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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(Feeling good and energized after WorldCon, ready to finish up a piece that’s been floating around in my head for a while. Story elements include Hawaiian shirts, a retirement community called Friendly Village, an old love affair, a smart-alecky fortune teller, rabbits, and centaurs. Here’s the current beginning.)
Old fabric holds smells better than the kinds come about in the most recent decade. The new stuff is all chemicals, rubbing the roof of your mouth like steel wool if you sniff too hard, can bite like a spell’s sting. Older silks, cottons hold household odors: cedar or cinnamon, tumeric and garlic, perfumes you can no longer find like L’Origan or Quelques Fleurs, camphorated moth balls or talcum powder. Rarely, the whiff of a person, a smell lingering long after every scrap of their DNA has vanished.
Most often just the lilac assault left by a hasty dry-clean. But the other times make it worth it.
I pulled the green XL circle aside with my thumb and kept going widdershins, into the Ls. So far the Value Village’s rack had yielded only two possibilities: an XXL black with a subtle bamboo-patterned weave, cream-colored dragons curled and coiled like sunridden clouds and an XL crimson rayon whose flame-pattern suited it to throw-away magic, a protective cloak perfect for what I was after: a trip through hostile territory with no one to watch my back.
It was a pretty day outside, the last days before summer would slant to the other side of the clock and the days begin shrinking into the grey days of fall. A day for turning up the radio and blasting “Dani California” until the sound came up through your bones.
My shirt was umbrellas, parasols really, pinwheeled against cerulean sky and white cumulus clouds. Protection, and even though it was newer and untested, I trusted it to ward off anything, magic protective gloves, more supple than lead-lined canvas but surely at least that solid.
The spell struck up from a black background, red serpents, scales lined with scallops as blue as the sky outside. Slashing bites along the outside of my left hand, locking on, tails sticking straight out as they attached themselves.
I lurched sideways.
The floor crashed up into my face, thunked against my forehead in painful collision.
Then I was gone.
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Was fiddling this for a writing retreat I’m doing in September. This is from the beginning.
June, 1976, Indiana
On Indiana summer evenings, the fireflies begin their dance as dusk creeps over the landscape, reducing green to gray and black and brown. Their lights are yellow as sunlight or neon; they blink among the hedges and maneuver a few inches above the tall grass. There are five varieties of fireflies native to the Northern Indiana region. Each signals prospective mates with specific timing, and no four second interval firefly would approach a six second interval one.
On the same summer evenings, the mosquitoes whine, though only the female ones, hovering before landing on unsuspecting arms and ankles, draining as much as they can before either taking off, heavy and bloated with their sanguine plunder, or else are splattered and exploded by their victim when he or she notices not the sting of the needlelike proboscis being inserted, but the tickle of their feet among the fine, downy hair arms.
Other creatures come out later: soft-nosed rabbits and the tiny bats that flitter around lampposts, devouring the night insects swarming there. Possums drag their heavy bodies along, investigating garbage cans and quarreling with the raccoons come to plunder. There are even rats, in some places along the St. Joseph River, water rats that move through the green-brown water, searching among the slimy weeds that coat the bottom. But the fireflies are already there: they have marked the coming of the night, lighting as though protesting the approaching darkness.
Michigan Street crosses down from the state of Michigan, comes through Northern Indiana and splits one of its larger cities, South Bend, like a splayed bird. Corn fields and alfalfa lie further out but here the street slashes the city’s belly, unfolds layers like the dark verge of Notre Dame University, the struggling downtown, the unsavory brew further south of town as you headed down to the smaller towns: Lakeville, Lapaz, Plymouth. Far to the south it reaches Kokomo, later Indianapolis, then the nether region of the state, which hosted the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the twenties.
Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon.
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