THE POLAR TERROR (Part 1) by Liana Brooks

Andrea scrolled through tumblr - hashtag supervillains - looking for a cosplayer who would fit the bill.

It was heartbreaking working with the Dreams Come True program at the pediatric hospital. Sure, it was wonderful when she could help the kids make a dream come true, but sometimes... sometimes it was all too much. Everett Jones was a special one. His parents had been in a car wreck when he was four months old and an improperly fitted car seat had thrown him from the wreckage. It had saved his life - the semitruck behind their car hadn't been able to stop in time - but it had left Everett broken and orphaned. He'd been in and out of the foster care system until his aunt graduated from college.

At seven, he should have been okay. But a little cold turned into bronchitis, and then they'd found abnormal growths along the bone. And then the doctors at Merriton Pediatric Hospital, the premiere children's hospital in the Yukon Territory, found out that the donor from Everett's last surgery hadn't been screened correctly. The bone cancer was sinking in.

Everett was seven and suicidal. His adoptive mother was a wreck.

Andrea wanted to do nothing more than make sure Everett had one dream come true. She'd gone to his hospital room with binders, folders, and brochures. Disneyland. Cruises. The Stanley Cup playoffs. She would make sure he got what he wanted.

And then Everett asked for the absolutely impossible: a day with The Polar Terror, the only supervillain north of the 66th Parallel.

She glanced at the clock. It was already two in the morning and she had her first meeting tomorrow at eight. Tanya Nothstien from the third floor (burn victims) was meeting with the Whitehorse Huskies and going to three days of hockey training camp, a reward for finally hitting her physical therapy milestone and being able to walk. Tanya had a long road ahead, and at least one more surgery to repair her arm, but she could be a hockey goalie as she was.

The Huskies had even invited her to come play goalie at one of their home games once the season was in full swing.

In the afternoon she had to meet with the Jenwa family. Three-year-old Doug was terminal. Dreams Come True was getting the whole family together -grandmas and grandpas too - and flying them to Hawaii to celebrate what was expected to be Doug's last birthday.

Unthinking, she grabbed a kleenex and wiped away the tears.

Tomorrow was going to be rough. She needed sleep. But...

Blurry-eyed, she hit the pencil icon on Tumblr and wrote a post...

WANTED: The Polar Terror for a day of fun and crime with 7yo Everett at the Merriton Pediatric Hospital.

Everett is a sweet boy who has had a bad run of luck. He wants to conquer the mountains with his favorite villains, and maybe rob a candy store.

If you're available, please email me at: andrea@canada.dreamcometrue.org

She posted it with a sigh and turned the computer off. Yukon Territory was not a geek hub with ten thousand cosplayers. But, who knew? Maybe she'd get lucky and some rich American who could afford his own batmobile would feel like dressing up in a traditional Yukon furs and flying up here.

***

The next day didn't dawn so much as slink in well after Andrea was at work. Winter mornings were an illusion more than a reality. By ten the hospital was sending home non-essential staff because of an incoming blizzard. Andrea shut her door, turned off the overhead light, and worked with the street light outside.

No one could send her home if they didn't know she was there.

Lunch was a bag of pretzels nabbed from the vending machine while the hospital director dealt with a car collision in the parking garage. And at two she went up to see Doug's family.

His room was filled with red toy robots, red balloons, and red stuff dog that was bigger than he was. Andrea confirmed all the details, checked with Dr. Harper to ensure that Doug was up for travel, checked with Doug's nursing staff to make sure all their paperwork was in order, and - worn out and ready to cry - she limped back to her office.

It was cold.

Bone-freezing cold.

She was Yukon born and bred, but negative 10 Celsius with snow swirling around her desk as she opened the door was too much. Her lips puckered as she sucked in a sob.

Someone - some utter bastard - had broken her window.

She closed her office door quietly behind her. There was no need to be rude, she told herself. There was cardboard behind the filing cabinet and the Good Lord had given her duct tape and common sense, more than enough to fix anything, as her grand-mère had always said.

Andrea turned to reach for the down coat hanging on the back of her door and screamed. There was a person standing there.

A huge, fur-covered aberration with a spear in one hand a rabbit-fur pouch at his hip. All the emotions of the day came pouring out in an ear-piercing wail that was swallowed by the howling wind outside. The bowl of tiny, polished rocks on her desk jumped and rattled as the despair and rage rolled off her. And then it finally stopped; her throat was swelling and scratching.

