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“What can I do about it?”
“Nothing. It’ll rain on yas or it won’t. You’ll get found by someone willing to help you or you won’t.”
“So why did you bother going through Doody Na Deadknaps over here to tell me a bunch of hopeless nothing.”
“Selfish, I guess.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I just wanted to look at you again,” she said with such a tender sadness that I would have cried, had I water for a tear. She and I had been through much together. We had been almost this thirsty once, on a boat at sea, maybe months ago and maybe a century from now. “Is that all right, coming here just to fill my eyes again with your good face?”
“Yah. I suppose it is.”
We were quiet a moment, then she wrecked it by saying, “This don’t mean we was going to get together again, like that, if you made it out.”
“Shut up.”
“I mean, I’m just not made for being with one person, like.”
“I mean it, Norrigal, shut up now.”
“Yah, sorry.”
“Just fucking look at me if you’re going to.”
“S’what I’m doing.”
We were quiet a good long while, and I guess I felt something shift.
Then the shadow in front of me said, in a whole different voice, “Show us yer cock.”
“What?” I said. “You’re not Norrigal!”
“What’s a Norrigal?”
“Get Norrigal back!”
“Me pap to a Norrigal, but you’re a bonny one. Show us it now, I don’t care if it’s a wee one, I’ve not seen one living for so long.”
“Fuck you!”
“Yes, all right!” She creeched and lay back with her legs up.
It was then that I heard a rao behind me somewhere and knew it for Bully Boy. I left my dead friend cunny-up on the plain and followed a second rao, which was plaintive, almost a coo. Bully wanted me after him, and I went.
It’s come to something when you’re following a blind cat, but I had no other guide in this place with Norrigal gone, and it wasn’t long before I felt a change in the landscape. I looked at the stars overhead, and though they were strange and western, I knew them for the stars of our world.
Galva stood there, under the almost-familiar constellations, with her pants on now, and her filthy, once-white undershirt, looking every bit as dream-haunted as myself. I thought she had dirt on her eye, but I realized it was just the shiner from where the goat had butted her while she was snowbound.
“Did you see Bully Boy?” I rasped at her.
“What, your chodadu cat? I have seen everything but him.” She squinted at me now. “Is that not him upon your arm?”
I looked down at the cat tattoo on my arm, just where it should be.
“Yah,” I said and started what would be a long hunt for my clothes.
“I shall never eat such berries again,” she said, handing me one of my stockings.
