Chapter 19: The Groggy Morning Game
The first sensation was a light, persistent rasping against his stubble. Then a gentle, vibrating purr, thrumming right below his ear. Travis swam up through layers of warm, dark sleep, pushed toward consciousness by the insistent, ticklish friction.
He kept his eyes closed. Smiled.
Mavis was rubbing the side of his face, the crown of his head, along the line of Travis’s jaw. His fur was silken, his body a living, humming loofah.
“Your beard is an agricultural disaster,” Mavis murmured, his voice thick with sleep yet full of deliberate purpose. “A scrubland. A territorial affront.”
Travis’s response was a low, rumbling groan. He shifted his head a fraction, burying his face deeper into the pillow. The movement exposed more of his neck.
Mavis took the invitation. He clambered up, his tiny feet pressing into the hollow of Travis’s throat, and resumed his ministrations along the other side, the purr deepening into a contented engine. The sensation was exquisite, a whisper-light abrasion that danced on the edge of ticklish and soothing. Travis felt his body tensing, a coil of laughter gathering in his chest.
“Okay,” he breathed, his voice gravel. “Okay, you win.”
In one fluid motion, he turned his head and exhaled a long, warm puff of air directly over the small figure perched on his collarbone.
Mavis squeaked. The purr cut off. He wobbled, tail lashing for balance.
Travis didn’t give him a chance to recover. He lifted his head from the pillow and brought his nose down, nuzzling into the soft fur of Mavis’s side. He was careful, infinitely careful, but deliberate. His nose was a giant, warm blade of grass, a gentle pestle.
“Hey—! Unfair! Chemical warfare!” Mavis shrieked between bursts of laughter, squirming. He tried to push against the bridge of Travis’s nose, his hands and feet slipping against the smooth skin. Travis just hummed, a deep, amused sound that vibrated through his skull and into Mavis. He moved his nose in slow, sweeping arcs, herding Mavis across the terrain of his own chest.
Mavis was giggling uncontrollably now, a high, breathless sound. His tail flicked wildly, slapping against Travis’s throat and chin. “Traitor! Betrayal! I was providing a service!”
“Too early for services,” Travis mumbled, his lips brushing against fur. He shifted, using his upper lip to gently corral a scrambling foot. Mavis squealed again, trying to roll away. Travis followed, his face hovering over him, a warm sky of affectionate menace. He covered the tiny, wriggling form with soft, warm puffs of air from his nostrils and mouth, a private, miniature simoom.
Mavis’s defenses dissolved into helpless, wheezing giggles. He flopped onto his back, limbs splayed, tail twitching sporadically. “I yield! I yield! Mercy! Your breath is… alarmingly herbal!”
Travis relented. He stopped the nuzzling, but didn’t pull back. Instead, he dipped his head the final inch and pressed his lips, soft and dry, to the top of Mavis’s head, right between his velvety mouse ears. He held it for a second—a seal, a benediction.
He felt Mavis go still. The frantic giggles subsided into shaky, contented sighs.
Travis finally lifted his head and dropped back onto his own pillow with a heavy, satisfied thump. The morning light was cutting sharp angles through the blinds, painting stripes of gold across the rumpled comforter. Dust motes danced in the beams.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their breathing, synchronizing slowly.
Then, a small, warm weight settled in the space between the side of Travis’s nose and the cool cotton of the pillowcase. Mavis curled there, his back to Travis’s cheek, his tail draping loosely across the bridge of Travis’s nose. A living, breathing blindfold.
Travis didn’t move. He watched the world through a filter of fine, brown fur and the brilliant, diagonal slash of sunlight beyond.
“You’re a terrible alarm clock,” Mavis whispered, his voice muffled by the pillow.
“You’re a terrible facial scrub.”
“I am exceptional.” A pause. The tail gave a faint, reflexive twitch. “Elenor emailed. I heard the phone chime from the wall. It was a greedy, limestone sound.”
Travis sighed, the breath stirring the fur against his face. Work. The gallery project. The world outside their warm, messy cocoon. “What time is it?”
“Time for a second sleep. A strategic retreat from productivity.”
But Travis was already awake, the last vestiges of drowsiness burned away by their play. The familiar itch of a pending deadline began to whisper at the back of his mind. He needed coffee. He needed to look at that email.
Yet he lingered. He turned his head just a fraction, enough to feel the solid, tiny press of Mavis’s body against his cheekbone. This was a choice, every morning. The pull of the mundane against the anchor of the miraculous.
