish was the reason why I was standing here on a deck thirty stories above the street, clutching a metal rail and saying silent prayers to the furry gods. She is a silver wolf morph with soft amber eyes and a pelt so sleek that it is almost iridescent. I suppose she is very pretty as wolves go, if one can look past the disfiguring scar that mars the side of her muzzle - a souvenir from a serious childhood accident. She could probably have the scar removed with modern surgery, but she wears it as a reminder that she is fortunate to be alive. Trish is like that. As close as we are, I do not think that there is any possibility of romantic involvement between us - it would be too much like kissing my own sister. On the other paw, love and romance are not necessarily one and the same. One could safely say that I love her, in the same sense that I also love her mate, Joel. It is a Platonic form that comes from a close bond of friendship. I met Joel through work, and we quickly hit it off because we shared a mutual interest in beer. It may not seem like much of a base to build a friendship upon, but we became inseparable. I am the fur who introduced him to Trish, a wolf pup whom my elder sister babysat many years back. I have heard of love at first sight, but nobody could have predicted the way the sparks would fly between these two kids. They announced their engagement within two months, and were married in six. I was best fur at their wedding. Ah, but I am starting to wander back to the reason why Trish and I were standing out on this veranda. Calling them 'kids' is a bit unfair, as they are only eight years my junior. I use that word because my protective nature emerges when I think about the two of them. They are like beloved younger siblings to me, and they know that I would do anything for them. I glanced over at the wolf and caught her eying me with the same speculative look she had been casting my way all morning. I wondered what she wanted, but I forwent asking because I knew that she would tell me when she was ready. Now was definitely not a good time to press her for answers about anything. I found her stare a bit disquieting and I quickly looked away again. What is it with heights and me? The harder I tried to ignore where I was, the stronger became the awareness of how far I was from the street. My old friend gravity was serenading me with her siren song, calling, "come back to me, wayward son." Her gentle tendrils reached to embrace me over the rail, summoning me back to the ground. In my mind, I knew that my grip on the bar was the only force keeping my feet on the concrete of the deck. The melody tugged at the darkness in me like taffy, and it responded by whispering to me with the question, "What would it be like to fall that far? What would it be like to have all that adrenaline pumping through your system, knowing that you would die at the end?" Trish sneezed, drowning out the unholy duet and anchoring my feet more solidly to the floor. Looking back, I think the trouble probably started with the first miscarriage. We were all crushed by it; they had wanted that cub so badly. I was going to be its godfather. I had no idea what a godfather was supposed to do, but we had joked a lot about it at the time, assuming phoney Sicilian accents and emoting about "da family-a business". Then it just happened. Trish awoke in the middle of the night with terrible cramps and bleeding, and by the time Joel got her to the hospital the cub was gone. Her body simply rejected the foetus; no other explanation was given. Her family was wonderfully supportive - her parents flew out for a week and the five of us held a little wake for the lost cub. We toasted it Godspeed to the afterlife and shared a few tears and hugs. On the other hand Joel's family were complete assholes. His mother sent a card addressed to just him, saying, "Better luck next time". His older brother called to say, "It's not like it was a REAL baby that died, you know." Perhaps I have paraphrased them unfairly, but that is the way that Trish and I interpreted their words. I think in his twisted way Joel's brother meant it to be reassuring. For my part, I think Joel must have been illegitimate or something because he is the only one in the clan who does not act like a head trauma case. His family had never warmed to his wife and this incident served to deepen the rift between them. A strong blast of wind tumbled one of the parasols on the veranda behind us, toppling the table and tossing a ketchup bottle and tray of coffee condiments across the veranda. The wolf morph and I both jumped then turned to watch the action as a pair of harried waiters bustled about, picking up debris and closing the other parasols. The ketchup bottle had remained miraculously intact, sparing The Aviary a nasty mess on the floor of their posh deck. When I started to comment about it to Trish I saw that she was again leaning on the rail and peering absently down at the street. I became uncomfortably conscious of the three hundred-foot drop behind me and hastily turned to face my nemesis again. Twenty months later they lost another child. Trish began bleeding and it would not stop. They ran whatever tests it is they perform for these things and determined that the foetus was already dead, and that the wolf morph would follow it if they did not induce an abortion right NOW. Apparently it was further complications arising from her childhood accident. Nobody could