They wore the blank features of cats framed upon their own faces. Beneath the skeleton whiteness of the smooth marble features, their child-eyes gleamed voraciously, filled full with the play of the fire before us, as it flickered a tortured, erratic dance. In their pocketed child-eyes, there crackled the crisp outlines of fiery shapes which no one had ever yet seen, and which died immediately in the formative cradle of their birth.
Immediately. There was life burning warm in the oceans of their eyes and upon their luminescent skin which was the color of the sand at sunrise. Shadow echoes of the flames played upon the tipi walls where we were snugly settled, where the smoke sailed up, funneling finally through an abbreviated animal-hide opening. The tipi top bloomed outwards, facing the full, festival moon. We were small in this stomach shelter, subsumed within the thick, interior scents of roasting meats which weighed plumply upon the thin, metal firetop grill, teetering on tiny, child-size legs.
We were six in total: four children, Nyanta, and I, though in my present state of intoxication (be it by harp, by umeshu, the culprit was decidedly negotiable,) I thought I ought to be considered among the younger beings. Nyanta himself scarcely added up to be an full-grown man, as he wore the effeminate feline face with pride.
"Welcome to the Neko-village!" He had moaned with a chastened cackle the night when I arrived in the tipi camp.
Gaku had drawn me here by hand from the meadow-dance across the road, where the harpists played sweetly and the late summer air set a sticky, precious atmosphere upon the hazy, swirling strangers, who in such company and space-time, could only be considered friends.
Gaku, the dear of my oceanic, traveller's heart, a young thing whose hands, when splayed open, counted hardly half the size of my own, and yet he was a man. As I swayed in the meadow he padded my thigh with those tiny, tender paws. He spoke enough English for us to be lovers.
"Come," he had whispered highly, ever serious, and his head craned toward the distant tipi, a grey spot faded upon black darkness, far enough from the bulbous, beating lights of the festival to foster a lurch in the scaffolding of my drunken heart. Gaku's hand was warm, and my hand was warm, and we were warm. He would not smile at me, but his rounded eyes received me with the persistent ache of unrealized love.
Halfway up the road, he preyed sight of my bare feet. I had not thought to return my shoes to my dancing skin, which breathed freely through those musical nights. Halting, he pointed down, pinning a space in the irregularly paved earth where he would stand. He was deeply concerned for the state of my soles.
"Gaku - stay - here," he commanded. "Amelia," the name which sang fluid, berry-sweet from his new-formed lips, "Go. Shoes - come back."
As I had learned from the working days, long before the dancing strangers painted the face of our earth, back when we were alone with the sea, and he had taught me to swim in his own secret way ... I had learned to know better than to argue with the boy. By the shore of the sea, I was his. I loved him deeply, the kitten-boy, and his pleas were sugar.
Dreamily, I retrieved my shoes. Stepped in. Stepped back, toddled up the road once more. My mind harnessed the songs from the stage into a strange and festive ambience, filtering and flickering fuzzily in as accompanying music for this romantic eve. When I graced the road's black earth once more, the small silhouette of my boy beat black and solid beneath the full, and fleshy fruit of the moon. He signaled: faster. I, dizzy, rushed to his side.
And so he had led me within the scrub wilderness of the adjacent hill to Nyanta, and to the cat children of the night. Nyanta's welcome was warying, laced with a wanting which I had felt from the others before, and which I knew, if met, would only disappoint. This was the game we were playing. We were cats or kittens, no mice to be seen. Whether or not I was intended as victim or heir of this ancient technique, there was no way of knowing, but compared to the black and white terrors of times spent in cities before, I preferred this seeming simplicity. We were soft; even if I was victim, I would feel no pain.
With a faded, satisfied gaze, I smiled coyly at no one and curled my thin, worn frame in the center of a sleeping pad which lay among others, surrounding the central sizzle of the unceasing fire. The smoke played stroking and gentle across my skin. Body sank. I could stay here.
Strewn about the unkempt shadow grasses were half a dozen half-opened platters containing tiny meats and bite-sized vegetables. Halved, between this curious space and the festival, my in-between body rocked nearly to sleep.
Yet did not, for the children were lively and playful, and Nyanta pleasured in the foreign interaction with my subterranean consciousness. He pursued, predator. Gaku glowered with a tender suspicion, and cautiously nuzzled his head upon my thigh. He breathed surely, defensively, and resigned his stare to the shadowplay on the tipi walls.
Another boy, barely older, with a great black spot on the right above his lip, similarly fixed his stare into the silhouette abyss. Since my arrival, he counted monotonously, "Ichi, ni, san, shi, go," and so on, and on.