Finally, he began the slow process of extraction. He slid his arm out from under the covers, then carefully, incrementally, rolled onto his back. Mavis, displaced, grumbled and climbed onto the crest of his shoulder, a watchful sentinel.
“The betrayal deepens,” Mavis said, but there was no heat in it.
“Coffee,” Travis said, the word a mission statement. “Then we’ll assess the limestone damage.”
He swung his legs out of bed, the wood floor cool under his feet. The house was quiet, waiting. As he stood and stretched, he felt Mavis move, scampering down the slope of his back, using his shirt as a landscape. He disappeared over the edge of the bed, a rustle indicating a return to the wall, to his own morning rituals.
Travis padded out to the kitchen, the events of the previous night feeling both distant and intimately close—the deep cold of Mavis’s small body, the shared warmth under the comforter, the definitive rhythm of his own heartbeat in the dark.
He scooped coffee grounds, the rich, oily scent cutting through the morning air. As the machine began its guttural cough and sputter, he retrieved his phone from the living room couch, now a lonely monument to last night’s documentaries.
There was, indeed, an email from Elenor. Subject line: Initial Concepts – Your Thoughts? Attached were three clean, minimalist PDFs. Travis leaned against the counter, scrolling. She was right. It was polished limestone. Smooth, cool, impressive. It also felt, as Mavis had said, slippery. Emotionally sterile.
From the doorway, a small voice piped up. “Well? Is it a symphony of beige?”
Travis looked over. Mavis was perched on the little wooden balcony that protruded from the rectangular hole in the bedroom wall. He was holding a speck of what looked like a blueberry, nibbling it thoughtfully.
“It’s… competent,” Travis said, turning the phone to show the screen, though he knew Mavis could never see the details from there.
“Competent is the death rattle of art,” Mavis declared, finishing his breakfast. He leaped from the balcony, a tiny, daring arc, and landed on the back of the worn armchair, then began the long journey across the living room rug toward the kitchen, a tiny voyage across a vast, fibrous plain.
Travis watched him come, this small, fierce critic navigating a world built to a scale that could crush him without noticing. He thought of the warm weight on his chest, the helpless giggles, the purr against his neck.
He looked back at the sleek, sterile images on his phone.
“Yeah,” Travis said, more to himself than anyone. He poured his coffee, black and steaming. “Yeah, it is.”
Mavis reached the base of the kitchen cabinet and looked up, his ears swiveling forward. Travis smiled down at him, then reached into a drawer. He pulled out a bottle cap, an old one from a craft beer, and placed it on the floor. He poured a thimble’s worth of coffee into it, the rich liquid swirling.
“Your diagnosis, Doctor?” Travis asked, lifting his own mug.
Mavis approached the bottle cap, steam curling around his whiskers. He leaned over, sniffed deeply, and took a cautious sip. He shuddered dramatically. “It confirms everything. The project lacks heart. It lacks…” he took another sip, “this essential, bitter warmth.”
Travis laughed, the sound echoing in the quiet kitchen. He slid down to sit on the floor, his back against the cabinets, bringing himself to Mavis’s level. They drank their coffee in companionable silence.
They drank their coffee in companionable silence, the steam forming a thin, shared horizon between floor and countertop. Travis finally pushed himself up, his knees cracking in protest. The gallery project, with its polished demands, waited.
He settled at his desk in the converted front room, sunlight glaring off the large monitor. He opened Elenor’s files, the stark white and grey layouts feeling suddenly alien against the warm chaos of his living space. He began to work, clicking and dragging, substituting one cold typeface for another only marginally warmer.
His concentration was a shallow bowl, easily spilled.
A faint skittering inside the wall to his left signaled Mavis’s own parallel morning. Travis heard the miniature scrape of a drawer, the patter of tiny footsteps across hidden floorboards. The sounds were a baseline, a familiar music that usually let him focus. Today, the sterile visuals on his screen seemed to mute them.
He was adjusting the kerning on a block of desiccated prose about “curated experiential spaces” when a movement caught his eye. Mavis emerged from the archway at the baseboard, tail twitching. He scaled the desk leg with practiced, rapid leaps, using knots and grooves as handholds.
He hopped onto the blotter, a living paperweight, and surveyed the luminous screen. His nose wrinkled.
“It’s gotten worse,” he declared. “It’s now the visual equivalent of a handshake that’s slightly too dry.”
Travis snorted but didn’t look away from the screen. “It’s what she wants. Clean. Authoritative.”
