A/N: I wrote this in the fall of 2005 for a creative writing class. It is what I would call a breakthrough piece. I never knew writing could be so much fun. I never knew I could write something so weird ...

Coppernose, Limited

By Quincer

Gnolan Coppernose was beginning to suspect The Prune Man might declare war on him if he and his partner did not find his wife’s body. He shuddered at the thought of his bags of wrinkly, slimy skin reaching out at his well-kept fur.

“I shudder at the thought of his bags of wrinkly, slimy skin reaching out at my well-kept fur. Why, on Earth, did we take this human’s case?”

“He’s a respectable man, sir. He’ll work with us at whatever the cost. He told us he would help us.”

“To pay his wife’s ransom! Imagine! A ransom for a dead woman! That worker at the morgue was either extremely stupid or brilliant to take the body during the funeral.”

“I doubt it is the first one; he didn’t look particularly inspired when he tripped into the coffin, yelled ‘Crikey!’ and sent it sliding through the door.”

Mr. Coppernose barked a laugh, “Incredibly hardy cat.”

His partner echoed the ginger cat’s laugh. Then she cleared her throat, “I can’t help but be reminded of the Catalystial ritual of eating cheese at funerals. The cheese was merely to represent the deceased becoming one with God—since His eye is the moon and made of cheese. Cats got hysterical over proper etiquette toward the dead. There is always someone calling it blasphemy to eat the cheese.”

“Ah, yes; leading to the War of Disagreements.”

Mr. Coppernose remembered being taught the story many times throughout his kittenhood. It went something like this:

One glorious day in Littersrove, a brave cat raised his paw at his brother’s funeral in protest. He raised it--raised it high--while he ran to the reverent woman at the altar who was respectfully eating cheese, her back faced to the pews. She was not showing a random gesture of hunger; she was a part of a thousand year-old ritual. As the first relatives took a bite, the ancient litany rang true:

Corpus Dei,

Corpus Cheesy.

Wot not of doom,

If the cheese is not tasty.

The mourning party ate cheese out of respect for the deceased—it was a way to help him or her pass over into the Post-Life. In death, each pious cat became one with the moon, or the very eye of God. Thus, smacking on cheese at someone’s funeral was a Great Blessing.

Well, the brave cat suddenly stopped the mourning feast when he raised his paw in protest. When all eyes were on him, he lowered his paw and stopped in the middle of the aisle. Then gentlecat passionately beat his paw on his breast.

“We are all doomed! The world shall come to an end as we are punished for cannibalism the church has endorsed! She’s eating cheese turned into Edgar—not a symbol!” he proclaimed.

At that, a grave silence fell over the funeral guests, and they wriggled in their seats. At the altar, the family of the dead cat coughed out the cheese; they were wailing and clawing the floor as they hacked it all out.

“Make way!” the brave cat went through the standing crowd and approached the woman at the altar. The cat’s three chins quivered as he forced himself to look at the cheese on the floor himself.

“YOU STEPPED ON EDGAR!” the lady cat shrieked as her fumbling son turned the regurgitated cheese to mush by stepping on it. Throwing herself to the ground, she picked at it and cradled it in her paws and wept.

A chorus of clicks sounded all of the church now (For these were the days when country cats carried their guns with them everywhere – even church). The pious gentlecat who first cried out motioned for the cats with guns to rise.

“It’s a sign! We must repent! Tell the clergy! Our sinful lives must be drawn from our foul souls!” he beckoned the rest of the crowd.

Immediately, hysteria came over the crowd. They all started coughing the best they could, pretending they were getting rid of the worst hairball they had ever had; a hairball of doom.

It only took three days to organize. A great pilgrimage took the great land by storm.

Imagine the top clergy of the country’s surprise when a mob of cats infiltrated the Holy City of Crestia, calling for reform. They flocked to the cheese storage rooms, knocking all of the crates to ground.

It was reported that two men, caught in the passion of repentance, cornered themselves when they knocked over melted cheese with no room to cleanly escape.

This sealed the poor souls’ fate; “Tell mother we love her,” were their last words.

