A Strange State of Affairs Ch. 3

A girl, newly orphaned, attempts suicide and ends up turning into a cat. A series of strange events leads her to the land of Kor in which she encounters even more unexpected events.

            She gazed at her reflection, somber and black, in the shallow surface of the tidal pool.  Several small fish swam about in it, and a starfish was painstakingly ambling its way to the other side.  

            Elevine had chosen one of the more secluded tidal pools of Puri Beach to lay by. The pools were mostly harmless; one just had to watch out for any spotted eels or stingrays floundering about in the crevices of rock.

            The cottage, she presumed, had been sold by her parents’ lawyer upon their deaths.  There wasn’t anything left for her �" and even if there were, she couldn’t claim it as a cat.  And she had decided that the new occupants of the summer home were barbaric.  She couldn’t stay with them.

            Elevine now truly was an orphan and a stray.  She had nowhere else to go; the villas on the southern coast did not allow pets.  She did not want a harsher repeat of what had just happened (she feared her tail would not survive another vicious yanking). 

            Her stomach rumbled, and Elevine looked down and the tidal pool.  A feeling of revulsion overcame her, but the need to survive quickly suppressed it.  All thoughts of suicide abandoned, she inched her paw into the water and held it still at the surface.  The fish swam about frenzily at first, objecting silently to the furry black intruder in their midst.  But at last they grew used to it; none of them noticed that one among their number was missing, speared upon the lightning-fast claws.  Elevine withdrew her paw from the pool, disgusted to see the impaled fish wiggle around in its death throes.   She transferred it to the rocky basin of the pool and waited for its death; when the fish stopped breathing, she lowered her head and feasted like a humble beast.  A salty tear of humility and status reduction coasted down her cheek, but it turned out to be just a drop of sea water from her hunting excursion.

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            Elevine lived by the pool for three days; during the rest of her stay, not a single fish was killed.  She left on the fourth day after bathing the wound on her back in the stinging liquid of the pool, sullying it with her fur and clumps of blood.

            El wandered aimlessly into another well-crafted series of cottages.  People sat tranquilly on the second-floor porches of their homes, fanning themselves and sipping guava juice in the tender breeze.  Elevine’s stomach rumbled with hunger, but she disregarded it.  Already her ribs had begun to show, and she felt a brittle quality about her bones. 

            She meandered about on the road.  Suddenly, she heard the roaring of a vehicle coming up close behind her.  Elevine swerved, but the white van still bulldozed into her.  It slammed into her already-damaged back and she flew into the bushes of the nearest cottage. 

            Elevine’s ears rang.  The last thing she witnessed was an elaborately-dressed woman stepping out of the vehicle, a cameraman in tow, yelling something about a man named Fye.