Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 320 words pre-work.  A self-contained scene, which is the way I like it to work out on a morning write, and so seldom get.

This whole phase of trying to stoke a popular uprising in one barony whilst staving off one next door is yielding some even more curious tensions than I expected.  Also, there are some curious parallels (or antiparallels) developing between the Young Duke as antagonist in Alland, and Luke as protagonist in Langdale.

When Three Katherines is a classic crammed in every certificate-factory, I hereby stipulate that the correct answer to, "What is Woodland suggesting, when he invites us to compare Prince Lackland's Progress to the Young Duke's Faring?" shall be, "He is saying he dunno, but this is Liberty Hall, and we can spit on the mat and call the Cat a bastard!"

And to most similar questions about everything else I write, probably.

Thirty-six weeks out of the fifty-two, I work as a biology technician in an English high school - a job whose limits in the better establishment are largely dictated by budget, energy, and imagination.  I now work at one of the markedly better establishments, possibly as karmic compensation for certain hijinks at one of the others.  But there are limits.  In particular, I am not in the waking world really responsible for looking after a bunch of indolent and moth-eaten lions in the central court.  Last night, that was just part of the background to a most exhausting dream-faring.

Because we have a new Head of Chemistry (really), and he has some slightly odd ideas about what his tech department ought to prepare for the dog-end of the school year (really), they had decided to outdo Biology by shipping in some young tigers for unspecified class activities (not really).  The chemistry technician is small and slight (really), and so I helped her move the crates upstairs (not specifically true, but typically so).  Unfortunately, our suppliers were arses (ditto), and decided that sending adolescent tigers by post in large cardboard boxes was a really good idea (probably true if ever put to the test).  Unsurprisingly, the tiger clawed through the packaging.  More surprisingly, she took a great fancy to me and insisted upon dancing with me at once.  A tiger is a very good bipedal dancer, because of all that cat grace and the balancing effect of the tail (do not try this).  She displayed a great and greatly inappropriate crush, much to my perfidious colleague's amusement, and by no means wished me to stop dancing and go about my business.

I was somewhat divided in my mind.  On the one hand, she really was a very attractive and personable tiger, as tigers go.  On the other hand, for me, this does not go very far.  On the third and fourth paws, she had all that cat restraint and cat selflessness, and a big set of scimitar claws in excessively close proximity to my viscera.  I escaped, to simplify matters somewhat, by remarking, "Oh look!  A school of flying fish, out that window!" and waking up before my treachery was discovered.  I think the original idea was to hide in the lions' den until a butterfly flew past the tiger's nose and distracted her, or some such.

I wish it to be clearly understood that I did not find the tiger-lady in Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer hot at all, nor found that entire subplot other than creepy and disgusting.  I can think of no other literary examples of being hit upon by big striped militant moggies, nor is it apparent to me where else this nuisance may have had its genesis.

But it is at least mildly interesting that I have an annoying, militant, and not especially attractive adolescent girl in Killer-Kate who is surnamed Tiger, as a tribute to her violent and enthusiastic temperament as well as her aptitude with knives.  It's true that, because I neither much like nor yet sufficiently understand her, I haven't been inviting her to all the dramatic dances I had originally intended.  There has been a certain amount of trying to go about my business instead. 

If this is really what all this rigmarole was about, then all I can conclude is that my subconscious is, like Jack Shit, not very subtle.

560 words: holly, Yule gifts, a squash-faced tabby cat.