Hammerport

Mizzy wasn’t certain she actually believed in God, but the House of God sure had a lot of nice and friendly people in it. Everybody seemed to like Mizzy at the church and she was fond of them too. She spent most of her free time at church because her parents never spent any time there, which was good enough a reason as any.

After losing her previous job, she had returned to the family enclave, now somewhat upstate after the Gardiner debacle. Mizzy never told any of her new friends about the scandal but as she had been such a young thing with fluff for a brain at the time, there was no doubt that she would be forgiven for doing something so juvenile. There was no sense in volunteering the information, though.

Mizzy had great organisational skills and organised anything that the Baptist minister took a fancy to. The Holyween evening, the local school choir and the Christian Sports Parade. When the minister ran out of ideas, Mizzy offered a few of her own. When the minister was too busy to listen to her ideas, she went ahead with them anyway. Mizzy was busy.

She subsisted on part-time earnings from working at the Bains Street store, tapping numbers into the cash register and sometimes helping out the old man from Pauli Avenue get the amaretto liqueur from the top shelf. He liked to make tiramisu for his wife, explaining that they had eaten tiramisu the first time they had sex, after which they got married because she got pregnant with a son that had turned out so well he had not bothered to visit for twenty-odd years. His wife had been six feet under for some time and Mizzy wondered where all this Italian dessert ended up. Perhaps the obesity of his black Dachshund was the key to that particular mystery, that not so much walked as dragged itself around behind the old man.

A low cost of living was maintained by living low with her parents. She only had to put up with Mom’s occasional jabs like “you could have been in the Olympics now, honey” and “you could’ve been married and had children now, honey” and “get me a goddamn drink, what kind of daughter do you call yourself?” Life was sweet.

This illusion of contentment was revised by an intrusive nightmare.

She was wandering out of the store at which she worked on Bains and a grey cat with snow-white paws was staring at her from the road. There was something wrong with the feline, something shocking; it took her a moment to realise what it was. Human eyes. As soon as she noticed, the cat stood up on its hind legs, like a human would and opened its fore legs like a human would stretch out his arms. Blood seeped from its paws. She recognised the signs – this was the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus Christ. Why had this cat been chosen? Why here? Now?

The cat opened its mouth to speak, with sharp, erect whiskers, and she waited for its words. She knew its words were a warning and her heart began to race. She knew that whatever it said was going to be very important. She felt intense fear of whatever truth the cat was bringing her. All she could say was, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

The first sound from its mouth smacked her awake. Dripping with sweat, she found that she had urinated in the bed. After all this, she was still a little girl and there was no getting away from it. The warning was incomplete but she had to tell someone. She tumbled out of bed, put on some pants and raced out the door in the middle of the night, time unknown.

She felt cloistered by the cold air. She ran for the church but was careful to avoid Bains, as her night terrors were still vivid and at large, preventing her from taking that particular route. She passed by the cemetery on the edge of town and spied a couple of dessert trays resting beside one of the tombstones.

Reaching the church, she banged on the door, rapping as hard as her fists would allow and pleaded for the minister. The minister came, looking shocked at the sight before him, having never seen Mizzy in a tizzy. He took her into the hall and asked her what the matter was. She told him all about the dream and the single word the cat told her. She didn’t know what it meant but she felt it was important. She was concerned that she had been sent a divine message but she had woken up before it had finished.

The minister asked what the name of the cat was, but she said she didn’t know and asked how that was important, and the minister explained that names were extremely important to get right. Without knowing the cat’s name, the minister seemed at a loss and just reassured her that it was probably just a bad dream. He made up a story about a bad stomach blight going around the town recently.

It wasn’t enough for Mizzy though. She started to tell everybody about the dream and because it was very important. She told the women who ran the cookie stall in the market. She told all of the children in the choir. She told her parents several times, even when her mother was clicking the stopwatch at her over dinner. Eventually people started to talk about Mizzy in a different way. When people start talking about someone, any small fact that they know becomes part of the general knowledge of that person. Soon enough, everyone had the full Mizzy picture, the one with the Gardiner debacle.

She couldn’t stay much longer after that and obeyed the only word from cat she had heard. That word was “go”.