“Morning,” she says approaching the bus stop. The cat looks up from her newspaper and they exchanged coded blinks and head tilts. The elder lifts a paw off the paper’s edge asking the wind’s favor. The page turns. Skimming the headlines she sighs, “Used to be witch hunts weren’t such slow, bloodless affairs.”

Nodding, she smiles and moving from larger politics asks, “How’s the colony fairing these days?” 

“Too much summer this time around,” the cat answers. They both look up squinting into the sun. She adds, “What does Tuor have to say about it, eh?”

“Ah, well, she’s been away and I’ve not received any messages yet.”

“It’s only been what? A few wythnos, child?”

“It’s been more than twenty new moons,” she answers. Cats experience time differently, but she certainly could not talk about lapses in timekeeping herself. It was only recently she’d noticed the kitchen calendar had not been turned, and it took an unreasonable amount of struggling with technology to find, charge, and turn on the phone to discover it should have been replaced entirely two years ago.

“That long? Well, this isn’t wholly unusual. She’s slipped between shadows before and returned to us.”

“When was that?” the girl asks taking advantage of a rare opportunity to pry some Tuor history from an elder.

“Half a kyr or so. Before you came.”

She nods. The cat is not intentionally being unhelpful. The bus rounds the corner.

“Tell her when you see her, Ol’ Rue said to come by.”

“Yes ma’am. I hope tomorrows meet you well!”

“Yes, yes, many more tomorrows to you,” she dismisses with a gentle paw flick as the bus doors close behind her.

After a brief moment of relief in the air-conditioned bus she’s queued up at the corner of Melitown Square with a small crowd waiting for the signal to change, unsure where they are to meet. A sudden wet sensation in the middle of her palm tells her to play it cool. Marked by the hound’s sigal, she follows her to a bench in the plaza facing the hotel.

“The spruce sawyers finished at dawn,” she reports through their temporary connection. “The wrens will continue keeping watch–they found your terms acceptable.” She adds in a memory of a recently fallen club sandwich she’d passed on the way, just as a courtesy. 

The hound gruffs in the affirmative and she politely wipes her hand across her tattered jeans to properly end the meeting. After the space of a few blocks she hears the low bellow of orders being given to the skies; her work complete.

Such a delicate flower, starts her ever-critical soliloquy, wilting in only just the earliest days of August. She pauses in the shade of a yellowing elm, its serrated leaves near crackling, occasionally crumbling as they sawed together in the traffic-created airflow. The mugginess has filled her lungs with steam and her soul with meanness and that is more dangerous than the weakness of will. Without the boss, is there really nothing she can do?

Patting the suffering tree’s bark, she closes her eyes. Instead of darkness, the world seemed to get clearer. Her depth of field opening, expanding around her, above and behind. She took a deep breath and pulled her attention back inwards, away from the distractions of the sweaty people slowly strolling through the plaza, and the vibrating trails of unbothered flies zipping from trash bin to bin. She might not remember exactly how long she’d been working for the boss, or when she’d started, or how she’d even gotten there, but she did have a single certainty; Tuor trusted her to do the job. Tuor said she belonged.

She sunk her forehead to the hand resting on the bark and focused on the problem. Making an offering to Notos is risky business; need a breeze not a gale. Can’t afford the steep price of summoning Autumn. Sure, a crimson pepper pod and two wings sounds reasonable but you have to factor in the time lost to the dragonfly.

Rushing the velvet season hastens the end of more than summer, obviously. Stop. Think. The goal is local respite from the worsening summers before we lose more friends. Local… Friends… oh. Oh!

Lifting her head, deep dark wells wide with new resolve, she pats the tree one last time before making her way home. “Gonna need a pretty bottle and some hydrocortisone cream…”