Eventually, the Molded Cheeseballs, as the rebels were called, organized into an army of peasants, merchants, and clergymen alike. It split the country in two for nearly fifteen years.

“You’re the only one who calls it the War of Disappointments, sir,” Ms. Lyffle said, her neck stiff at the collar of her human’s clothes.

“Don’t know why, either. It’s more creative than the Great War. Or the Great Fill, now, for that matter?” Mr. Coppernose could not restrain the mocking ring in his voice.

“Sir, I respect your opinion, but I do not understand your need to ridicule.”

The Great Fill referred to is the prophet that the world will come to an end as cats knew it. The moon above would finally blink Its holy eye—signifying the Lunar God’s pleasure—and cheese would fall from it and break apart all over the surface of the world. This would end all hardship: no one would have to work for food ever again, as God would drown cats in Holy Cheese! Then would be the beginning of the Great Nap for all believers. All cats dreamed of being a part of this elite group—being a part of the Great Dream—those who were to be awarded.

Those Catalysts were so very dynamic with their titles, as you can see . . .

Mr. Coppernose twitched as he saw the human church coming up. He was feeling that very need to ridicule.

“Now, we have the human’s queer ritual of featuring the body in garish make-up and a tindlewood coffin that will see the light of day for one grand day. Isn’t that just a little odd? Do they all line up in order to ratify to themselves that their loved one is, in fact, a carcass looking even more absurd than they did in life?”

“Perhaps. And Mr. Plum will not sleep well until he knows that his wife is safely dead within his sight.”

Mr. Coppernose started to reply when he tripped over the cobblestone road of the jagged town of Simpleton. He took a very deep breath.

Mind you, Simpleton was not really a town. Granted, its segregated human residents liked to think of it that way. It was small and once called “Cozy,” by the Chief Architect of the King. This was, of course, so many years ago that it is now Old Purr and had to be translated by experts of the Twig Ages.

The most elite professors, now, will tell you that the prefix “Coz-” once had a connotation with rotting meat and that “Cozy” was an ancient colloquialism of today’s “utterly-detestable-but-its-a-good-thing-I-or-my-supporters-don’t-live-here.”

Now in a drafty carriage, Ms. Lyffle patiently floated her paws over the window curtains as Mr. Coppernose straightened his jacket. The two cats could have closed their eyes and found Mr. Plum’s house walking, had they wanted to. They had been to his house twelve times in the past two days. Thus, they did not want to.

“Hullo, detectives!” the man cried through his window—or, rather—his hole in the door. All humans had holes in their doors for some dietary laws of theirs; they were not allowed certain foods. Moreover, the hole was a way for their God to smell what they were cooking and know whether or not they were on his diet, and whether or not they will look forward to ‘living’ on sawdust in the afterlife.

Detectives Coppernose and Lyffle waited and stared at the jagged, monterywood door. Mr. Coppernose cleared his throat painfully, “Pull, sir.”

A chin came into view for the sharp-sighted cats, followed by crawling veins on the human’s neck and his bright eyes. He had pulled his door open. The Prune Man laughed, genially reaching out.

Mr. Coppernose froze. The knotty hand made its way safely to Ms. Lyffle’s upper arm. Mr. Coppernose looked up in gratitude.

“Good to see y—Oh . . . You’re cats,” the skin on his chin rippled as sweat seemed to ooze out of his gigantic, far-too-apparent pores.

The man thought for a moment, then pursued superficial friendliness. “My wife nannied a cat, you know!”

Taking one last glance at the cottages of wattle and daub and the carriage leaving, Mr. Coppernose followed his partner into the dense air of a blind man’s home.

--

“Yes, sir. You’ve told us that your wife nannied a cat. And, no, I doubt her soul is lost because she has no shoes. But, just in case, we will fix that soon.”

Lyffle is so damn patient. How does she do it? How can she touch his bald body as if nothing is wrong with being glazed-over with slimy sweat and useless restraints to preserve the smell?

The fastidious cat squirmed in his ruffle and jacket.

