Fantasy & Science Fiction 2021 07-08 by Spilogale Inc

Author:Spilogale Inc. [Spilogale Inc.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale Inc.
Published: 2021-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

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The Penitent

By Phoenix Alexander | 4498 words

Fiction writer and F&SF columnist Phoenix Alexander says, “‘The Penitent’ was written in lockdown after a months-long spell of writer’s block, and was partly inspired by the two kittens I got in August, Ridley Scott and Purrince William the Furred (lol). It was also inspired by ‘one-electron theory,’ which I researched over the summer and found to be quite moving.”

FORMLESS BEFORE THE molecules glue together, now it makes bones, nerves, epiderm, keratin, and now it is a kitten, and now it is being born.

The many-mouthed pinknesses of its littermates, four in all, greet it; their eyes barely open but its do, his do, it is the male sex in this timeline, at least genitally. There is a feeling of rage, of malcontent in this body. A sense of foreboding in the permeability of its infant form.

Weeks pass like wingbeats.

He grows.

He knows the man called George will adopt him when he is big enough, and he knows, too, that there is the possibility of violence in this timeline. Violence and worse: a corruption of some cosmic law. A discord all his own and another violation in spacetime that he must fix, adding to the tally of all violations everywhere. But he is not sure what form it will take, or how.

But it — he now — always forgets that the cells in physical form make their own knowledge, their own history, their own consciousness. And the longer it stays in a physical body, the more it forgets.

So the days become tumbling play and trying teeth against sibling limbs and suckling milk from a mother’s teat. The Middle Consciousness becomes fixed in the kitten. The Middle Consciousness forgets that it is all things; it does not see the other dimensions layered like panes of glass; dimensions in which it is one of the other siblings, or the mother cat, or a weed jostling out of a crack in the sidewalk, or the mosquito murmuring like sand in the owners’ ears, or the clay that makes a brick that makes the foundation of this house. It exists, in specificity, between the beginning and the end of time.

One day, when he is bigger, slushing meat into his mouth from a bowl now that his stomach and jaws are strong enough, the smallest part of the Middle Consciousness goes dormant and he thinks, It will be different this time, I will not break any laws.

When the man, George, comes, I will not be a criminal. I will be good.

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