Frankie Lawson (_hiss) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-03-16 21:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | frankie lawson |
Rounds
Who: Frankie
Where: all around Vegas
When: Present
The whole… were-cat… thing? It wasn’t always easy.
The moon could be a bitch, obviously. That one was just par for the course. It was worse when Frankie was a kid, the ones where he was tiny and fluffy and had a soft little mew that made it dangerous to be out and about on his own, and his mother kept him locked in the bathroom overnight with a litter box, an open can of tuna, and a few crinkled up balls of old wrapping paper to keep him amused. It wasn’t completely terrible, but there was always a sense of frustration; the older he got, the more often he’d find himself staring out the window, watching the moon as it moved through the night sky, longing to be out and running wild through the city streets to his heart’s content.
These days, he allowed himself that. Frankie gave himself escape paths, allowed himself to run in the moonlight, dodging cars and foot traffic and stray mutts that might try and take a bite of him.
But it wasn’t all just the call of the moon. Sometimes, Frankie just felt an itch. A compulsion. A sudden need to draw in open himself, to be small and free.
Days like today.
Frankie woke up early, and he just knew; he’d drawn in on himself, the pain so familiar as to be almost nostalgic to him now, and padded away from the bed on four paws.
His first stop on days like these was always to see Martha. She was an early riser; she had been, she confessed, since her husband, James, had died some years before. They had been married for 57 years, and sleeping without him still felt strange. She would fall asleep in her recliner at night, watching returns of Antiques Roadshow or the PBS News Hour, and when she’d wake after an hour or two with an urgent need for the bathroom, she’d wander into bed for a few more hours, at least until the early light began to paint the sky.
She was often in the garden before eight in the morning, and Frankie found her there, tending to her newly planted eggplant seedlings. She wore a sun hat in spite of the earliness of the day, and gardening gloves printed with multicolor polka dots, kneeling on a bright pink foam pad to make the hardscrabble ground a little less hard on her knees.
Frankie mewed plaintively, winding his way through the bean sprouts and asparagus shoots to flop on his side among the eggplant, reaching one paw to swipe half-heartedly at a rapidly retreating lizard.
Martha smiled. “Well, there you are, Benjamin,” she said, reaching to scratch behind his ears. Benjamin, she had confided one lonely day the year prior, had been the middle name of her only child, a son who was stillborn the year after she and James had married. When Frankie visited, he wore the name with honor. “I was wondering when you’d turn up again.”
He rolled in the dirt, mewling softly and flicking his tail. Martha laughed and gave his belly a quick little rub before pulling her hand away, avoiding the slow kick of his back feet she knew had been coming.
“Let me finish here and we’ll go have some breakfast,” Martha told him, and a half hour later, Frankie followed her into her kitchen for a bit of scrambled egg.
By midday, Martha was dozing in her chair, and Frankie was on the move. There was a little yellow house on Sunrise, just off of North Hollywood, surrounded by a chain-link fence that even in his diminutive form, Frankie could still climb. The dry grass in the backyard was full of toys: a plastic playhouse, a tricycle, a jump rope or two, and some rubber bouncing balls, all scattered around. The cement patio was a rainbow of chalk drawings and messily scrawled names of the children who lived there, and the sliding glass doors were open to let in a noontime breeze, spilling out strains of a pop song from a local radio station and the chatter and laughter of a half-dozen children.
Sofia was the only one in the yard, blowing the dregs of a bottle of bubbles out into the wind, and she squealed with delight when she saw the tuxedo tabby making his way up the back fence to jump in the yard.
“Mama!” she called through the open patio door. “Mama, she’s back! Bonita is back!”
Inside, washing the breakfast dishes, her mother, Isabelle, smiled; she was fairly certain that the stray cat who visited now and again was a male, but she never had the heart to break the news to Sofia, who had named him. Hearing their sister’s call, the other children piled out the door with glee to visit their feline friend, and Isabelle scraped a little leftover chorizo onto a paper plate to bring outside.
She thought the cat must have a home somewhere; he was always clean and looked well-fed, and played with the children without scratching or biting. When she stepped out onto the patio, Frankie -- or, rather, Bonita -- was jumping and swatting at Sofia’s bubbles while Tommy and Matty through blades of grass for him to catch, Ariana drew her best rendition of the cat in shades of pink and orange sidewalk chalk, and Luis, the baby, just sat and laughed.
Isabelle smiled and set the paper plate down on the ground, clicking her tongue to catch the cat’s attention. He jumped at a few more bubbles before hurrying over to wind between her ankles and purr, then stop to enjoy his lunch. A pet just wasn’t in the cards for the kids, not yet, not when they were still so young and Isabelle didn’t have the time or space for a litter box or the room in the grocery budget for cat food; Frankie-as-Bonita’s visits kept the children happy and gave them a little time to play with a feline friend.
They didn’t even badger their mother for a pet of their own anymore; after all, Bonita probably wouldn’t visit anymore if there was a cat in residence.
Isabelle reached down and smoothed down the fur on the cat’s back, smiling again as he purred a little at her ouch. When her husband arrived home from work that evening, he’d be greeted with tales of Bonita’s visit and a few illustrations, courtesy of Ariana, of all the fun they’d had together.
Frankie’s last stop of the day was always around dinner time, when Edgar got home from his latest drywall job. The man was in his early fifties but already had a stoop to his shoulders, remnants of working hard in construction since his teenage years and living paycheck to paycheck as the renovation market waxed and waned. He lived alone in a small apartment not too different than Frankie’s own, on the second floor of a ramshackle building with a rusty balcony where he left a lawn chair so he could smoke while he watched the far-off lights of the Strip twinkle in the twilight.
He had never married; Frankie thought he might be closeted, but it wasn’t as though it came up in their evenings together. For all of their similarities, Frankie knew there was a great difference between them: Frankie had friends. Edgard, it seemed, was very much alone. He was nice enough, but closed off in a way that Frankie didn’t understand.
He needed someone; of that much, Frankie was certain.
Frankie was sitting on the balcony, waiting, when Edgard came home. The man smiled and snorted a small laugh to himself to see the cat sitting there outside the balcony door, watching and waiting. He thought somehow the Cat -- with a capital ‘C’, because that was the only name that Edgar had ever given him -- seemed to know when he brought home a fast food burger for his dinner.
The Cat was mewing plaintively when Edgar opened the patio door and he laughed again, a rusty chuckle deep in his throat.
“What, am I late?” he asked in a voice that sounded like a pick-up grinding down a gravel road. “Sorry, bud. Didn’t realize we had an appointment.”
He took his place in his lawn chair and they sat there together watching the lights, while Edgar dropped bits of his burger onto the greasy paper sack it had come in for Frankie to pick at while the sounds of traffic filtered in from the streets below.
Frankie made it home before midnight, exhausted from a day wandering the city on four paws. He lumbered back to bed and fell asleep almost immediately, the itch beneath his skin satisfactorily scratched, for now.