Just Deserts

inspired by the picture "Just Deserts" by Harris Burdick



If they wanted to know the truth about what happened to Henry Caldwin, then their biggest mistake was not coming here, to the crazy cat lady’s house at the end of main street. The humans assumed that Mrs. Wentworth was innocent--too harmless, and besides, not even connected to the Caldwins. They probably didn’t even consider her a suspect, and they were right in that. Their mistake, though, was assuming the cats knew nothing. They couldn’t have been more wrong. I’m the only one who knew Meridian. I’m the only one who saw everything, from start to finish. I’m the only one who helped her, at least knowingly. The rest of the world saw Meridian as a girl named Marina Walters, a maid who wasn’t worth noticing. She cut her hair like those flapper girls, and most people who saw her assumed that she wanted to be one. Maybe they thought she was going to speakeasies on the weekends. Her clothing was too plain to attract any young man’s attention, though. One the whole, no one thought she was capable of anything. If they didn’t want Henry Caldwin to get murdered, then that was their biggest mistake. I’m telling you, cats, humans never know what's good for them.

The gossip magazines will never know this, but it all really started in October of the year before. No, I wasn’t there, and no, that doesn’t make me less of an expert. Meridian told me everything, and I could feel her soul as she told it. Yes, familiars can do that. It’s a thing we can do. But even if we couldn’t, any cat could have figured it out. Probably even most humans, that’s how upset she was. She threw the kitchen door open and slammed the empty pan down on the counter, that was how mad she was. I could feel her anger, righteous and overwhelming and threatening to take control. Meridian stood there for a few seconds, breathing heavily. She looked at me, and then straightened with a start. Meridian walked over to the pantry and yanked out a bag of flour, closing the pantry door afterwards with the same force that she was putting into all of her steps. She set the flour bag down on her counter and punched it, then punched it again, and again, and again, until the whole room was covered in white powder and my fur had turned some shade of grey. Then she collapsed onto the floor. I padded over and started to lick her clean, even though I probably needed a grooming more. I can be selfless sometimes, when it comes to Meridian.

“It’s that bastard Henry,” she said, through gritted teeth. I’d been able to figure out that much from the moment she’d walked in, but I kept licking. Humans have a way of stating the obvious, I’m sure you’ve noticed. She started toying with my fur before she started talking again. “A kid died in one of his stupid factories, and Henry is giving the family nothing. The mother came to him, in tears, and all he told her was that if she was going to miss the income, then she’d better just start working more hours. She’s already working sixteen hours a day,” said. She was choking on sobs now. I abandoned licking and curled up in her lap. She let her hand fall to the ground and sighed. For a moment, neither of us said anything. I just absorbed her anger, her sadness for the mother, her pity for all of the children in Henry’s factories, her stubborn disappointment in Henry himself. “The worst part is,” she finally told me, “that I just stood there and served him dinner. I said nothing. I just acted like it was alright.” I said nothing. I wouldn’t have, even if I could. This outburst had been a long time coming. Her whole time working at that house, she’d come into the kitchen where she hid me and tell me about Henry Caldwin. Her tales had grown worse and worse. I think I knew what she was planning before she did.

When she left me that night, went home to her tiny apartment that wouldn’t take pets, she hadn’t figured it out yet. I think she’d started to by the time she came back the next day. She was feeling a bit braver and a little bit more scared. Yes, she did in fact feel both at the same time. Kittens these days have no emotional intelligence. Anyways, I got more certain that she knew what she was planning as the week went on. Her courage and fear hardened into resolve, which was strengthened by fresh infusions of anger. Whenever she doubted that the plan she was forming was a good idea, she always seemed to come back to the fact that doing nothing would be weak. And she never wanted to seem weak, at least not to herself. Others might look down on her, but she needed to respect herself. Like a cat, sort of. So I could sense that she was going through with this.

I knew for sure when she came in one morning with a pumpkin, its skin pure white, and grinned at me. “They asked what it was for and I said ‘just desert’. They thought I was talking about a pie.” She cackled at her own cleverness. I loved it when she cackled. She didn’t do it often, but when she did… it was pure bliss. The moment the cackle slipped out though, she stopped, horrified with herself. Maybe she was worried that she was being too obvious, or maybe she felt some kind of guilt -- I wouldn’t know. Familiars can only feel emotions, not read minds. What I do know is that the moment of glee was over. She set the pumpkin down at the end of the kitchen counter and got started on the Caldwin family’s breakfast. Before she left the kitchen, balancing a steaming plate of golden pancakes and a platter of fruit, she came over to where I was, perched atop a cabinet. She looked me directly in the eyes, and I looked back. “I need you to lick the pumpkin. Give it a complete bath. And don’t leave it alone until I come back.” It was a strange request, but her eyes looked earnest enough that I took her seriously. She wasn’t ready to tell me her plan out loud yet, but she could tell that I knew. She left the room, back straight like a good servant. No, no one would suspect a thing.

