haunting

leon and i were sitting up in bed, in our jammies, playing cards and smoking and drinking wine, when i looked over at the corner at the end of the bed and saw bagheera. he was laying down but his head was up and looking beautiful and noble. i was shocked, and pointed at him and said, "leon! it's bagheera! he's back!"

bagheera stood up and strode across the covers, knocking our cards astray, and then gently leaped off the bed and wandered over towards the closet. we were watching him while we held hands, wondering if he was real or perhaps a visiting spirit. i started crying from relief that the whole ordeal had been a bad dream. leon was petting my hair and stunned into silence.

bagheera sat down on his haunches and the most amazing transformation took place. he slowly and gently morphed into two cats. they looked like him, but smaller, and where he was brown, they were peach coloured. where he had one eye, they had two. where his eye was an irridescent, almost supernatural violet hue, theirs were a clear, bright green, almost like pale glass. they looked like twins and sat side by side next to one another, watching us.

i don't know what we said, but we were shocked and surprised and a little awed at the mystical implications of what we'd just witnessed. we called them over to us and were petting them. if they were seperated by more than a few feet, they would both become disoriented and start stumbling, like bagheera had in the moments before his death. we decided that they were bagheera's reincarnation and that they each represented one part of his whole and that they should be kept together at any cost.

marvelling at this amazing development we introduced them as "bagheera" to the children who were confused. i didn't care. i was high. high on the fact that something divine had come down out of the heavens and touched a fingertip to our lives and given us a strange and inexplicable gift. i wanted to take the bagheera cats out with me, show them to people and explain the story, so that they might understand as i did there are marvelous forces at work in the universe that do magical and amazing things. i scooped the two cats up in my arms and carried them out to the car, plopped them in the passenger's seat and drove up towards liam's school where i knew there would be some parents i could amaze. i pulled up to the fence running alongside the schoolyard and called some parents i recognized over to see the magical cats. they came and were ooh'ing and awww'ing and some seemed skeptical about my story, but i didn't care. as i was talking to them, though, i got a strange, dark feeling in my chest. my eyes glanced up and in the rearview mirror i saw a woman, a very bland, plain looking woman, maybe in her 40s, with a beak nose and a lined face and a quiet expression of resignation, sitting in my back seat.

i stopped talking to the parents and they wandered away. i rolled up the window and turned to face the woman. she didn't speak. i said, "who are you? why are you here?" she looked me right in the eyes at that point and i could see infinite sadness in them, and determination. i suddenly realized who she was, this boring lunchlady-esque woman in my back seat all bundled up in a brown puffy parka. she was an angel of death, here to amend the fluke chance of bagheera coming back to us, even in an altered form. "no, no, please no," i begged her, quietly, wanting to pull the cats in close to me to keep them from her. she still did not speak, she only looked more sad. i started crying as she leaned forward, the vinyl of the seat squeaking underneath her, her arm extending over the passenger's side seat, her index finger extended loosely towards the cats. i cried and cried.

it was quick. she gently moved her finger along their jawlines, like a soft swoop or a friendly hook like you would do to a friend who is blue, as if to say, "chin up, you." the effect was immediate. the cats melded back into one another, became bagheera as i knew him in his first incarnation, with his one eye and his chocolate point markings, and then he turned into a very small human baby boy, who writhed in his death throes, in the front of my car.