“How can you tell me that when Delilah is cold and alone? The least I wanted was a government official who would sympathize with my wife’s soul hanging in the balance. Didn’t get bloody near that. After that cat in the morgue, who sounded constipated half the time—which I should have known was a sure sign that I shouldn’t’ve trusted him! Why, after that neutered stray set my wife up for eternal damnation by not doing his job to make her beautiful for my last look upon her—Delilah! I’m coming to join you in naked purgatory—you will not suffer ignominy alone--having seen what the world has come to. Oh, Delilah!”

Mr. Coppernose slowly sank his head into his paws and ripped at his sleeve with his claws a bit.

“Please, Mr. Plum, we came for a reason. Otherwise, we would not have come at all.”

“What, now?” The chin dropped and the redness disappeared from all of his face. Mr. Coppernose looked to see the human staring right at him. He continued, in a softer tone.

“The mortician Mr. Art’ry will make a compromise. He has written in this note to you,” the ginger cat gingerly handed it to Mr. Plum.

The man took it as a deafening blow to his whimpers. His blood-shot eyes scanned the note:

Dear Sir,

I apologize for running outside on during your woman’s funeral. The thing is that we didn’t expect you to really look at her body. We took your money and cleaned her up, so as not to spoil the fancy, stained Tinglewood casket. My boss said and told me not to worry—that you humans’ld thank us for it.

I mean, who, in their rights of mind, would desirable to bury someone with trinkets and doodads that never you’ll not see again?

Once the coffin was knockered off the carriage three streets from your church, I took ither below stairs and sat and pondered a bit.

Well, I pondered and I pondered thinkingly till I could ponder no more. I knew I was in something deep, now. The boss tells me not to give up the body till you decide not to ask for your money back. He told our lawyer you hadn’t instructed us to make her presentable-ish.

Just somore money and we’ll make her smilingly happy to see you when you stealingly pick her up.

Please don’t sender your church after us,

Cronwell Art’ry

The Chin handled this quite well, gaining its full color. The rest of the body, however, turned purple at incredible speed. Mr. Coppernose decided that the white of the chin was a good thing for a human.

Mr. Plum then gave Mr. Coppernose a pleasant surprise by throwing a bag at him and asking them to leave. He instructed to pay them whatever was needed, and find his “little chuck a’fore the Second Week, when her body is taken to damnation forever!”

“Lyffle,” Mr. Coppernose said after a pointed pause.

The team was back in their office and no longer clothed in order to appease zealot humans. Mr. Coppernose took a moment to stretch and twitch his tail in the utter freedom he was feeling.

Clothes were so ridiculous for humans, anymore. Fortunately, for most of his life, the ginger cat was without such restrictions. Of course, there was the vest to hold the pocket watch and the occasional hat, but, besides those trifles, cats did not wear clothes. Cats only did so in human-dominated society—other wise, humans wouldn’t treat one seriously worth buttons.

Of course, Mr. Coppernose had to admit, women’s night-gowns were quite comfortable when it was a chilly enough to blow the fur the wrong way. There was just enough room to keep the fur comfortably in place. Those hats, on the other hand, were wrong in all ways known to cat . . .

“Yes, Mr. Coppernose?” she turned from the fire she was starting in the office.

“Memories are plaguing me—certain memories I had hoped were dead.”

“Oh?”

“The Prune Man suggested that his wife had threatened to leave just before she died--of course, he just called it ‘going on holiday.’ I also picked up a repulsive smell at the doorway. I’m sad to say that I know that smell. I had to live with it until I was an awkward teenager that smelled like an old nanny—Dear God, that woman will never die!”
“What!” Lyffle tilted her head.

He grew red, as if being suffocated by that accursed nightcap.

Oh, those marks of make-up . . .

His eyes widened. “This woman has not died, I’m sure! She is too stubborn.” He stood up, as lithely as if he were a kitten. “Oh, the blasted woman was my nanny! She was insane—always hugging me when I hissed and scratched at her. She never stopped laughing! I have no idea what possessed her to marry this ill-masked zealot, but, once she did, she faked her death—perhaps, hoping he would want to join her.”

Lyffle’s jaw took a slow trek to the ground.

The fireplace popped and crackled. Mr. Coppernose approached the fireplace with an expression that made Lyffle uneasy.