“It’s empty.” Mavis began to pace a tight circle on the leather blotter, his path a brown smudge in Travis’s periphery. “Where’s the crack in the pavement? The moss on the stone? You’re designing a tomb for art, not a home.”
“It pays the mortgage,” Travis said, his tone flatter than he intended. He selected a new image, a photograph of an angular, empty room. He dropped it in. It looked like a cell.
Mavis stopped pacing. He sat back on his haunches, his tail curling around his feet. He watched Travis’s face, not the screen. The only sounds were the hum of the computer fan and the distant rush of a car passing outside.
After a long moment, Mavis’s whiskers twitched. He leaned forward, his small head tilting.
“Did you know you smell like cinnamon and maple syrup?”
Travis’s fingers stopped hovering over the keyboard. He blinked, finally looking away from the monitor. “Uh, no.” He brought his forearm to his nose, sniffed. “You mean like if I just had those things? I haven’t.”
“Not exactly.” Mavis inched closer, his tiny black eyes unblinking. “It’s not precisely cinnamon and maple syrup, but it’s my closest approximation. Your scent lexicon is limited. Generally, it’s like an earthy sweetness and a sharp spice.”
Travis lowered his arm, disarmed. The comment was so utterly foreign to the task on screen, it created a momentary void. “That’s… what, my soap?”
“No. That’s pine and chemicals. This is underneath. It’s in your skin. The heat from your neck last night was full of it.” Mavis stated it as simple fact, a climatological report. “It’s a good smell. It’s not limestone.”
Travis stared at him. The words dismantled something tight in his chest. This tiny creature, whose world was built from textures and scents and vibrations he could never fully comprehend, had just described his essence in terms of warmth and earth and sugar. Not in terms of productivity, or skill, or the clean, empty shapes on his screen.
He looked back at the design. The empty room, the sterile type. A tomb.
Without a word, he selected the entire image and pressed delete. The screen flashed white for a second, a blank slate. He opened a new document.
“What are you doing?” Mavis asked, his voice quiet.
“I don’t know yet.” Travis’s hands moved, pulling up a forgotten folder of his own photographs. A close-up of rust flaking on a wrought-iron gate. A rain-slicked alley brick wall marred by vibrant moss. The gnarled, non-symmetrical root of the old oak in the back yard. “Something with a crack in the pavement.”
Mavis didn’t reply. He simply climbed onto the back of Travis’s hand, a warm, slight weight on his knuckles, and sat there as Travis began to work for real, the first genuine pulse of the day moving from his brain, down his arm, and into the waiting keys.
The new composition began as a fracture, a jagged line of pixelated moss splitting the sterile white field of the screen. Travis worked with a quiet focus, the kind that made the room disappear. Mavis remained on his hand, a silent supervisor, shifting his weight minutely whenever Travis moved the mouse.
He layered the image of the rusted gate over the moss, setting the blend mode to multiply. The corrosion bled through the green like a old wound. It wasn't pretty. It was alive. He could feel a corresponding unraveling in his own chest, a tightness he hadn't acknowledged loosening its grip.
“The limestone is receding,” Mavis observed, his voice a soft buzz near Travis’s thumb. “I detect notes of rebellion. And damp soil.”
Travis almost smiled. “Shut up. I’m concentrating.”
“You’re finally breathing.”
Two hours dissolved. The sun climbed, the stripe of light on the floor narrowing and sharpening. Travis’s coffee went cold in its mug. The gallery’s proposed logo—a sleek, geometric ‘E’—was now half-submerged in a digital scan of the gnarled oak root, the hard lines fighting a losing battle against organic chaos. It was messy. It was compelling.
His stomach growled, a loud, visceral interruption in the quiet room.
The sound jolted him. He leaned back, his spine emitting a series of pops. The screen swam before his eyes, the vibrant clash of textures suddenly overwhelming. He lifted his hand, bringing Mavis up to his eye level.
“Break time,” Travis said, his voice hoarse from disuse. “I’m seeing pixels in my soul.”
Mavis stretched, his tiny arms reaching forward, back arching like a cat’s. “Your soul has a low resolution. I require a raisin. Possibly two.”
In the kitchen, Travis dumped the old coffee and made a sandwich, his movements automatic. He sat on the floor again, his back against the same cabinet, and ate. Mavis navigated the terrain of a torn-off corner of bread crust, a monumental, chewy landscape.
The frenzy of creative push had ebbed, leaving a calm, curious emptiness in its wake. Travis watched Mavis, his mind circling back to the earlier, simple revelation: cinnamon and maple syrup. To Travis, Mavis smelled like clean fur and, faintly, of the dry, papery scent of the walls he lived inside. A pleasant, simple smell.