offer a good explanation for why it was not discovered after the first miscarriage, but I suppose that medical science is not an exacting one. The incident left her sterile, but at least she was alive - which had been far from a certainty throughout the ordeal. She was never the same after the second miscarriage, nor was Joel. Almost as quickly as they took her off the sedatives, she began smoking again; she had not smoked since before they were married. He was furious with her, and almost out of spite he began drinking again - which is not to say that he did not drink before, but he started to partake heavily and often. I tried to talk sense into both of them, but they wanted a friend with a sympathetic ear, not a mediator. I backed off then, fearful that I might lose them as friends, and the blackness inside me grew a little. I mentioned that darkness in my soul, did I not? He showed up at my door sometimes, so drunken that he could barely stand. I never turned him away when he did that, I invited him in and plied him with coffee and listened to him babble until I felt he was presentable enough for me to walk him home. Joel was having a very hard time with Trish's sterility - he was raised in the belief that a fur's worth is measured in his offspring, and his way of coping was to drink. I have a few stains on my carpets where he puked. I confess that I got drunk with him too on a few occasions. Three weeks ago he stopped by my house, unannounced as usual, but stone sober. He said without embellishment or preamble, "Trish and I are getting a trial separation." This did not come as a complete surprise for me as I knew that things had not been going well between them for a time, though I did not learn until later that they had actually come to physical blows. I offered to let him stay at my place until things settled down a bit, but he assured me that she had already made arrangements to move in with her sister while they tried to work matters out. That was the last I heard of him until I got a call to bail him out of a drunk tank a week later. Trish stopped by the house this morning and buzzed the doorbell until I crawled out of bed to see who it was, though I had my suspicions - she had been crying on my shoulder a lot recently. She said that she had been out walking for over an hour, and just felt like having coffee with a friend. For over an hour? It was barely a quarter of seven! I would have invited her in, but I live in a typical bachelor sty. Rather than risk offending her with the stacks of unwashed dishes, unvacuumed snow leopard fur and dirty laundry hung over everything, I made her sit on the doorstep while I quickly dressed. She amused herself with a cigarette while she waited. I suspected that she had not eaten yet, and offered to take her up to The Aviary for breakfast. It was not the cheapest restaurant by far, but it was reasonably nearby and I knew that it would be open at that early hour. It is located on the thirtieth floor of a high rise only ten minutes away by transit. The building stands forty stories high, but the top ten floors are set back from the lower thirty for some reason of obscure aesthetics. I suppose the architect thought it looked more pleasing to build a step into the grey slab. In any case, the step made a perfect veranda for a restaurant - especially one that catered primarily to the avian business crowd. There were a half-dozen landing perches located along the railing on which Trish and I leaned. I finally decided to chance a look down. Perhaps I thought I was being brave, but whatever my motivation, vertigo washed across me in a wave of nausea and morbid fascination. Gravity and darkness began to whisper to me anew, and I started to wonder how long it would take to fall thirty floors. I knew my physics well enough to be able to calculate the numbers in my head, but I was curious about how long it would be subjectively. I have heard that a fur relives his entire life just before death. Does that mean that time slows down? How much would I relive? Would I remember my own birth? I began to formulate a theory that a falling fur never subjectively strikes the pavement. Time simply slows to a stop as he falls, as he relives his life over and over again for all eternity. A lot can happen in eternity - a cat might even learn to fly. I do not know if I would have done it, and it is academic now anyway. As my legs were bunching and my fingers slowly loosened their grip on the rail, Trish turned to me and said, "I think I'm ready to eat now. Let's go inside." After breakfast I walked her home. We stopped on the sidewalk outside her sister's house and chatted at length about inconsequential matters. Each time I tried to beg my leave she suddenly remembered something else she wanted to add to the conversation. As we finally started to part ways, she abruptly turned and kissed me, wrapping her lupine arms around my neck and enfolding me in her wild fragrance. I admit that I was surprised, but I did not fight it. She released me, stepped back and said, "Thank you Plonq for being the one thing in my life that's been solid. I don't know what I would do without you, I really don't." And it was not like kissing my sister at all. It was not even close. A tiny part of my mind began to hope that things would not work out between them. I gently brushed a finger my lips which still tingled from the kiss, and I felt the darkness within me stir. * Plonq (\ ,,, /) o O @ ==( . )== U