The Big Meow

“I’ve only seen these in ffhilms,” Urruah said, turning around to spray one of the vehicle’s snow-white tires with great care. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

Rhiow flirted her tail. “If you say so. ‘Ruah, you’re not by any chance doing something that would annoy the ehhif who owns it, are you?”

“Oh, not so anyone would care…” He waltzed back over to Rhiow and Hwaith. “It’ll wash off in the next rain…”

“Hah,” Hwaith said, amused, as he led them on down the hill. “You really are a New Yorker. ‘The next rain’ won’t be until October.”

They ambled further on down the road, and Rhiow noted as they went that the houses seemed to be getting much bigger, the front yards most seriously wider and deeper and more manicured, if occasionally a bit brown; and some of the houses even had two of the big autos in front of them. “You must have good police here,” Rhiow said, glancing into one driveway at the two massive cars there. “You’d think just anybody could steal them, or key them, out here…”

“Steal them?” Hwaith said, sounding shocked. “They wouldn’t get far. The police here are pretty good, for ehhif. And I don’t think there are as many cars now as you folks have uptime…”

Rhiow cocked an ear: the Whisperer slipped a number into it. She blinked. “Three million?” she said. “In the whole state?”

“You’ll believe they’re all right here in the Basin, under your nose,” Hwaith said, sounding rueful, “the first time the inversion layer gets bad.”

“Leaded gas…” Urruah said, waving his tail, looking back at the big cars as they headed on downhill.

Hwaith looked at him with big bronzy eyes, their polite expression nonetheless managing to suggest that Urruah was one whisker short of a full set. “What else would there be?”

“Wait a while,” Urruah said. “Believe me, it gets better. And you just wait till the sushi bars open.”

“What’s sushi?”

Urruah took a deep breath, then let it go as they all paused in the middle of the street where it was crossed by another. The four-way STOP sign might as well have been in the middle of the Mojave for all the traffic there was at this hour of the morning. “Let it be,” Rhiow said. “Hwaith, Herself is very quiet. Have you noticed that?”

“Unusually so,” Hwaith said. “I hate it when She waits for us to tell Her what to do.”

“You and me both, littermate,” Rhiow said.

They wandered across the intersection, and Rhiow caught a sidewise glance from Urruah as he headed across the road to sniff at the base of a peppertree. ‘Littermate?’

She gave Urruah his look back with a dead rat on top. Goodness me, ‘Ruah, do I detect a note of jealousy?

Of what? Of him? Urruah busied himself spraying the bottom of the royal palm at the corner with an expression of utter abstraction. He’s too skinny for you, Rhi. Plus, you met him, what? Two hours ago?

Fifty years ago, some ways, Rhiow said, angling gently rightward: away down the road, she could see another of those huge blunt round cars coming up the road. He’s a nice young wizard who can use some emotional support, the way things are going around here. Got a problem with that, Dumpster boy? Go pee on another tree.

Urruah gave her an amused look as she and Hwaith stepped up onto the curb. He trotted away from them, across yet another perfectly coiffed emerald-and-jade-striped lawn, to examine a big scraggly bush with bright red flowers that looked like bottlebrushes. Urruah stared up into the tree as they walked past the large pink-stuccoed house it leaned on. “You People have really large bees here!” he said.

“Uh…it’s a hummingbird,” Hwaith said softly, but not in time for Urruah to get out of the way of the furious little bundle of scarlet feathers that came diving at him from higher up in the bottlebrush tree, making a sound like an infuriated cellphone stuck in texting mode.

Urruah went galloping off in a gray-tabby streak into the next yard downhill: the hummingbird, a subdued blood-ruby glint in the early light, went after him at humm factor five, closing fast. Urruah dove head-first into a bed of ivy and vanished.

Rhiow had to stand still for a moment: it was bad for a team leader to be visibly incapacitated by laughter, at least for longer than a breath or three. “City guy,” Hwaith said under his breath. “We get them here. But there are cities, and there are cities.”

“I begin to get that sense,” Rhiow said. They walked another block or so downhill, the equivalent of a Manhattan long block – if the road wound rather more while it made its way down the hillside — while Urruah lost his pursuer, or talked it out of the pursuit, and emerged from a low flat bank of ornamental yew, looking ruffled but (to do him credit) amused.