But that wasn’t the truth. It was just his own, human limitation.
He swallowed a bite of sandwich. “Hey. That thing. About how I smell.”
Mavis looked up from his systematic dismantling of a bread bubble. “Your aromatic profile? It’s unchanged. Still dominantly earthy-sweet, with top notes of rancid butter from this inferior dairy product.” He nudged the mayonnaise-smeared bread.
“No, I mean,” Travis started, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He struggled to phrase the weird question. “You described it. In your words. Cinnamon and maple, or whatever. That’s your… translation.”
Mavis sat still, waiting.
“I can’t do that,” Travis said, his voice lower. “To me, you just smell like… you. Clean. A little like old books. It’s nice, but it’s flat.” He paused, gathering momentum. “Could I… I mean, is there a way for me to smell what you smell? The depth of it? Or even, what you smell like, to you?”
The question hung in the air, stranger than he’d anticipated. It felt intimate in a new way, a request to step past a sensory border he hadn’t known existed.
Mavis didn’t answer immediately. He finished chewing a fragment of crust, his whiskers twitching thoughtfully. He cleaned his paws, a fastidious, deliberate motion.
“You’re asking for a lexicon you don’t possess,” he said finally, not unkindly. “Your nose is a blunt instrument. It tells you ‘food,’ ‘danger,’ ‘clean.’ Mine,” he tapped his own tiny, pink nose, “is a historian. It tells me a story.”
He hopped down from the bread crust and walked across the linoleum until he stood before Travis’s bent knee. “The smell you call ‘me’ isn’t one thing. It’s the layered record of my day. Right now, you’d be smelling the dust from the wall corridor I patrolled this morning. The ghost of the blueberry I ate. The faint, sharp tang of the lead pencil I had to move from your desk because your placement was offensive. The warmth of your own hand from where I sat. It’s all there.”
Travis listened, rapt. He’d never considered smell as a narrative.
“And to smell me as I am to myself?” Mavis’s tail made a slow, contemplative arc. “That is interior. It is the smell of my own breath, my own fur. It is… known. It is home.” He looked up, his black eyes gleaming. “You could put your nose right against me and inhale for a year, Travis. You would only ever smell the summary. You couldn’t read the pages.”
Travis felt a sudden, profound sense of loss for a world he could never access. It was a loneliness, but a shared one—they were both blind to the other’s most vivid text.
“Oh,” he said, the word small.
Mavis tilted his head. “But.”
He scurried forward, climbed onto Travis’s socked foot, and then up the leg of his sweatpants with determined agility. He traversed the plain of Travis’s thigh, crossed the cliff-face of his torso, and finally came to a stop on the center of his chest, just below the sternum. He sat down, pressing his body flat against the worn cotton of Travis’s shirt.
“Breathe,” Mavis instructed. “Not a sniff. Just… breathe in normally. And don’t think of a name for it.”
Travis obeyed. He let his lungs expand, a slow, deep draught of air. At first, there was just the usual: laundry detergent, his own sleep scent, the vague residual hint of coffee.
But then, beneath it, as Mavis’s body heat seeped through the fabric, something else emerged. It wasn’t a scent he could separate or name. It was a quality. A cool, dry nuance, like the shadow under a tree on a hot day. A subtle, green note, not of plants, but of stillness. And something achingly familiar, something that spoke of safety and quiet companionship so deeply woven in it had no distinct odor of its own.
It was the smell of the space between his own collarbones in the deep night. It was the smell of his own bedroom when he woke feeling peaceful. It was, he realized, the smell of Mavis’s presence woven into the fabric of his life. He couldn’t isolate it, but he could feel its texture.
He exhaled, a long, slow breath. “I can’t name it.”
“Good,” Mavis said, his voice a vibration through Travis’s ribs. “That means you’re feeling the story, not reading the headline.”
He pushed himself up and resumed his climb, heading for the familiar perch at the base of Travis’s throat. Travis didn’t move, his mind lingering in that wordless, sensory space. The gallery project, the cold emails, the polished limestone world—it all seemed to recede, becoming a faint, grey murmur at the edge of a much richer, more textured reality.
His hand came up, not to touch Mavis, but to hover near his own throat, where the small weight now settled. He breathed in again, chasing the ghost of that inexplicable, comforting coolness. It was already fading, slipping back beneath the louder, simpler scents of the day.
But he’d felt it. For a second, he’d read a page.