The snow stopped swirling and her window slammed shut.

"Sorry about the entrance?" the menace offered.

Andrea stalked behind her desk, sat down in her creaking, broken chair in a huff, and grabbed a kleenex. Then a throat lozenge. She glared at the face hidden by a black balaclava.

"You, um, asked for me on Tumblr." The voice was deep. Definitely masculine. Almost apologetic.

She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a fresh bottle of water. It was against her policy to drink bottled water unless the pipes froze, but this was an emergency.  Sometimes her carbon footprint had to take a back seat to panic.

The person shuffled and took a seat in the stiff-backed client chair.

After several minutes, and half a bottle of water, Andrea sighed. "All right. That didn't go well. I try not to scream at anyone." She glanced at the window. "Who are you? And why is there snow melting on my desk?"

"It can't stay snow in this heat."

Andrea glared. "What I meant is; why didn't you come through the front door? We have a receptionist."

"They went home early. A security guard told me everyone had, so I came up here to leave a note."

"Through my window."

The masked face turned to consider the now-unbroken glass. "Eh... it made sense at the time?" He lifted his shoulder and dropped it. There was a slight twang in his voice. Almost...

"Are you from Newfoundland?"

He turned faster than she expected. "How'd you- "

"It's the accent. I dated a guy from there once. It didn't end well." Andrea realized her hand had tightened around her limited-edition Glamdring letter opener and dropped it. She wasn't going to risk getting blood on a collectible. At least, not a limited-edition one. She had a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey stick, signed by Leo Komarov.

She could part with that.

"You did want to see me, didn't you?" With gloved hands the man reached into his rabbit-skin pouch and pulled out a folded piece of paper that he held out for her.

Andrea stood just enough to reach out and take the paper between her pointer and middle finger, then plopped back down. Glaring at him, she unfolded it with great ceremony. It was a screen capture of her desperate Tumblr post.

She shut her eyes.

This was the problem with the geek community, when cosplayers got into something, they really went all out. She was willing to bet that later - much later - when she wasn't so worn out she'd find the string this guy had used to tug the window closed so it looked like he was using the wind.

"You don't look happy," the man said. "I thought, children's hospital and all, it might be time sensitive. And I was in town."

"Of course." Andrea closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I'm sorry. I've had a very... rough... afternoon. I was expecting an email. There's paperwork to be done. If you cosplay for a living you can use your time as a tax write-off. We also have security checks and things like that."

"I won't pass those," he said. "I'm a supervillain. An ecoterrorist or a planet defender, depends on who you ask."

Andrea opened one eye to glare at him. "I appreciate your dedication to the role, mister...?" She held out her hand as invitation for him to fill in the blank.

"Terror. Polar Terror. Rhymes with bear."

She looked at her water bottle and willed it to become a Chilkoot Larger from Yukon Brewing Co. The color didn't blush the deep amber of ripening wheat, so she figured she still hadn't come up with the ability to spontaneously make alcohol appear.

"Do you want colder water?" the man asked.

"No. I want beer, but I can't have it during working hours and usually only drink on my birthday, Canada Day, and New Year's Eve. This is not a job where I need more depressants in my life."

"I thought bringing good cheer to kids would make for happy work."

Her sour smile was enough to make him lean back. "It's great when you actually can help. Some of our kids will recover. But they don't all walk out of here healthy and alive." She lifted her shoulder and dropped it. "This afternoon I had to talk to a family whose little boy probably won't live to see four."

"Oh." His head tilted to the floor. "Is that Everett?"

"No. Everett is seven, he was in a car accident and had several surgeries to fix broken bones. One the bone grafts left him with bone cancer."

There was a moment of silence, a place for grief.

"His parents must be devastated," the man said, quietly.

"They're dead." Andrea hated how callous she sounded, but she was out of emotion. "His aunt has custody. She's a very nice woman, but totally overwhelmed. Her sister, Everett's mother, was the only family she had. She's been working hard to raise Everett and be supportive through everything, but she really doesn't have anyone else to lean on." Andrea picked up Glamdring and spun the miniature sword around. "They have your comic books."

The man nodded. "All the proceeds go to college funds for kids from the Yukon Territory, you know. I don't get paid for that. I didn't license it either, but..." He shrugged, and Andrea thought she heard a hint of a smile when he said, "I had a word with the duo drawing the comics and we worked things out."

