Now
Sandi Hall

I awake knowing I have had the strangest dream, but all that remains of it is a sense of sunlight whiter and dryer than here, and hills that were brown with dying grass.
There was a woman too, someone familiar but also someone I cannot identify with my wakeful mind. Freudians and Jungians alike would say it is a nascent memory of my mother, or of being in the womb, and New Agers would say it is my spirit guide or higher self. If only I could believe in such easy and comforting philosophies, but my life refutes their tenets, and I have been plagued with questions to myself for as long as the skein of my memory measures on its spindle.
Rose jumps onto my feet and makes her way up my leg onto my bottom, then walks my spine like some miniature, four-handed masseuse, exotic with knowledge and knowing just where to press. At my shoulder, she peers under my hair to see if my eyes are open, as she intends they should be. Her old-bronze eyes are stippled with flecks of black, black as her small wet nose, and from such closeness, I see right inside the glistening oysterish landscape of her ears.
She purrs her approval of my opened eyes and walks back down my body to knead my calf, an encouragement to me to leave the bed and move to the kitchen. There, she will accolade by means of hip sinuosity and tail curvaceousness my abilities as a food provider, almost the highest rung on her laddery list of attributes desirable in large warm beasts like me.
I am not sure which rung has primacy; warmth or love …
I do know that when I danced with her at the beginning of her pregnancy, her love for me flowed into mine for her, and made an audible click in my psyche. When all of her kittens proved to be female, an unusual enough happening in itself, instinct told me that their chromosomes firmed and remained Xs at that moment; but rationality, so hard to avoid with its lean muscular appeal, said it couldn’t possibly be so.
Even if I should wish to, I would not know who to consult about such phenomena; to qualify in the field, such a person would first of all have to think dancing with cats a perfectly natural thing to do. And second, to believe that Rose really loves me, no anthropomorphising here. The kind of blood-and-mind love that comes only from an entwined ancestry in which our screaming limbs burned together in the wicker cages of fury. Rose remembers, as I do, how centuries before, when the molten flow of persecution snaked through Spain and France, we escaped northwards to the lands of ice, where we ate milk shards from yellow bowls and learned to draw the chariot of the moon.
My name is now Stella Mante and Rose and I now live on this northern island of Aotearoa, an island of hills with trees at their feet, surrounded by an apple-green sea. According to the new government of this country, as a foreigner, an alien who has not lived within its control, and who has no recognised numbers, I should not be living in this four-tiered house, each level a single room (with a curl of stairs) and open to the sea. According to the new government, I should be living in a holding house in Manukau City, where old buildings are meek under the stern shadows of new ones, and dignity is not the order of the day. But fortunately, we have a friend, Sabe, who chooses to live in Auckland, its mother city, and who with ease has taken on two more duties, as paperworker and sentinel. Through her kind efficiency, Rose and I are safe.

Sandi Hall is a novelist and playwright. She the author of three works of speculative fiction, The Godmothers (1982), Wingwomen of Hera (1987), and Rumours of Dreams (1999) and three plays, Just Passing Through, Change of Heart and Death Duties and has also published short stories. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand, with two friends and a cat named Milo.

From: Rumours of Dreams
pp 3-4
Website: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au