A Good Reason

By

Lily of Trust

(Disclaimers: My story, my idea, MY MUSE! Steal and I sic my psychotic, pointy-object-wielding lawyers on you. Play nice now people)

Hmmm….Dark. Very dark. But not dark enough to keep her from her business. A set of green-gold orbs glimmered softly by the foot of the basement stairs as she padded silently up the word wooden steps. Her footsteps made no noise. None audible to her, anyway, and therefore far beyond the reach of human hearing.

She stalked across the old and pitted linoleum of the kitchen floor, ears swiveling back and forth for the telltale clicking of the dog’s claws on the tiles. Fortunately, she heard them dreaming, heard their faint whines as they chased illusory prey through ancient forests and grasslands that had disappeared long before they'd been whelped. It was quite fascinating, actually, to study the canine dreams. She suspected there was some racial memory that went back to the time before they had been domesticated by man. Sadly, there were other matters to attend to. Her hobbies would have to wait.

The linoleum fell away, replaced by the hardwood floor of the hallway. She swished her tail lazily back and forth through the air as she sauntered along. Presently, she found herself confronted by a closed door, the knob a good three feet above her head. Pitiful. A quick nudge from her skull, and a paw inserted into the resulting crack. It was simple to push and worm her way into the room.

It was even darker in here, without the benefit of the light over the kitchen stove for illumination. The red lights of an alarm clock blinked incessantly, just slightly out of time with the flickering light from the VCR. A dark lump lay curled up tight under the blankets on the bed, but none of this was of interest to her. Interposed over the steady, deep breathing of the sleeping child was the erratic 'tacketytacktacktick' of a keyboard being utilized to the fullest. She crossed over to the door on the opposite side of the room, silent as ever. It sat ajar, allowing a thin line of blue-white light to fall across the floor.

She poked her head through the crack and sighed. As she'd suspected. The source of the light was the computer screen, and the source of the sound was the girl seated at the computer.

Her hair, while normally the red-brown color of kelp, seemed darker, black even, thanks to the lack of overhead lighting. Hazel green eyes were washed out to a pale shade of mossy brown by the glare of the computer screen. It threw dark shadows across the girl's face. They pooled under her eyes and cheekbones, making her seem somehow ethereal, and ghostly. Her fingers were a pale blur as they danced and jumped over the keys, creating line after line of text displayed on the screen. She hummed quietly to herself and nodded her head in time to the rhythm of her typing.

The watcher sat down and curled her tail primly around her footpaws. She sighed softly as the girl at the computer suddenly winced, and pulled her hands away from the keyboard. She rubbed at her left wrist with the opposite thumb, working kinks out of sore nerves. Her lips twisted into a grimace as she hit a particularly tired carpal.

"Why do you do that to yourself?" The onlooker asked quietly, delighting inwardly as the girl jumped in surprise and spun the computer chair around to face her.

"Laura," She said, her mouth curving into a smile "I thought you were asleep."

"Cats do not sleep," Replied the feline, standing once more to sashay over to the chair. "We just lie there with our eyes closed."

"My mistake," The girl chuckled and turned back to the screen, her hands falling instinctively onto the home-row.

Laura was not to be deterred. She bunched her legs beneath her and leaped lightly up into the girl's lap. Or at least it looked to be a light landing. The human made a soft 'oof!' noise glared mildly down at the cat in her lap.

"It's two in the morning," Said the furred one.

"How very observant of you. Your point?"

"You should be asleep."

"Authors do not sleep," The girl said, her face perfectly deadpan as she reached over the cat to resume her typing, "We just stare at the ceiling and pray for inspiration."

"You're not nearly so witty as you think you are," Laura reached out one pristine white paw and shoved the little sliding tray, upon which the keyboard sat, back beneath the desk. "And you're hurting yourself. Rest your wrists for a while."

The girl sighed, having learned through long experience just how futile it was to argue with the cat. She leaned back in the chair, laced her fingers together, and stretched her arms over her head. In the process, she nearly bent herself backwards over the chair, yawning as the hour of the morning caught up to her. Laura watched and tucked herself down into what the girl liked to call the 'meatloaf' position, with her paws and limbs folded neatly beneath her.

Sighing softly, the author slumped back down in her seat and resumed rubbing wearily at her wrists. The cat turned her attention to the screen, browsing through the latest product.

"Your grammar leaves much to be desired," She stated critically, "And your sentences wind on and on. They get confusing at times. Shorten them."

"Listen here, you're my muse, not my editor," The girl said crossly.

"Do you really want your beta readers to look over an inferior product?" The cat flipped her tail primly up over the girl's knee.

"You fight dirty."

"And you don't fight at all," Laura yawned then, her little pink tongue curling back into her mouth as her ears flattened and her eyes narrowed to slits. "And you didn't answer me."