"They donate all the money, and you don't kill them with your freeze-ray?"

"See, the way you say it sounds so mean. And it's not a freeze-ray. That's something only fake supervillains need. I have superpowers."

PART 2 (coming soon!) 

Stillborn

A dark shape moved among the trees, nearly indistinguishable from ebony night. The wraith-figure stepped cautiously closer to the edge of the forest, glancing once up at the sky. The new moon teased the stars into shining but, despite their brightness, the could not remove the shadow that kept him hidden. He progressed with an almost sinuous grace, nauseating to watch, halting at last beneath the great pine near the house at the edge of the village. Searching each window with milky eyes, he found candlelight, the flame illuminating a young woman. He whispered her name, an exhalation of the longing of the universe. An agony of despair blazed within him. It nearly made him want to rip his heart out; but that would not cease the pain. Such things could kill him no longer. Immortality was not his, yet not a form any would envy.

What of his actions deserved this? Few memories remained of his transformation. The afternoon had been warm and summery as he strode through the forest towards her house. His hands had fiddled with the ring in his pocket; no one alive could have been as anxious as he.

Suddenly, there had come a shrieking cackle, the glimpse of a witch-hag’s face. Fire had blazed, leaving behind this wraith-body shivering on the ground. The witch had vanished, but her voice remained.

“Wish you to be human again? The curse will lift only if you kill she that you love. Unless you wish to live forever alone, for none will accept you now!”

The choice, however sickening, had seemed clear. Yet, now his heart screamed in denial. In stories, the hero could save himself and his love. Here, there was no such option.

A moan sounded, the embodiment of that one unanswerable question:

“Why?”

Dark storm-clouds reflected his despairing thoughts. A single flash rent a tall birch nearby. Lightning: that near-divine power, able to rip soul from body in defiance of immortality. The hairs at the back of his neck rose, warning of imminent proximity. He remained still.

“You say you love me,” his beloved had teased. “How will you prove it?”

She must never know.

The Kitten Psychologist vs the Kitten's Owners

(Just jumping in now? Read the previous installment, The Kitten Psychologist Broaches the Topic of Economics, here, or the first story, The Kitten Psychologist, here.)

Boy, was I in trouble. I think it would have been worse if I hadn’t called my friends the day I left for vacation, which is exactly why I did that. But, man, give them two weeks to steam off and they were still mad.

And, okay, yeah, I deserved it.

When I got back, they demanded an accounting of exactly how much money their kitten had paid me out of their bank account for our sessions and how often. They didn’t need to. I’d spent half my vacation angsting about the whole thing and had all my documentation prepared by the time we met in their living room.

This wasn’t just some strategy to placate them and get out of trouble. I’d had a lot of time to think during vacation, and I couldn’t escape the fact that what I’d done was wrong. For someone who spent a lot of time and energy trying to ignore my conscience when it suited me, it was sure uncomfortable having it yelling at me from three inches away.

Consciences really need to learn a thing or two about personal space.
It also bugged me that I hadn’t gotten back to the kitten about its email when it found out what I did.
Fuzzy as it is, that thing can be darn intimidating.

But now I couldn’t talk to it. My friends had made sure of that.

“Why would our kitten even need a psychologist?” asked the one with the green shirt. (I may be a coward, but even I know to keep my friends’ identities private online. You’re welcome, friends.)

“It’s sentient. Even humans find that uncomfortable, and we’re supposed to be that way.”

They didn’t appreciate the joke.

“How could you take advantage of it like that?” asked the one in the worn jeans.

Wait, what? “It called me! I had no idea-”

“You could have refused it at any point. Heck, you should have!” Green Shirt fumed. “It’s just a kitten, for crying out loud. It doesn’t know any better.”

“It’s a kitten that-” I stopped myself. Thinking before I spoke was probably a better strategy in this situation if I didn’t want it to turn into a warzone. Well, more of one.

“What? A kitten that what?” My friend’s eyes had taken on the uncanny appearance of someone aiming a gun. I cringed.

“Uh. First: yes. I should have refused. I’m sorry I didn’t, which is why I called you in the first place. Second: you didn’t know your kitten was sentient until just over two weeks ago. How do you know it’s not capable of seeing the right and wrong of its actions for itself?”

“It’s a kitten!” exclaimed Worn Jeans.

“More than that, it’s a cat,” said Green Shirt. “Cats aren’t exactly known for their strong grasp on morality.”