A girl who clung to her baggy, grey shirt like a disguise, giggled shyly at his dreadful, ritual drone. She wore her cat face, yet seemed uncertain f its place as she pawed at its smooth skin with her fingertips.
In this smoke-screened time which we shared, we were fixed in bliss.
"You have boyfriend?" Nyanta asked, naturally. He the charmer, I the charmed, I had been twisted by the repetition of these letters which preyed over and over on the scratchy tongues of these full-grown lions, encroaching upon my territory.
Tilting my cheek toward the young head whose soft, dark hair now covered my leg, I laughed with a stunted, lucid calm, which I was just now acknowledging to have consumed the entirety of my self. "Gaku is my boyfriend."
This seemed funny to the skin-and-bones lion man, and he threw his head back far behind him to show it. Gaku gave no evidence of having heard. He lay soft. The young, masked girl offered me a gingersnap cookie. A treat for the kitten, for having performed such a kindly trick. I ate it with gratitude, though I was entirely full from the beginning.
The gestures continued, for I was the guest in this dreamy tipi chapel of the crazed cat community. Nyanta sang and howled, amusing the occasional visitor who appeared at the entrance flaps of the Neko-village. One woman entered serenely for no more than a moment, and told me she would teach me to fire-dance, one of these nights. She had a real child smile, quick and genuine. Her eyes flashed and then she was gone.
The boy with the spot had not ceased his archaic quest, counting higher and higher into the hyakus of the numeral alphabet. Suppose the tipi was a spaceship, and we were drifting farther from the festival with each frantic jerk of the fire, with every second which became terrifyingly tangible in the slow, pronounced numbers which tainted my attempts at entering eternity.
For all I could tell, the full moon was swelling, drooping closer, or we were growing near.
On and on and time went on and on. Oh, I had grown so warm, and so soft. And the voices were indistinguishable, overlayed, some folkloric song which was lullaby to my relaxed heap of flesh and bone. By my knee lay another luminescent, cat-faced mask. In the empty wells of its eyes, I imagined my own, and in this distanced art of self-pretending I fell deeper into the security of the night's ritual glamor, and of disguise.
So soft, I mewed. Nyanta had set out tea for me, which I had stretched out and promptly spilt on sleeping pad. Clumsy, foolish, kitten me, I behaved terribly. I wanted only to sleep, and to dream of the same thing which was this moment. The girl offered me the bag of biscuit treats and a roasted pumpkin slice. Beaded tears pearled in the pools of my eyelids. I accepted the gifts, wishing abashedly to string the child a necklace composed of the treasure gems which streamed from my beaming face.
In the cradle of the night which rocked our fresh bodies toward rest, my searching eyes lost track of the changing motions. Sometime, then: the young girl had disappeared. With a reflexive, girlish twirl of my hips, and some sleepy, heedless sigh, I knew Nyanta had left hastily in resistance to the game which we were playing, which we were always playing, which we could not stop playing but by sending ourselves out into the sea.
I knew he was not quite there yet, though. To the sea, I mean. I was quite confident then that he'd gone out only to drink, to fill himself with swirling liquid, rather than submerge within liquid his own sinful self.
Still, now, in the fan of the flames lay myself and the two boys, who were men, though all of us were truly nothing but cats.
In the newly realized absence of the village crowd, some unsettled piece of my halved self felt its way into the space which we occupied, and despite the smoky heat, a chill played upon my spine like a child's harsh fingertips tip-toeing machine-gun on piano keys.
Gaku had transported his tiny body around to the other side of the fire and now rested far from me, as he could be assured of my safety in the present absence of the prowling lion. He had not, however, and I can not blame him for it, accounted for the very personal, precarious dangers in my awakening from the evening's drug-spent dream surge. Terrifically, against my will, an early, incubating anxiety took root in his faraway body. My eyes grew wide in fear of him - this little boy - who was in love with me. This crinkly feeling of being known, so physically, so absently, drove splinters through my veins. I began to worry.
The other boy with the spot was no longer counting. Instead, he stared blankly into the space beneath my eyes. There, too, in his turning, lifeless glare, the glare of a man, a fetal terror was born.
They continued to roast miniature meats above the dying flames, but we no longer wore the faces of clean, white cats. Though the light was fading with the gradual, illusory permanence of nighttime world, I felt that the tipi had never been more blurred with smoke.
Against my will, I was waking up, remembering that beyond the murmur and chants of unknowable human voices, there was an awful, endless silence. And the boys were no longer speaking for me to hear, but were whispering, sneaking soundless words into each others' ears. Between their shared language, I caught glinting child-eyes, the eyes of thieves, volleying back and forth from my exposed being. Indeed, I fell victim to the weathering of the night, to the abrupt wells of consumptive silences, and to the alien body in which this world had identified: me.