When she returned, the pumpkin had already mostly dried, and I was curled around it, purring. You’re laughing? Look, I get that it could sound dumb to a cat who’s never met a witch, but that pumpkin needed to be shown some care. It was crucial. Anyways, where was I? Oh, right. Meridian. She came back and got a jar of something out of the back of her spice cabinet. It was dark, darker than black, and I couldn’t tell what kind of substance it was. It flowed around in the jar, avoiding the glass edges, too thick to be a gas and to light to be a liquid. I watched, enchanted, as she reached into the jar and took out just a pinch of the substance. She closed the jar, quickly and carefully. Then she spread the substance all over the pumpkin, chanting in some unknown language as she did so. She muttered quietly as she massaged the pumpkin, and worked with speed. Speed and silence: those are the skills needed, to be a covert witch. At first, I thought the pumpkin looked exactly as it had before. It wasn’t until she turned off the light to leave at the end of the day that I noticed the pumpkin was glowing, faintly.

We continued this for exactly a month. A real, lunar month, not those thirty day monstrosities that humans put on their calendars. I would bathe the pumpkin while she served breakfast, and she would rub and chant when she got back. The pumpkin grew brighter, until you could see its glow in daylight. Meridian had to cover it in a cloth in case anyone but us happened to walk in. As it got brighter, it got hotter too--a sharp, lively heat, that made me proud to lick it. Even to the end, I could still touch the pumpkin. I could tap it with my paws, and lick it with my tongue. Meridian wasn’t so lucky. The human hand is a fragile construction, useful though it may be. When she spread her dark substance over it, she had to hold her hands a few centimeters away from the pumpkin. The substance still flowed onto the squash, though. It knew its place.

That month passed both quickly and slowly, depending on Meridian’s mood. When it finally came to an end, though, she stayed the night in the kitchen with me. I knew she was just staying for the pumpkin, but I couldn’t help feeling overjoyed that she was here, in our kitchen, at night. I wasn’t alone. Yes, Butterball, I know cats are supposed to be solitary, but it's different between a witch and her familiar.

I spent the night pacing back and forth across the kitchen, watching her work, occasionally rubbing myself against her legs to give her strength. She spent the time between sunrise and sunset chanting. The only times she moved from her stoic place directly in front of the pumpkin was when she got the occasional glass of water to keep her throat going, and even then, she never took her eyes off of it. As she sipped, I could feel her, mentally chanting, sending her thoughts and power and will out into the glowing specimen of plant sitting on our counter. When the sun broke above the horizon, her voice grew silent. She stroked my back for luck, and then she gathered her supplies.

This time, her equipment was of a more ordinary nature: a bowl, a rolling pin, a knife, some flour and sugar. She reached for the knife first. She paused a moment, holding it above the pumpkin, steadying herself. Her eyes were wild like she couldn’t fully believe what she was doing.  The pumpkin glowed under her hovering knife. Her plan was finally real now. Once she cut into that pumpkin, she would be acting, not plotting. She lowered her knife and it grew even brighter. She had to struggle to get the knife through the pumpkin without touching the fruit. By the time she was done, eight perfect slices of squash-bound starlight lay on the counter. When I nudged one slice with my nose, I yelped and leaped back. It had burned me. I went to watch from the corner, offended that the pumpkin I had worked so hard to create had hurt me. Meridian just smiled at me and baked the pumpkin into a pie, like she would have with any other. I wanted to be annoyed with her for brushing aside my pain, but how could I be, when I was witnessing something incredible?

She got a brief break when the pie went into the oven. She leaned against the wall next to me and stroked my fur, letting her eyes close for a moment. She was triumphant, but she wasn’t fulfilled. There was a faint but deep sadness in her that I couldn’t understand at the time. She was succeeding. She was ridding the world of a cruel and heartless person, a person who’d destroyed her multiple times, even if he barely knew she existed. We’d all be better off without him. I wanted her success so badly.

The timer went off.

“Okay, you ready?” she looked at me. I nodded, as much as a cat could.

When she pulled the pie out of the oven, it looked just like any other pumpkin pie. “See? It is just dessert,” she said to me with a wicked grin that didn’t quite spread to her eyes. “A breakfast especially for Mr. Henry Caldwin.” When she walked out of the room that day, she didn’t look back.

She returned not much later. I could tell she’d been successful, but she didn’t look happy. She looked defeated. I don’t think I realized until then the great flaw in her plan, so caught up was I in the magic of it. You see, she’d loved Henry Caldwin, somehow. As great a witch as she was, she still was susceptible to that one human weakness. And it had made her root for him. She wanted him to be a good person, maybe more than anyone else in the world. He’d failed too many times. The child in the factory had only been the last straw.

Meridian looked at me with such sadness in her eyes and asked, “Do you really think it was right, that I took his life? Was it really my place to judge?” I looked back at her, without answering, because I am only a cat. Meridian broke down in tears and hugged me. She almost never did that. “I don’t want to be a witch anymore,” she whispered in my ear. My stomach turned to ice at the thought, the idea of the two of us being separate, of her losing her magical identity. A cat can only meow in protest, though, and at that point, I think, she had already made up her mind.

She brought me here a few days later.

Cats, when I started this story, I was going to ask you to help me find her. She was my witch. But now I don’t know. The connection between witch and familiar is already starting to fade, and I think she’s adjusting to life without me. What do you think, felines? Is it even worth it? (or replace second question with ‘could i be just another cat?’[if you do this, mention earlier in paragraph that sets up for it])