“Well, they do know what it is,” amended Worn Jeans. “They just don’t follow it. On purpose. So, in the case of our kitten…”

“Cats will be cats?” I supplied.

They nodded.

“And, since your kitten is now too young to know these things, and will grow up not to follow them anyways, it’s up to us to make all of its moral decisions for it?”

“As much as possible, yes,” said Worn Jeans. “We do know we can’t be there all the time in every situation.”

“Which is why it’s so important that we only let it be with people that are committed to the same thing, and not boneheads like you,” Green Shirt said, arms crossed.

“Boneheads?” said Worn Jeans. “That’s a little harsh.”

“Well, it’s true!”

I fidgeted. “Should I leave?”

“That depends. Are you going to leave leave or go talk to the kitten again?”

“Well, see, it sent me an email that I haven’t responded to yet…”

“It has an email address?” asked Worn Jeans in bewilderment.

“And a tumblr, too.” I pulled out my phone. The kitten’s latest post was a picture of a fall forest, with the caption ‘We are more than we feel’. The previous was a sepia-filtered photo of latte art.

“It has a hipster blog?” said Worn Jeans. Green Shirt grabbed my phone.

“I’m not sure how to process this.” Green Shirt’s eyes were concerningly wide. “Is that latte telling me to live my dreams?”

“Maybe you should, uh, get to know your kitten better?” I suggested. “And, meanwhile, we can work on a payment plan for me?”

“Yeah,” said Green Shirt, still scrolling through the kitten’s tumblr. “But, uh, I’m beginning to see why it needed a psychologist.”

That sounded hopeful. I swear my bank account perked up at it. And, if I wasn’t still having an attack of conscience, that would have been that.

“You know, I think your kitten is plenty able to do what’s right. Enough that making those decisions for it is only going stop it from wanting to.” Damn, damn, damn. I knew from their expressions that that had been the absolute worst thing to say.

Green Shirt handed me back my phone. “I think we understand our kitten better than you do. We’ll work out a payment plan, but we’re not budging on our requirements for your behaviour with it.”

“Or we can just pretend I never said that.”

“Really?” said Worn Jeans. I gulped. “I can’t believe you.” At which point my friend upped and left the room.

This is what I get for being a psychologist to a kitten. Correction: for being desperate enough to be a psychologist to a kitten.

“We’ll, uh, work it out over email,” I said as I high-tailed it out of there before Green Shirt could do anything.

So, that was finally that. Years of friendship hanging precariously in the balance all because we disagreed about what their kitten could and could not handle.

It’s one of those moments where you’d like to laugh over the ridiculousness of it, but it was a little too serious for that.

I mean, we’d have never been in this situation if I hadn’t let the kitten take advantage of them.

But wouldn’t that mean that the kitten would have always been stuck? Aren’t I doing it a favour by standing up for it to my friends?

I don’t know.

Morality is hard, guys.

Dear psychologist human,
 
I cannot believe you showed my humans my tumblr. Do you not understand that it was meant to be ironic? They think it’s serious!
 
On another note: You still have not responded to my previous email. This displeases me. I require that you respond in a timely manner.
 
We must speak.
 
Sincerely,
You know who.

The story continues in The Kitten Psychologist Tries to be Patient Through Email.

If the World Were Flat

There once was a world that was flat. On one side, the sun shone all the time and, on the other side, the moon and stars reigned. Right in the middle of the moon's side sat a woman who spent her days staring up at the stars with sadness and hope in her eyes.

One day a pelican flew from the side of the sun to the side of the moon, and saw the woman, cross-legged at the centre of the world. It landed next to her and asked:

"What are you looking at?"

"The stars and moon. I wish they were bright enough to show me myself."

"The sky on the other side of the world is much brighter than this one," said the pelican. "What if I took you there, where you could be lit up by the sun?"

"Oh, no." The woman drew her legs to her body and shook her head. "This light is all I am meant to have. Any more and every would see how hideous I am." The pelican paused for a moment, as if to think, then flew away. After a while, it returned and placed a rock in the woman's hand.

"This is a gem of great beauty," it said to her. "But yours is greater by far." The woman smiled politely and turned the stone over in her fingers. It looked like nothing of value in the light of that side of the world, but it felt smooth.

"Thank you. It's nice," she said, setting it aside, and resumed her staring. After a pause, the pelican flew off again, this time returning with a full mouth of more smooth rocks which it placed next to the woman.

