tororo

In this last day of March our small Spring Serial comes to an end...To see the earlier episodes of this pulp fiction:

episode 1
episode2
episode3
episode4
episode5


And so on...



DAUGHTERS OF BASTET: 13th hour

I hadn't seen Mysterious Stranger since the day of the big fire.
I missed her, at least a bit. She would have liked this place, with so many things to inspect.
It was easy to imagine how she would have explored the place, going from table to table, her tail strictly vertical. But judging from the black eye the waiter had just given to me, perhaps she wouldn't have been welcome in this fancy caf, I had chosen for the view it offered on the ocean.
Wrong decisions may be made in any place, but you're less likely to make one while looking at the ocean.

Anyway I knew what Kristi would have done. What she was expecting me to do.

The small Neanderthalian colony that had managed to survive for centuries in the caves deeply buried under the Parisian catacombs... the people who had sheltered us, fed us, took care of us, Kristi and me, during that year long ago that changed our lives forever... they would have been unable to withstand the contact with the twenty-first century humanity.

Carefully, I wrote the address on the thick paper:

Mademoiselle Christine Gamahuchie
Poste restante
87310 La Merveille-Le-Chteau
par St. Laurent-sur-Gorre
(France)


Since I had found, late at night, the piece of paper this innocent-looking address was written on - near to a scribbling of a closed Oujdat eye, my mind had been wandering... could it be that Kristi had succeeded in completing yet another of the improbable goals she had assigned to herself in the idealistics days of our youth? could she have identified the location of the Chteau de la Merveille... the dreaded Castle Marvelous, on the borders of the vanished Kingdom of Gorre, so many a Knight of the Round Table had entered, only to never be seen again?

I stuffed the envelope with all what was at hand - paper towels, pages from my now useless agenda- in an effort to make the tiny sculpture's form as undiscernible as possible.

I displayed on the table the few poststamps that were left in my wallet - I use to always keep some in it, just in case. If only there was enough of them for prepaying the small envelope's sending.
A $3.50 with a view of the Capitol. A 50 cents commemorating a long-forgotten governor of Puerto Rico. It was not enough. I turned the last one over. On the printed side, on a dark background, a slender feline was keeping a hieratic pose. She was so minutely drawn one could notice her wide eye's different colors. One blue, one green.
I had no memory of having bought it. In fact, I had no memory of having ever seen such a stamp anywhere.
But, after all, aside the caption "Abyssinian Cat", it had "USA" and "$2" printed on it, and $2 was just what I needed for completing the stamping.

When I licked the stamp, I had this uncanny feeling I had heard it moaning.

I wasn't sure.

Maybe it was purring.