Their whispers echoed in the hollows of seashell ears, and anxious, I strained to remind my sobering senses of our proximity to the tidal rise and fall. Sounds and motions which operating still, without fail, and without light.
Whatever they were saying, Gaku's brow raised in concern as my face fell in tremors. My boy, my dear, concerned for his own, saw the gasping fire and set to fix what he worried had broken. For though I may not have been the child, he was, and he was also the man, and he wanted for my happiness.
With a feline dexterity, Gaku handled a candle stick which was secured in the grass by bits of melted wax and perhaps a murmured prayer. Flick - match - fire, he had it alit. Straining his small, flexible frame over the shrunken flames, he extended his whole self in an effort to stoke the surrounding sticks with the comforting light.
The poor boy, my love of this life, the fire fell from his hand and into the dried earth. And like all flames, in this world or in the halved fantasies of tipi ritual planets, the earth feeds on fire, and so fire was fed.
Now, we were forced awake by fear. The spotted, mystic boy split his self into a flurry of animation and excitement, pouncing upon the flames as if intending to swallow them whole. Gaku searched about the mess of strewn objects, and, choosing a towel, attempted to drown the surge of light which had yawned and consumed half a package of meat in its fiery path.
"Daijoubu, daijoubu," he muttered, faltered, certainly. It was all right. Is all right. My body, sensing solely the smell of smoke and the feeling, which was fear, was gripped by a stiff, inane responsibility for the children, who were set upon the flames already and saving my paralyzed self.
They danced upon it like wild-cats. I, instead, spilt the gas on the sleeping pad, accomplishing the pathetic, full-circle redemption which was heaving the mattress out of the tipi before our entire momentous universe could erupt into ash.
And so, black. Oh, they had done it. For a moment, we were in darkness, and the walls of the tipi were no longer emblazoned with play and pretend, but had fallen prey to the visual silence which is black, black as the night.
Then the smooth, young fingers of my love salvaged a newborn bead of pearly light, a single tear upon a candle, which he attached again to the precarious, minimal puddle of wax pooled into the earth. Tipi walls took on a wonderful, hesitant glow. Gaku released a sigh into the the weakly lit space which had suddenly fallen cold.
I kneaded my elbows and shifted my eyes. No more whispers, no more movement, save for our singular, spitting gemstone which burned atop a tilting beam of wax.
No more. Sometimes, the little dream must to encounter this: no more, the astonishing loneliness of the afterwards.
The lull between lives, before Nyanta returned to the tipi, and it was too late in the night for me to imagine any more, and I was in a tipi with burnt grass and two terrified boy-kittens who were no longer in full possession of their innocent skins. Who likely never were.
Then, Nyanta lurched in, having no doubt lapped up some substances before returning to his sanctuary, Neko-village, where we were all cats, where all we did was play.
But I had forgotten the game, seeing only his returned, ravished excitement. Instead I fumbled upon the scorched earth.
"I think maybe, I will not stay the night, actually," my over-embellished English choked the ashen air, rolling in my mouth, tainting the tangible, physical world with my imagined anxieties.
Nyanta's mouth curled downward in a faint, playful grimace. He would ask me wherefore, but I would not answer, because already I had found my shoes to tack along to my soles, to track me along to the road, to return me to the festival lights, and to my homeland security, which I knew, in my heart, to be questionable in its promises, too.
No matter, though. As if my mind had fused with muscle, I walked harshly, robotically, back to the Bamboo Bar, where the past, seeming hours dripped into folklore, where my excitement would inevitably be banished by the patronizing indulgence of the full-grown, drunken company which was some familiarity.
My ribs rolled against the ribs of the bamboo floor, beneath twinkling, electric lights. There, the adults talked and drank. I thought, I may still be a cat. And justly so. Until I finally forced my streaming self to burrow into the cave of my campsite, I watched as the creatures of the Neko-village, Gaku and the spotted Cat, prowled through the decaying festival lights.
When I let my eyes falter, their paws would grip on to my ankles, trying to drag me back to their chapel, where the Cat would count to a thousand, and Gaku would nuzzle my thighs. But I had had enough to drink, and in this afterwards night I was no longer a woman, but a fearful child. A kitten, all over again.
I tore myself from their persistant shadows in those faint, failing hours, crawled into my tent, and gave into an extravagant exhaustion - I do not believe it belonged to me - and, drawing a line between my dreams and the darkness, I separated myself from this strange, animal world which was not so.