"These are gems of great beauty," it said, "But yours is greater by far."

"They look like nothing to me," said the woman gently. The pelican shook its head and flew off again, returning with more of these rocks. It proclaimed the woman's beauty, and the woman politely disbelieved, which only caused the pelican to go and return again with more. This continued until the pile of rocks next to the woman had become a mountain, but the pelican's insistence did nothing to change the woman's mind.

Then, while the pelican was away, an eagle came to the moon's side of the world. It noticed the woman, the hope in her eyes, and its heart fell to see the sadness that kept the hope powerless. It flew down and settled next to the woman, asking the same thing that the pelican had, and received the same answer.

"My lady," the eagle said, "I am an eagle, and my eyes are the strongest of all creatures, but even the blind mole could see your beauty, no matter what lit the sky." Then it flew away, but its words echoed in the woman's heart and the hope shone bright in her eyes.

"Even the blind mole?" she asked herself. On a whim, she stood and stepped towards the mountain next to her, suddenly hungry to see its supposed grandeur. With that step, the balance of the world shifted and it started to turn upside down, rotating slowly at first, but with greater speed the closer she came to the mountain. Before long, a bright light peeked over the edge of the moon's side of the world. It rose gently from the horizon, filling it with blue. The woman stopped moving, watching the sun as the world settled again, watching as the brightest of lights came to rest in the centre of the sky. And when the woman looked back at the mountain, she put her hands to her mouth in surprise.

The mountain blazed with colour, with ruby and emerald, sapphire and diamond. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen...

Until she saw herself reflected in it.

May you see your beauty as clearly as those who know you.

Fox Red: An Interlude

Seventeen: An Interlude

Imagine, if you will, a young boy—about seven, say—who thinks he’s the cleverest thing in the whole damn world. Sadly for him, he’s not far wrong—but clever doesn’t mean wise.

This kid, this boy—this genius—has played in the bush behind the house forever, wandering all the way down to the pine plantations that line the highway that’s the lifeline of this little two-bit town called Jilamatang. Regional Victoria, back of the Snowy Mountains, over an hour to the nearest thing they’ve got to a city. He’s outgrown the place and he isn’t even in double digits. Good thing they have the internet, even though the connection’s slower than the post from Melbourne.

He wanders far and wide, spends the whole day exploring while his parents think he’s a good lad in school—an easy ruse because school’s also easy—and one day, he discovers something worthwhile. Not far from town, a couple of kilometres or so, there’s an old train line. Barely anyone remembers it, and even the real old timers hardly know it’s there. But he knows. It’s always been a sort of demarkation, the eastern border of his domain, and he’s had it in mind that he probably oughtn’t cross it. Crossing it, he feels, is maybe a step too far from his parents’ world.

But of course, one day, his curiosity gets the better of him and, breath held by tightly pressed lips that quiver with anticipation, he skips across old rails rusted to the colour of fox’s fur. At first, nothing seems to have changed. The air tastes the same, the same wind blows against his skin, and the same sun beats down upon his shoulders.

But then the trees overhead grow denser, gnarled eucalypts and wattles give way to lofty, straight-trunked pines, needles flared against the bright sun and crisp air of early autumn. Their leaves will not succumb to the on-coming cold. Never mind that neither will the eucalypts’; the pines would have everyone know that needles, at this altitude, this close to the highest mountain in the whole entire country, are superior, which is why their trunks are so tall and straight while the poor little natives twist and bend, backs crooked in submission to the wind.

The thick mat of rust-coloured needles devours the boy’s footsteps more effectively than any carpet, and for a while it’s eerily quiet. It grows colder, too, and the boy shivers, even though summer still lingers in the air in long, hot afternoons and the true bite of winter is months away.

Through the trees, something shifts, and he catches glimpse of something moving, something big—something alive. And although his heart pounds like it wants to escape his chest and run right back home to the safety of his kitchen, the boy continues. This, he knows, will be a sight worth seeing.

He follows the half-glimpsed beast for maybe thirty minutes, though it seems that either seconds or hours have passed, and then—at last—he reaches a clearing in the pines where granite boulders pile up high like someone has torn away the skin of the world and exposed its spine. And there, atop the boulders, head thrown high against the sky, antlers broad and strong enough to tear apart the clouds, stands the last thing he’d have expected to find in alpine Australia: a giant grey deer, easily as tall at the shoulder as the boy is himself—and he is hardly short for his age.

