UnFamiliar
Few imagine the plight of the familiar whose witch has died.
No lawyers tailor their business to the estate planning of witches’ familiars. Grief counselors do not advertise their bereavement services to these newly unfortunate ones. Relationship sites and match-up apps do not exhort these widowed creatures to peruse their hopeful oceans of bright chipper faces to find that soul mate floating in digital limbo, just waiting for a salvific lifeline to be tossed their way.
Some naively imagine witches live forever, or until insufferable people with various political agendas kill them, but it simply isn’t so. After a few centuries, witches die like everybody else. Many spend their final days in witch hospitals or nursing homes which are all around you in your community. But these are interdimensional places. They don’t need their own lots. They can interpenetrate other buildings and no problema. Unless you practice a supernatural trade, these buildings are invisible to you. One of these witch hospices might be sharing space with your house or apartment right this moment. I assure you that you walk by the front doors of these places fairly constantly. Witches watch you from windows as you pass down the sidewalk below their rooms. Who knows what they think of us in those moments as they watch our drastically different lives and hurrying umbrellas from above.
(Interesting sidenote: the windows in these institutions are fitted with spell-proof glass for the protection of innocent bystanders and passers-by on the street.)
Astabell Crusoe was the name the cat adopted when he assumed human form. When he was a black cat, he was Zozaster. Several of his feline friends had attended the funeral of Mizz Kloss, his dearly departed witch, and then did the drinking rounds with him that weekend. They hit the bars in their two-legged forms, they danced with humans, they sang sad songs in drunken caterwauling sopranos on a bridge, their legs dangled above a midnight-black river. They cried it out on bar stools and warmly slapped each other on their temporary backs. But after that, the boys and tomboy Prunella skedaddled, left town, since they still had witches to serve.
Zozaster, or rather Astabell, since he was living exclusively in human form these days, was now the un-familiar, on his own.
Astabell had gotten himself an apartment in a questionable part of town. He wondered whether he should seek out new witch employment. It’s much harder for a familiar to find a new witch than it is for a witch to find a new familiar. It’s a buyer’s market for witches, since there are just oodles of creatures looking for this plum position. Witches don’t immortalize you, but (unlike pitiful science) they can give you a few centuries of life extension. So even though familiars are more likely to perish than witches of natural causes or be destroyed in a witch war between two weird “sisters of the spell” who just cannot get along, it still remains a buyer’s market for witches. You have to hustle to score a witch.
He looked wistfully out the window of his apartment at a rainy river. It was a walk-up and he only had some nine hundred square feet to pace. He found himself tempted to resume feline form to sleep since he found that the most comfortable and comforting. But he knew he had to practice remaining in human form, at least for a little while. So he found himself curling up in an over-exaggerated fetal position most nights, trying to reach that wonderful cat ouroboros of sleep. But it just doesn’t work for the human form and it soon gave him lumbago.
One of his feline friends, Jezzbago, had sent him a link to a classifieds site where solo familiars could seek trial “spell dates” with witches who had lost their familiars and were seeking. Most had lost their cats (or other creatures) to death, spell-wars, familiar-hunters and such. A few had lost their familiars inter-dimensionally, so those could presumably return one day. Those were iffy situations for any new-hire familiar. Zozaster avoided those classifieds.
Astabell began communicating with a woman who introduced herself as a “bereaved witch,” a two-hundred-year-old redhead who talked a good game and really made him feel that he might have found the “new situation.” But the more he talked to her, the sketchier she sounded. She had spent a lot of time in jail (usually a sign of witch gross incompetence) and she drank too much owl’s blood. He was glad he had proceeded cautiously and repeatedly delayed physically meeting her. It had proved to be the prudent move, as he soon learned the witch actually had not just one familiar but two. And neither of those had died. She was just pussyfooting (pardon the pun) behind their backs, looking to replace them or make them jealous or who knows what. She was messy. She was an embarrassment to her profession.
That experience had really soured him on the witch interviewing process. He was still grieving the loss of Mizz Kloss. He still felt he had lost her at least a century too early, so young. He began to figure out he might need a sabbatical to get his head straight.
Astabell decided to take a time-out from familiaring. He figured he would do the human gig for a while and just see where it led. He had adopted the form of a svelte young man of some twenty-five years old, conjured up a handsome small face with large eyes and full lips. He had given himself “beginner’s muscles” and a cute little mustache. He was an interesting and saleable mix of masculine and feminine. He knew this would make it easy to get work since he could flirt with anyone during the interviewing process and it would usually work.
He ended up bartending in the dive on the ground floor in the building next to his. The Mermaid Lounge. He called the place “The Cold Fish” behind its back because it was mostly just a bunch of mean old drunks, men and women on their last legs who drank themselves into a stupor each night while the jukebox (yes, they still had one of those) played songs from years when Nixon or Jimmy Carter was president. He realized this was an incredibly lazy choice for a job. He could just walk down two flights of stairs, step out a door and step through a door and he was at work. But he liked how relaxing it was. He was actually good with mixed drinks but he rarely had the opportunity to make any of those except for Natasha, whose barfly tastes did run the gamut of cocktails from Monday through Friday. Who knows where she went on weekends. Maybe dialysis. Maybe she was a senator’s wife. He never asked. He just smiled and she smiled back. She was the least deathly of a deathly bunch.
(…)