“She may have been onto one thing . . .” he said. “Lyffle, I need a piece of your hair.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve always wanted to be a white—what do you think? My hair is too short; I need some long hair to burn.”

“What are we doing now, sir?”
“Some special effects are all we need. We must give society what it wants in order to penetrate it.”

She did as he asked. Ms. Lyffle was beginning to understand what lead he was taking in their case.

At least, she hoped.

For the first time in years, Ms. Lyffle couldn’t sleep that night. No matter how melodiously she purred, no sleep came to her blink less eyes. She lay in bed, recollecting the day’s occurrences.

After his conspiratorial—and paranoid—proclamation, Mr. Coppernose caught the next carriage to the church in Simpleton. On the way there, Ms. Lyffle pestered him about what he had not told her.

“There is something else you blame her for, isn’t there? Did she hurt you?”

“She made me a desperate, little bugger of a kitten. I hated her because she wasn’t my mother. She made me sick with her human antics. The way she powdered herself, her sickly perfume, and the way she always complained about noise. She hated it, especially on Saturdays, when we had our Catlystial ceremonies. She made me dress myself—coat, collar, and all of the other suffocations. She thought it was cute. One day I had had an earful of this. She called me to come downstairs to go to the market with her. I complied, and her eyes grew as round as dog dishes. She watched as I pranced down the stairs in her own nightcap and gown.”

Lyffle’s neck seemed to creak as she gazed at him with a tilted head.

Mr. Coppernose convinced himself it was just the wind and the bouncing carriage. He plodded on through his story.

“It was actually quite comfortable. I don’t see anything wrong with wearing attire like that if it’s a little chilly out . . .”

“What does this have to do with our case?”

“Not much, really. I just feel better, now . . . I had buried that in my memory for years.”

Lyffle forced a smile. “At least, you . . . did it to make a point, right?”

“Yes. And it solved my discomfort in our horrible silk bed sheets.”

Lyffle’s delicate chin seemed to quiver as the silk window curtains swished against her fur.

“You made a habit of dressing in drag.”

“No,” he spat, indignantly, then, even more indignantly, “Yes! It made more sense and it still makes sense.”

She jolted, and, for a moment, Mr. Coppernose was convinced that he had seized her shoulders. A door opened behind her and she hastily slipped out.

He followed her, the corpseknapper’s note in his long, delicate paws.

To Lyffle’s confusion, they were not at the scene of the crime. Instead, Mr. Coppernose had taken them to an obscure alley in the middle of Simpleton.

Before she could correct him, the ginger cat slyly slipped into a side door. Lyffle decided to wait for him.

It was not long before a glaringly white cloth blew threw the door, preceding the ginger cat in a silky, innocent white gown. With frills of cloth bouncing on his shoulders and his arms gently swaying at his side, he looked like an angel of the old human religion.

“My. It does look comfortable,” the lady cat conceded. She had forgotten exactly what night gowns looked like.

“Is that not what I told you, dear lady?” he said smugly as he straddled to hold the door open and put the matching night-cap on at the same time.

Lyffle stared abashedly as he looked up to the lacey cap with crossed eyes. Holding back giggles, she felt as if she were spying on him--as if he were acting out some forbidden taboo. She watched her boss’s tail go limp, get tense, then pulse against the cloth to the rhythm of his frustrated purring.

Eventually, Mr. Coppernose conquered his attire and headed to the door just behind Lyffle. She followed as he led his partner through a hall that, slowly, shrugged off its shabby, alleyway appearance and adopted grand wallpaper with golden zigzags all over it. It got even more elaborate when they turned a corner and through a door with a grand stained-glass window.

The stained-glass window-pane had words on it:

Hiker Jeglat

UNDERTAKER

It appeared the Mr. Coppernose knew the undertaker just beyond the door—this Hiker Jeglat. Coppernose was very brisk in speaking with the plump cat inside of the capacious office. The willowy cat called him his “stump of an old friend.”

Fair enough.

Mr. Coppernose’s nickname was very appropriate. Nothing but Mr. Jeglat’s beady eyes and mouth moved—nothing at all.