The stag tosses its antlers, and the boy can feel—feel—the words the stag would say, if it could talk—if it would talk.

Welcome, the stag says. Welcome to the home of the Winter King.

The boy bows politely, because it seems like that is a thing that should be done, and when he straightens up again, the stag is gone.

But he knows, now, the boy, where this Winter King lives, and now he'll never leave it alone.
Time after time he returns, at any hour of the day: the crisp, bright light of of a dew-covered morning, the frosty bite of a late autumn evening, the blazing hot midday summer sun as he runs through the bush, wild and free while school is out.

Time after time, the boy returns to the Winter King, and slowly, he begins to love him. Both hims, that is, come to love the other him, and they stand with each other for hours, foreheads pressed together or flank to flank, saying all the things the Winter King would say if the Winter King decided he wanted to speak.

The boy rubs the knot at the end of the Winter King’s spine, right before it turns into a tail, and brings him sweet carrots and apples and old-fashioned lumps of cane sugar. The Winter King whispers secrets into the little boy’s heart, right before it turns into his consciousness, and feeds him joys and delights too subtle for words to make out. Probably the Winter King enjoys it as much as the boy does, for although the boy is lonely—at school, at home—at least his has his parents, and they love him very much.

The Winter King has no one.

Well, that is not quite true, the boy learns. The Winter King has his storm foxes, ethereal spirits that ride the winds like hawks, soaring and diving and tumbling. The storm foxes love the spring storms best of all, when thunder splits the sky like canons and the lightning flashes strobe-like across the forest. They love the storms because storms bring freedom: the Winter King cannot contain them when the heavens open and rage, and through spring and summer his power wanes almost entirely.

Then, one day, the boy has no one either. His mother and father fought, and although that wasn’t unusual, the fact that his mother left and didn't come back was.

He didn’t realise until years later what the little plastic stick in the bathroom bin had meant; why his mother had cried for three days straight before the fight that ended it all; why his father had been so relieved to see her go. Not that he ever said he was relieved, and the boy knew his father missed his mother—but he also walked as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. An important weight. A weight of about seven or eight pounds, if the boy understood things correctly, that would last some eight or nine months and then the rest of their lives.

The boy thought he might have quite enjoyed that weight. It might have been just heavy enough to hold his family together.

But alack, the weight had vanished—from his father’s shoulders, his mother’s body—and so his mother vanished from their family, and the boy felt all alone.

That was the night it happened. The night he told the Winter King what he wanted—and the night he learned that sometimes, what we want is the worst thing we can imagine.

He was supposed to fly.

Instead, he thudded to the ground. And he learned that even foxes can cry, if they’re really, truly sad enough.


If you enjoyed this story, check out the That Moment When anthology, which contains the first part of Fox Red!

Plane Travel

            Plane Travel:

You                              start

like                              this

            elbows in

         ankles crossed

         never touching

       but      s    l     o      w       l        y

you start to  s

                        p

                          r

                               a

                                     w

                                              l

Because       HOUR   HOUR   HOUR

                     HOUR   HOUR   HOUR

                     HOUR   HOUR   HOUR

                     HOUR   HOUR   HOUR

                     HOUR   HOUR   

                                                is a really long time.

            Elbows bump.

            (sorry)

            Knees touch.

             Sorry.

A baby’s foot brushes your leg.

             Sorry!

It’s not a problem. Also, he’s adorable.

            …Thanks!

This is how friendships begin.

Is fourteen hours long enough to make

                        a friend?

            Maybe.

     in the right time

     in the right place

with the right people.

            Either way,

             You   can

              now sit

              likethis

The Kitten Psychologist Broaches the Topic of Economics

There once was a little kitten. No, not the kitten I wrote a story about in September.

Definitely a different kitten. A very different kitten.

Oh, fine. It’s the same kitten. So I’m reusing characters. So what?

This kitten had had a hard time going outside. Which is as much to say as it didn’t. Not after its first experience with snow, which is probably like a person’s first experience with horseradish: you either like it or you don’t. And, in this case, the kitten didn’t like it.

In the last story, wherein the kitten realized that there was probably maybe some benefit to going outside after paying me good money to sit around and ask it questions containing answers that it decided it had come up with all on its own, wondering what I was doing with my life being a psychologist to my friends’ nine week old kitten.

