Written by the marvelous Shawna Jacques.
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It is winter, and the sun has long since set. It’s a clear, chilly night. A silver, sliver crescent of a moon, luminescent in the inky sky, grins mischievously down on the forest clearing. It’s an infectious grin, and even while it makes you shiver, you can’t help but smile back.
You hear cawing in the distance, and you feel something twining around your ankles. Startled, because birds that speak that particular language are usually at roost and sleeping this time of night, (and where even did this fat grey cat come from?!), you look around. There are crows mysteriously EVERYWHERE. On the road, in the grass, in the trees. The fat grey cat looks at you, chirps, licks her paw, and looks up at the sky.
You follow the fat grey cat’s gaze, taking note of the fact that you’ve seen a cat without a smile, but a smile without a cat is a most curious sight. You watch another cat, an enormous, very fluffy tabby cat appear around that lunar dentation. His fur shifts between hues of all possible colors, and his grin widens even further as he espies you. The cat jumps down to the ground amidst a flurry of black feathered beings as they make room for the enormous Cheshire cat (for who else could this cat be?). Social protocol for dealing with Very Large Felines being not well-established, you bow to the grinning beast. He seems to bow in turn, his eyes luminous and unnervingly yellow-green, until you realize that there is a man climbing off the cat’s head.
He is dressed in vivid swirling colors, shifting much like the cat’s coat, and there is a guitar strapped to his back. Before you can respond, one particularly animated crow swoops down, lands, and shifts into a brown, curvy, curly haired human form, dressed in deep jewel tones and black, a bow and blue fiddle in her hand. She winks at you, and turns to the man, her gaze sharp and fond.
“It’s a Cheshire Moon tonight, my love.”
“It is, indeed. But perhaps we should bring this person along?”
“Ah, yes. Hello. I am Lizzie Crowe, and this is my husband and magician Eric Coleman. We’ve come here to sing. Are you here to listen?”
You nod, somehow at a loss for words, and sit down on a nearby boulder. Several crows settle on and around you.
Lizzie raises her voice. “Come one, come all! If you’re here to listen, we will play!”
You look all around you as people and creatures of many sizes, species, and types appear, some out of the forest, some out of thin air. A girl with a fluffy russet tail with white fur at the tip sits down next to you, her large, soft, pointed ears twitching at the sounds around her. She tilts her head at you, a curious expression on her round face.
“Do you know them?” she asks.
Your eyes wide, you reply, “No, but I feel like I should!”
“You’re going to love them!”
Lizzie tunes her fiddle as Eric tunes his guitar. Then Eric grins and inclines his head toward his trickster wife. “Shall we?”
As the enormous cat meows agreement, the man settles his guitar solidly in front of him, and strikes a chord. The crow-woman plays a haunting introduction on the blue fiddle, and then she begins to sing, weaving voice, guitar, and fiddle into otherworldly panoramas and eery epic tales of heroines, legends, warnings, and wings. She sings of goddesses and gods, good queens and wicked princesses, wicked queens and goodprincesses, good witches, bad witches. She sings of crows, the flock joining in raucously on the chorus, and before tonight, you’ve never seen an enormous cat dance.
You don’t want them to stop, but all creatures must rest, and the wonderful pair finishes the last song for this fantastically strange night. The crow-woman, her fiddle and bow safely stowed, nods at you, winks again, and dons her cloak of feathers once more, settling next to the large cat’s left ear. The man climbs back aboard, and with one powerful leap, the cat launches himself back into the sky, and suddenly you are alone in the forest clearing again. You wonder if you’ll see them again.
The full moon rises, and the Cheshire Moon does not reappear.
Some days pass, and it is now the first day of the second month.
You hear a cawing in the distance…
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