It was so very queer to poor Ms. Lyffle, but Mr. Jeglat’s face seemed to be drowning. His eyes and his nose gleamed in between the folds of his skin and fur. It was absurd to look at him because anyone would want to fish his face out and bring his shifty eyes back to the surface, and get his slip of a mouth some air.

Perhaps then he might have said more about who ran the morgue above his authority. (And noticed that he was speaking to a gentlecat in drag.) The presence he spoke of had apparently moved the body of Delilah Plum from her comfortable file cabinet in the P section.

He only spoke with fear and respect of “Moon Mother” and her gang, the ones who had Mr. Jeglat’s second pair of keys and Mrs. Plum’s body. “Moon Mother” and her followers had a deal with the morgue: In exchange for freedom to come to and leave the morgue as they pleased, “Moon Mother” paid the rent of his business.

Mr. Coppernose responded to this by saying she had showed interest in meeting them. Mr. Jeglat blew a few breaths like a fish under water, considering the credibility of the detective.

He pointed at Ms. Lyffle and said that he knew he had smelled burnt hair.

Ms. Lyffle squirmed indignantly and looked down. That’s what burning my fur was for.

Seconds later, Mr. Coppernose was leaving. She followed closely behind his golden gown hem out of the ash-covered building and back into the street.

She tried to remember all that she had heard about a Moon Mother group. Her mind roiled with all of the religious scandals she had ever been a part of. It had not been many.

Were they the ones that burnt hair as sacrifice? They had been the first to sacrifice allegorically in the Catalystialism’s many religious branches. The sacrifice was that they smelled this way for weeks on end after standing within sight of the burning hair.

Did this mean Delilah was a part of this cult? The cult seemed to have a far too eminent reputation in having high class members to hire a nanny. Still, the Coppernoses were not common middle class members. Gnolan Coppernose’s parents were very influential and traveled all across the globe.

Lyffle could imagine Mr. Coppernose’s frustration with the woman. It must have been just Delilah and little Gnolan for weeks and weeks on end.

She turned to her partner, walking along the puddles of Simpleton’s street. A happy boy passed them, stopped, and bowed to Mr. Coppernose.

“Good morning, madam. How d’ye do?” He gave another bow.

The slim cat’s shoulders slumped. Mr. Coppernose promptly swept his foot deeply in the mucky rainwater, aiming at the little lad. The boy’s freckles disappeared as he grew pale.

“Sorry, madam, sorry!” He fled with dirty water lapping at his ankles.

Strange; he thought Mr. Coppernose really was a woman.

Ms. Lyffle clicked her tongue. Her partner never had reacted well to warmth and politeness, always assuming it belied selfish intent.

“Play your make believe games elsewhere!” the ginger cat muttered, a look of shock washed over his face.

“Sir, not all kindness has ill-intention,” Ms. Lyffle smiled at his befuddled expression. He didn’t respond and walked on indignantly to their carriage.

He didn’t talk the whole time they sat in the carriage. Lyffle didn’t try to ask him where they were going; she would soon see.

It was almost sunset when her and Mr. Coppernose’s carriage careened to a stop in front of a majestic, remote place that, she guessed, was a convent.

Her guess was ratified by a winking woman in a garishly yellow, two-cornered hat—to cover her ears to beckon God to keep her from hearing what she should not hear. Her dress was also yellow and fell at her ankles like a bell.

The young woman winked again. Ms. Lyffle smiled in response to her wink, but when the woman gave a shrill, airy shout, she guessed the woman was only flinching all along.

She was holding a broom and aiming it at the Gentlecat Coppernose--still so gloriously in drag, and who was casually plucking at the material to feel the air go through.

Despite the maid’s ferocity, Mr. Coppernose just ignored this woman—which was not hard. She came up to his thigh when she leapt at him and batted the broom.

“I come in peace, little girl,” he said between strides toward the door—pushing her along the flower-adorned walkway. She hovered at the same distance from him, matching each of his steps.

He sighed. He lifted his gown scandalously. He lifted it higher and higher and reached out as far as the hem would go. Then, the amply-round gown swallowed the maid quickly and efficiently.

Ms. Lyffle flinched, but said nothing.

