Chapter 1: Pancakes and Paw Prints
The alarm clock was a traitor. It didn’t beep; it chirped, a sound so aggressively cheerful it felt like a personal attack on the concept of morning. Arthur cracked one eye open, registering the familiar landscape of his half-demolished ceiling. A sprig of exposed fiberglass insulation waved at him like a tired grey sea anemone. He could already taste drywall dust in the air.
Then, the other smells hit.Burnt sugar. Vanilla. Something singed.
He rolled over, the mattress groaning in protest, and faced the empty side of the bed. The sheets were a tangled nest, sprinkled with what looked like... glitter? And was that a single, fuzzy blue hair clinging to the pillowcase? He plucked it off, watching it catch the sliver of light fighting through the plastic-sheeted window. Neon blue.Of course.
The noises from the kitchen were a symphony of domestic catastrophe. The heavy thump-thump-thump of a body moving with more enthusiasm than grace. The clatter of a bowl. A happy, muffled hum that was all Bethany.
Arthur pushed himself upright, his joints popping a morning concerto. He pulled on a paint-stained bathrobe, its belt missing, likely repurposed for some project involving macramé or restraining a rogue pipe. He padded barefoot into the hallway, the floor cold and gritty underfoot.
The scene in the kitchen stopped him in the doorway.
Bethany was a concentrated chaos of neon blue. She was a sphere, roughly four feet in diameter, covered in foot-long, plush fur the color of a radioactive berry. From this furry mass emerged two sturdy, ottoman-like legs currently planted firmly on the linoleum, and two surprisingly dexterous, slender arms ending in five-fingered...paws?Hands? They were currently wrist-deep in a bowl of batter.
She stood at the stove, her back to him. A frilly apron—a relic from a ‘normal’ life—was tied in a lopsided bow around her middle, though ‘middle’ was a generous term. She was humming along to a tinny pop song from her phone, her entire body swaying gently, causing the dust motes in the sunbeam to dance around her like fairies.
On the floor around her, a Jackson Pollock of flour footprints led from the pantry to the counter. The counter itself was a museum of her current obsessions. Neon paint tubes, squeezed into arthritic shapes, sat next to a crockpot burbling with a viscous, chartreuse liquid that smelled oddly of pine and regret. A single, large googly eye was stuck to the refrigerator door, watching the proceedings with blank enthusiasm.
But the main event was the pancake.
She had a cast-iron skillet on the burner. With a careful, concentrated motion, she lifted one of her large feet, curled her toes around the spatula’s handle, and used it to deftly flip a golden-brown pancake. It landed with a perfect, soft flump. She did a little, two-footed shuffle of victory, her fur shimmering.
Arthur’s heart did something complicated. It was a feeling comprised of equal parts profound bewilderment, a lingering grief for the woman who used to have brown hair and ten fingernails that weren’t constantly dipped in glue, and a staggering, inconvenient wave of love. The love was the heaviest part.
“Smells like you’re committing breakfast arson,” he said, his voice still gravelly with sleep.
Bethany jolted, a full-body fluff that made her expand momentarily like a startled cat. She turned, and the two large, expressive googly eyes she’d attached to her front—her ‘face’—widened. They were slightly misaligned, one just a bit higher than the other, giving her a perpetually quizzical and endearing look. A smaller, third eye was stuck near the top of her head, which Arthur privately thought of as her ‘skyward observer’.
She made a series of soft, wet clicking sounds with… something. It was their language now. He’d gotten good at interpreting it.
“It’s blueberry,” the clicks said, accompanied by a pointing arm-gesture towards a bowl of mush that might have once been fruit. “The smoke is… aromatic.”
“The smoke alarm is about to be aromatic,” Arthur said, walking over to the stove. He peered into the skillet. The pancake was, indeed, a deep, suspicious purple. He reached around her—her fur was incredibly soft, like touching a cloud—and turned the burner down. “You know, the normal people on the cooking shows use their hands for this part.”
One of her googly eyes swiveled to look at the spatula in her foot, then back at him. A low, bubbling chuckle emanated from within her fuzzy form. You have such boring, linear definitions of ‘hands’, the chuckle seemed to say.
He filled the kettle and put it on the other burner. “What’s in the crockpot? And before you answer, remember I’m the one who has to clean it later.”
Her arms gestured excitedly.Experiment Seven! the gestures announced. Edible adhesive! For the day when everything in the house is both tasty and firmly attached!
“Ah,” Arthur said, nodding seriously. “A noble goal. The dream of a sticky, delicious home.” He opened a cupboard, miraculously still containing normal mugs. “Tea?”
A happy, definitive click.Yes. The black one that tastes like tree bark.
“Earl Grey it is.” He busied himself with the tea bags, the simple ritual a mooring line in the strange sea of his morning. He watched her from the corner of his eye. She was now attempting to slide the purple pancake onto a plate using a combination of foot-spatula and arm-guidance. It was a ridiculous, cumbersome ballet. Flour puffed up with every movement. A bit of batter dripped from the whisk she’d tucked under her arm.
The absurdity of it all rose in his throat, sharp and sudden. He was a former accountant. He had a spreadsheet for their monthly utility payments. And he was currently making tea for a four-foot-tall, neon-blue, googly-eyed furball who was trying to cook with her feet. The disconnect was so vast it was dizzying.
Then she got the pancake onto the plate. It landed slightly off-center. She used a careful finger-paw to nudge it into place. She looked up at him, and even though her expression was just glued-on plastic and felt, he could see it. The crinkle of pride around where her real eyes might be. The tilt of her head that asked, See? I’ve got this.
The tight, bewildered knot in his chest loosened, replaced by a warm, aching fondness. Of course she could flip a pancake with her foot. She’d learned to reassemble the garbage disposal by listening to its ‘whispers’. She’d wallpapered the downstairs bathroom with pages from old botanical journals using a paste she’d fermented from potatoes. Flipping a pancake was nothing.
He poured the hot water into the mugs. “It looks great,” he said, carrying them to the small, cleared corner of the kitchen table. He had to move a stack of books titled things like The Mycelium Revolution and Quantum Glitter to make room.
She waddled over, the plate held carefully in both paws, and set it between them with a soft clack. She settled onto the floor next to her chair, her eye level now perfectly even with the tabletop. Arthur sat. He sipped his tea. She made a contented, vibrating purr as she sipped hers through a long, flexible straw she’d plugged into the mug.
He cut a piece of the purple pancake, speared it, and took a bite. It was surprisingly good. Sweet, with pockets of tart blueberry, and only the faintest aftertaste of something that might have been acrylic paint.
“Okay,” he said, swallowing. “This is a win. Experiment Six was better than Five.”
She did a little shoulder-shimmy of delight, almost knocking over her tea. The turmeric was a mistake, her clicks conceded.
“A bold mistake,” Arthur agreed. He ate another bite, looking around their kitchen, this glitter-sprinkled, half-finished, chaotic monument to a life that had veered wildly off the map. The googly eye on the fridge watched him. The chartreuse adhesive burbled. His wife, a beautiful, bizarre science project of joy and fur, sat beside him, happily sucking down Earl Grey.
He reached out and placed his hand on the top of her fuzzy head, right between her main eyes and the little skyward observer. The purring intensified.
“So,” he said. “What’s the plan for today? More adhesive? Or are we finally tackling the living room floor?”
She clicked thoughtfully, then pointed a paw-arm toward the living room, where the subfloor lay exposed like a wounded thing. Then she pointed to the crockpot, then to a bag of rhinestones spilling over on the counter.
Arthur took another sip of tea. It tasted like home. “Right,” he said. “Sticky and sparkly it is.”