The only problem with this picture (I mean, aside from the obvious) was that the kitten wasn’t paying me out of its own money. Let’s be serious: I can be a kitten psychologist all I want, but we have to admit that a kitten having its own income stream at nine weeks stretches credibility quite thin. Which is as much to say as that this kitten had mastered the use of arcane computer enchantments and pulled the money from my friends’ – its owners’ – bank account.

Frankly, I thought my friends would have figured it out on their own. It might have been a bit cowardly of me to wait until they got a clue and started investigating but either this kitten was more clever than I thought or my friends had an awful memory for their own spending habits. I’m not actually sure which is more concerning, but I had plenty of concern on hand to spend no matter which it turned out to be.

In other words, while my friends were out of the country a couple of weeks later, I house-sat. And, as I sat the house, I had a conversation with my friends’ kitten.

“You really have to stop this,” I said.

“I don’t pay you to have an opinion,” the kitten said with a swish of its tail.

“You pay me to be a psychologist. That’s exactly the same as paying me to have an opinion.”

“What happened to unbiased objectivity?”

“Fine. In my unbiased, objective opinion, you have to stop this.”

The kitten tapped its chin. “Stop what?”

“Paying me from my friends’ bank account without their knowledge or consent.” As if it didn’t already know.

“If you don’t like it, I can always find another psychologist…”

“That’s not the point.”

“And how do you propose I tell them about it when the idea of my sentience is patently absurd to them? Certainly you can’t. They already think you’re crazy.”

Obviously, I was going to have to have a conversation with more than just the kitten. “And how would you inform a potential new psychologist of this patently absurd idea?”

“That’s different. They’re not my human. They aren’t used to me. They don’t have ingrained ideas or habits about me to contend with.”

I bit back a sarcastic remark about the strength of eleven week old habits. For the kitten, that was a lifetime. That and it wasn’t as if I hadn’t had plenty of ingrained habits and ideas of my own about the nature of kittens when this one hired me. I wondered if maybe I should have kept one or two of them. No amount of income was worth this trouble. Well. Perhaps not certain amounts of income.

“Well, just give it some thought and see what happens,” I finally said.

The kitten avoided me after that.

Which could have been the end of that, I suppose. Certainly it seemed like it, which I was a bit peeved about, to be sure. But, in a few days, I received an email:

Come at once. My humans are away. Sincerely, you know who. 

I wondered if the kitten had finally got to my friends’ YA collection. That and I went.

“So, I told my humans.”

“How did they take it?”

“Now they’re seeing a psychologist.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

“You know-” the kitten stretched- “I’ve come to a realization.”

“Oh?”

“This is a ridiculous situation. I’m a kitten. Why do I even need a psychologist?”

I shrugged.

“Exactly. I should be going my wild way on my wild lone. Except…” it glanced at the couch. “…I don’t think I’m prepared to give up the amenities of my current living situation.”

“Then don’t.”

“Oh, I’m not. This may not be ancient Egypt, but this is certainly something. Do you suppose you could talk to my humans? Now that I have, that is.”

And admit that I’d been complicit in what was essentially theft? Um. “No.”

“Drat. I had a feeling this was my fight.”

Sure. That’s exactly what it is.

“Well, do you have any advice on what I should do next? Some words of wisdom I’ll probably ignore when I inevitably come up with something better? Like nothing? I rather like the idea of doing nothing.”

“If you’ll just come up with something better, then why do you need my advice?” No, theft was too harsh a word. Underhanded dealing, perhaps?

“It’s amusing.”

“So, am I psychologist or court jester?”

“Whichever makes you feel better, I suppose.” The kitten yawned. “I’m going to have a nap. If you come up with something, email me. Or stop by. I’ll pay you as soon as you do.”

Who was I kidding? It was definitely theft. By the time I’d got home, I realized that. I also realized that, despite the fact that the kitten really should be acting responsibly with its humans, so should I with my friends. With a sigh, I picked up the phone.

I wondered how long I’d be paying them back.

Dear psychologist human,

I’m not entirely sure what you stood to gain by informing my humans of your part in all this. My intention had been for you to merely vouch for my sentience. You have done me a service, and it is right that you should be compensated in turn, not that you should throw that all away.

But no matter. We shall speak when you return from vacation. I think you will see things much more clearly when this is all over.

Sincerely,

You know who.

The story continues in The Kitten Psychologist vs the Kitten's Owners.