Mr. Coppernose paraded into the covenant, receiving stares of bafflement. One woman, who seemed much older than the rest, warmly received him in the hospital and had him sit down.

Ms. Lyffle could see now that Mr. Coppernose was fooling all of these humans into treating him as a pregnant woman. She decided to play along and sprawled into her chair.

“Oh, poor Delilah! ‘Old on, my lit’l arrow-struck ‘art! She was named after ‘er mother, what. What, we miss ‘er so, don’ we? Oh, Delilah Plum, ya perished too soon!” She drew his paws to her lap and rubbed his.

The nun stared on, her bulbous nose seeming to drip into her parched, shriveled mouth. She smiled a toothless smile, and her mild eyes seemed to say, “Wait there, please!” She swiveled around in her bell of a dress, and galumphed out of the room.

“Ow!” Mr. Coppernose growled—just when the nun had gone. He reached between his legs and drew out the little girl, a wad of fur in her tiny, balled fist. Before an insult could be thrown, Mr. Coppernose watched as the girl walked stiffly out, dusting things with his fur.

“I think the bugger drew blood . . .” he said groggily as he rubbed his bald spot on his stomach.

“Such an odd thing . . .” Then again, nothing seems normal anymore.

Ms. Lyffle breathed in the quiet, relaxed atmosphere. She was beginning to enjoy that fact nothing could be predicted. It gave her a strange comfort.

Before long, a shriek rent the rumination of the two cats. Three passer-by nuns stopped in their tracks and pinged into to one another as the shrieking woman attempted to capture the nightcap from Gnolan Coppernose’s head.

“What, you want to embarrass me in front of my friends? You should be ashamed of yourself, a full-grown man—cat—in woman’s apparel! They told me a pregnant woman was here.” She fidgeted, stomped her feet on the patient’s bed, and examined him from head-to-toe.

Ms. Lyffle gave a choking giggle, calling her to the ex-nanny’s attention.

“Are you this woman? You don’t look very husky to me. --Gnolan Aslo Coppernose, did you get blood on my nightgown?”

This woman’s prattle seemed to overlap itself. She was a blur of a robust lady, smiling and scolding at the same time. Once, she peered at the hospital door and noticed the ladies were gone as she wagged her finger in the air, asking, “What, these nice people, just? You’d do this to these nice ladies? This nice lady?” She pointed to herself.

“To see you is oddly satisfying,” Mr. Coppernose eyed his partner. Lyffle could not tell if it was a hybrid of amusement and relief or of shame and respect. For his thick whiskers had a queer and deceptive way about his nose, and one could almost swear he were smiling when he was really just contemplating the concept of tacking his claws onto someone’s chest.

The woman then delivered an abrasive, curt brush on the end of the ginger cat’s nose. He hissed and bowed his head like a child and—was he sniggering?

“To the point, will you?” she prompted.

“The point is that you are dead,” Ms. Lyffle announced, surprising herself at her bluntness.

How presumptuous of me! Assuming she is Delilah Plum like this! I hope I haven’t offended her.

However, seeing Mr. Coppernose’s eyes begin to water, she felt brave and continued to talk for him.

“You see, Mrs. Plum, we were to investigate for your husband and find your body.” A strange taste was in Lyffle’s mouth and she had to stop under the little woman’s blank stare.

“You won’t tell him, will you?” The tidy woman jumped to the floor, confronting Ms. Lyffle.

“Well, can we at least have the coffin back? The Tinglewood cost your husband quite a lot. You know, he just wants you to be happy . . .”

“He just doesn’t want to be damned.”

Ms. Lyffle swiveled her head sympathetically.

She knew it was crucial for one to provide a comfortable afterlife for one’s spouse--or else the deceased’s spirit might come to one every ten minutes, asking for milk or a rub on the back. This would get rather distressing when there would be no fur or skin to, in fact, rub and no voice to ask for which one was wanted. Any good Catalystialist shuddered at the thought, cat and human alike.

Mrs. Plum’s expression softened.

Mr. Coppernose seemed to be recovering now. He backed into the bed, straightened his skirt, and adjusted his nightcap. Now he had recovered to huffing like an indignant old lady.