"I didn't?" The girl blinked down at her in puzzlement, though she took advantage of the cat's yawn to scritch beneath the furred chin.

The muse stretched her neck upwards, eyes now falling half closed. "I asked why you were still working,"

"I promised I'd have this chapter finished by the weekend," The human smiled wryly and rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. "The next time I do that, bite me in the ankle, would you? Maybe the pain'll knock some sense into me."

The cat snickered. "We can hope," She looked upwards at her author, and the blue screen-light gleamed eerily off her slit-pupiled eyes. "Though that's not what I meant. Why write at all? It's distracting, and aggravating. I've seen you go into fits over writersblock, or get snappy because some detail refuses to work. Why?"

"You're a muse, and you ask me that?" The girl said quietly.

Laura shrugged. It looked rather funny coming from a cat. "I just inspire. That’s all you’ll see if you check out the fine print on my contract. I’ve never pretended to understand the way your mind works."

The author laughed lightly, and ran her fingers through the vivid tortoiseshell fur, pondering the why. The quiet stretched on, broken only by the sound of the girl in the next room turning in her sleep. The screensaver kicked in, scrolling the legend ‘Whoever said nothing is impossible obviously never tried to slam a revolving door’ across the screen. The girl reached out almost absently and jiggled the mouse to turn it off. The muse swished her tail lazily from side to side. She was a cat after all, and she could wait.

"I never really thought about it," The answer whispered into the darkness of the room, sending barely a ripple into the shadows. "I’ve just always done it."

"Why?"

The corner of the girl’s mouth quirked upwards into a faint smile as the question reminded her of a game she and her sister had used to play; the one where the younger sibling would ask ‘why’ to everything the elder said. Aggravating indeed.

"Because I love to," Even quieter was the reply. "If I didn’t write, I think I’d explode, or break. I can’t yell, it’s not in me to bite people’s heads off…and if I didn’t let it out somehow, I’d lose my mind."

"But to consider making a career out of it?" Laura’s tail lashed harder. "Especially when the odds are you can’t possibly make a living through your work."

The author opened her mouth, and shut it again. She went through this process a few more times as she considered and discarded multiple responses. Finally, she answered in the true feline fashion she had learned from her muse, by replying with a question.

"Laura, would you say people like my work? That somebody enjoys it?"

The cat found herself wishing she had eyebrows, if only to lift one. "The reviews would indicate so," she said carefully "Someone finds it a good read, or at least interesting enough to come back for more."

The girl nodded, a mere ghost of a smile hovering around her lips.

"There you have it. That’s why."

"I don’t follow."

She twirled the cat’s tail around one long finger, and nodded again, to herself.

"I don’t really write for myself," She said "I write because what I really want to do with my words is touch something inside someone. Even if just one person reads what I write, and remembers it past shutting the cover, that’s enough for me." She stopped, and for a while Laura thought that was it, though both her feline and muse-endowed instincts told her otherwise. Her patience was rewarded in the long run.

"Emily Dickinson once said 'If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry". And that’s what I want. I want to hit people like that. Only since I can't write poetry to save my life, I can try to do it with stories, can't I?" Her eyes shone eerily bright in the computer’s glow. "Could you imagine being able to influence the way perfect strangers feel? To make them cry, or laugh? To make them know a character so well they begin to know what he or she will do before they do it? When I read a really great story, I put it down wishing that it hadn’t ended, because I don’t want to leave the characters and their world. I always cry a little, at the end of the good ones, because I know nothing will be able to touch me exactly the same way," She locked eyes with her muse, and something like a strange mix of wonder and longing touched her gaze. "I want to make other people feel that. Even if just that one person wishes that the story hadn’t ended, it’s enough for me."

Laura held the stare for what seemed to be an interminably long period of time. She raised a paw and swiped her tongue over it, and scrubbed behind one ear in a thoughtful manner. After a moment, she dropped the paw and hopped down to the floor with a faint ‘thud’. The girl watched her as she sashayed towards the door, waiting for some cutting remark about the foolishness of human ambitions, or at least something along those lines.

But when the cat spoke again, it had nothing to do with their conversation.

"Go to sleep," She said softly. "Your work will be here in the morning."

The girl laughed, sensing immediately that the subject had somehow affected the cat, and that neither of one them would be comfortable with bringing it up again.

"The trick is going to be kicking my sister off long enough to pick it up again," She joked as she hit the save button. The cat snorted and disappeared into the darkness of the bedroom, heading towards the crack of hallway light. The author smiled to herself and stretched once more. She reached out tapped a quick footnote into the bottom of the document, and minimized the Word™ window. Somewhere during the course of their little talk, she’d gotten an idea for another story, and she felt like she’d better jot it down before she lost it….