Fiction Complete by Tracy Canfield

Author:Tracy Canfield [Canfield, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Delores was hosting the emergency meeting, so she changed last, hanging up her skirt and blazer and folding her underwear before setting it in the laundry basket. She washed the silicone breast form in the sink and put it away in its box.

She’d had the mastectomy two years ago—werepanthers might not age like human women, but their flesh too was heir to a thousand natural shocks. The doctor couldn’t understand why she didn’t get the reconstructive surgery. She didn’t tell him what changing shape does to silicone implants.

She relaxed out of her human form. Black fur bloomed over the puckered scar, and it stretched into a long silver line. The weight of the panther flesh tugged her down until her forepaws thumped against the hardwood floor. Changing shape was like picking up something heavy and putting it down again.

All the doors in her house had handles instead of knobs, and she let herself out and padded out into the high-fenced garden where the others were waiting.

“I don’t see why my daughter Diane can’t join the guild,” Helen was saying. She rolled back and forth in the grass, tail lashing.

“Has your daughter ever seen you naked on Delores’s lawn?” said Ruth. Helen bared her claws and took a swat at her. Helen was fond of saying that panther shape felt more natural, but, thought Delores, that isn’t quite it. After seventy years on this Earth, human form felt natural, too. The world just looked different when you walked on all fours.

What does Anthony Schomacker see when he looks at us? thought Delores. Old women who had jobs but never had careers, playing house in mansions they could never have? And what do I see?

She sprang up into the magnolia tree and stretched out on her favorite branch. A pair of deer from Eagle Creek Park lay on the patio next to a bucket of poplar-Dijon sauce. The tall stockade fencing that screened the yard from neighbors had—like the door handles—been worth every penny.

“Let’s open the meeting,” said Delores silkily.

“I move that we eat Brian,” said Betsy. “Selling us out like that after all we’ve done for Van Duzen Florists.”

“May I remind you,” said Delores, “that we have emergency business.”

Four pairs of green eyes looked up at her expectantly.

“Helen, your daughter would be a credit to any charity,” said Delores. “But the Guild was never a charity. It was our pride.

“Years ago, one by one, we took the human husbands we have all outlived, we had the human children who will outlive us. They were good children,” and Delores was thinking of feeding her human daughter from a glass bottle, like human women did in the 60s, “they were good children, but they never could be part of our pride. One by one, we founders will fall, as Eunice did, under the weight of our battles, and when the last of us is no more, the Guild will end.

“But that time has not yet come.” She raked her claws down the branch, leaving two-inch-deep grooves in the wood.

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