“Well, madam, what do you propose we do? I have a duty to do, unlike you, who abandoned it,” his voice tapered off.

Was it in fear in the ginger cat’s voice?
“Oh, cheese rot! Listen to me, and try to keep that look of constipation just to a minimum.”

Mr. Coppernose hunched his shoulders and puffed his cheeks.

No, that wasn’t fear . . .

Ms. Lyffle patiently plopped down into a nearby chair. Delilah Prune took a breath.

“I should have seen it coming when we married—just doesn’t want damnation. He used to sprinkle flour around our bed during the Night of the Carrion—once a year, just—and he bought me that strange fragrance called ‘Strands of a Waking Dream’—I appauled the scent because it smelled like burnt, smelly cat fur, but--everyone else hated it, too, so I kept it.” She pointedly looked up at the tall ginger cat.

“I was, on the whole, quite tolerant.

I retired when Gnolan went away to school! And though he was older he wouldn’t retire. He was a well-respected preacher--led the town through many years of Simpleton’s social independence from that late cat tyrant of yours. Just having ended the madness, just, things were calm in Simpleton. Every day of my retirement, he asked what we would do today?—I’d say, anything I please, just. Since he is a devilishly helpful man, he volunteered to do the shopping in the market when I took up gardening. That was the time he started raving about the drought farmers had been experiencing over the years, just. He slept without a blanket for a week. He said some rat trap about penitence for a sin he had done—a sin that God had punished the whole town for, just. He became very fond of the analogy of comparing us mortals to ‘spiders dangling over a fire.’ He warned us of the Lunar God’s fury and pushed the town to eat in church—convinced that our diets were upsetting the Divine Eye.

He became so hysterical, just, and stopped eating his favorite foods. He simply smashed them on his chin and nodded pleasantly, thanking the church cook. He ate at night, though, and would smash cabbage and cheese on his chin before the church lunch, to appease the town. He stopped shaving, but, for a year no hair grew on his chin.”

“—That explains the chin,” Mr. Coppernose murmured. “I think . . .”

Delilah started up again after she caught her breath. “Then, he told me not to eat anything and jab it all onto my chin and I refused, just!” She flicked an indignant finger at her round middle.

Ms. Lyffle waited, and Mr. Coppernose waited. They both unconsciously licked at their chins. Ms. Lyffle was finished first.

“So, you ran away to a convent in order to escape your religious husband . . .?”

“Yes! Just so! I love it here. No one talks religion except to outsiders, and outsiders come for confession. I’ll tell you, we have some scandalous discussions about the confessors—intellectual, of course. And it’s so silent here—oh, just, I adore the calm silence! Everyone here has gotten the religion out of them from their early years. Books are the religion now. Oh, dears, the library is huge! We write all day and are too tired to argue after copying the minds of geniuses who dwarf our own intellect onto paper.

“No. I say to dust with this whole hypocrisy! I shall live as I see fit, no matter if the others like it or not!”

Ms. Lyffle whipped her head around when she heard sharp, womanish giggles. Her back instinctively arched.

No one was in the hall.

Was there another hospital room? Was someone being tortured?

Suddenly, soft white floated over her ears. It smelled of male perfume. She sneezed, throwing the thing to the ground. She looked down at Mr. Coppernose’s—or was it Delilah Plum’s?—nightcap.

“Oh, bless you, child,” came in the middle of the giggles.

“Thank you.” she said while turning, her edge disappearing.

Her edge was almost forgotten—stunned out of her when she saw Mr. Coppernose gathering Delilah Plum in his arms, a smile on his lips. Coppernose was purring.

More than that . . .

Ms. Lyffle almost cried out, but there was enough boo-hooing to summon the dead—had the dead not already been there . . .

She shook her head. Mr. Gnolan Coppernose himself was the one crying! Sobbing like a child just told that the monster under his bed did not exist. His little ex-nanny cradled him just below the waist.

Swaying his tail affectionately beneath the night gown, the ginger cat was weeping with joy and gratitude in the nun’s bosom.

A/N : I didn't post this for a long time because I thought this might be my first published work, but I see its many flaws now. It's really a transitional work; I read it with fond memories of the fun I had writing it.