by Margot Spronk
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- 1. The Courting
Gwyn sank into a Downward Dog, extending her claws to deepen the stretch, unfortunately slashing her purple yoga mat, and not for the first time. Her previously even breathing stuttered, as her feline brain popped up an errant thought: why wasn’t this pose named the Downward Cat? No dog could bow their spines until their elbows touched the ground like a cat could. Maybe a dachshund — but that would look ridiculous. Gwyn giggled, exposing her canines, then snapped her jaws shut.
Always…dogs. Never cats.
She shuffled her hind legs closer to her front paws and lifted her knees onto her elbows, precariously assuming the Crane Position. She balanced for a second, then dropped one foot back to the ground, hissing at the strain.
If it wasn’t dogs, it was cranes.
Wasn’t a heron the same as a crane?
Her whiskers twitched. Maybe yoga wasn’t for her after all. She flopped down into what she liked to call the Lambchop Pose — one leg pointing straight up — and licked her white furred belly with long, raspy strokes while intermittently staring out the living room’s French doors at the front yard.
Outside, rain had slicked a shine onto the green lawn, brightening the overcast early spring morning. Beyond the grass, a clump of alders stretched their bare grey limbs upward. Tiny spheres of water clinging to the furled buds that tipped the branches glinted like diamonds against a pearlescent sky. Below the interlocking alder boughs a great blue heron stood, still and silent, his long sharp beak pointed at the ground.
Gwyn’s pink paw pads broke out in sweat.
Was he coming here already? Stopping to hunt a vole on the way like a human suitor would stop to pick a bouquet of wildflowers for his sweetheart?
His beak struck the ground, neck stretched then springing back into its ‘S’ shaped resting state — a grey blob wedged between his upper and lower beaks as if it was a piece of sashimi clasped by two chopsticks. It wriggled and Gwyn involuntarily salivated. She imagined a shrill squeak and almost had to visit the litter box in her excitement.
Reiher strolled through the grass toward the glass doors, neck bobbing, head steady as if it were balanced on gimbals. His yellow eyes fixated on Gwyn, as if she too were prey.
Which… she supposed, she was.
Her Russian blue great aunt slunk into the room. Either she’d seen Reiher transiting the lawn, or she’d been expecting him. (If Gwyn had known the heron was coming, she would’ve gone to the 11 a.m. yoga class in town instead of setting up her mat in the living room and giving him an inadvertent show).
Auntie bounded to the door, a ghostly streak of gray, rushing to let the heron in before Gwyn did something foolhardy.
But Gwyn hadn’t even thought about locking Reiher out. Her attention was fixated on the furry bundle firmly clasped in his beak.
It smelled of iron and petrichor and looked plump and tasty.
Reiher strode across the threshold and dropped the vole in front of her. Gwyn thanked him while licking away some drool. He nodded — he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. She’d noticed that about herons before — their extreme and endless comfort with silence. And staring. Always the staring.
Auntie left to give the lovebirds a little privacy.
Love… birds?
Why not love-cats?
Gwyn recognized she had become a burden. At eight months she’d already put her thoroughly menopaused and fastidious great aunt through two estrus cycles. Twice Gwyn had rubbed, rolled and shed reefs of white fur while yowling affectionately at anyone who looked her way. She shuddered. So embarrassing. How did cats manage before vacuum cleaners were invented? Her elderly guardian was understandably anxious to ensure her next heat was someone else’s responsibility. Reiher was an upstanding member of the community. An expert hunter. And… Auntie was always talking up his plumy blue fronds and sexy white ruff.
Gwyn had to admit he was just as gorgeous as advertised.
Gwyn vowed to at least give him a chance. It wasn’t as if suitors grew on trees or were beating a path to her door. Reiher had been hatched “in” a tree, and he had just stalked to her door, so that had to count for something.
Reiher assumed his resting pose — totally motionless, one baleful eye turned toward Gwyn’s mouth.
Did he want the vole back?
Or was he fascinated by her sharp teeth?
This was not the meet-cute she’d hoped for, but he had brought an awesome present. She ripped out the rodent’s belly like the predator she was, wolfing down chunks of slimy organ and chewy muscle.
Wolfing?
Something clunked against her back molar. It wasn’t a vole bone as they were thin, flexible and perfectly edible. This felt pointed, impervious, like it might chafe her throat and abrade her intestines as it moved through her digestive tract. Spontaneously, she horked it up.
A gold ring, set with a moderately-sized solitaire diamond, dropped onto the carpet coated in a stinky bile soup speckled with bone shards.
Well.
That was done.
They were engaged.
2. The Wedding
Gwyn tried to convince Auntie that she would’ve looked better in black, as the white silk of her wedding dress against her white fur was not a good look.
Also black would’ve suited her mood better, which surely Auntie knew but wouldn’t acknowledge. Gwyn sighed.
She slid a manicured claw under the dress’s delicate accordion neckline. Confining as a dog collar. Cats weren’t known for their patience, and Gwyn was no exception. She wished she could play the Chatte App on her tablet while waiting for the ceremony to start. Pounce on a few fish, squash some cockroaches and chase a laser pointer. But a few weeks ago, when she’d tried to include Reiher in the game, he’d cracked the glass screen with his beak. After the second time it happened, the person at the other end of her extended warranty’s 1-800 number denied her claim.
There was nothing to do but prowl back and forth. She peeked through the curtain into the nave of the church. Everyone who was anyone was there. Van Varken the heritage hog, accompanied by a passel of piglets — all rumored to be killing the computer science program at MIT. Paard the Carter — she’d parleyed her one-horse business into a major transportation conglomerate. Lapin Konijn, the porn star who apparently had a very large… hind foot, and Cuervo the crow, who’d made billions mining silver and gold and topped the Forbes 30 under 30 list five years in a row. Considering his entrepreneurial prowess, and that a crow’s lifespan maxes out at thirty, he was likely to be ineligible due to death well before he aged out. His sister Vorona, who was said (in whispers) to be a highly paid assassin and spy for hire, sat to his right. To his left, his trans-species mate, Raaf Raven, who was a social influencer famous for running Instagram scavenger hunts, took a selfie.
Gwyn’s abundant cousins were there, sprawled over the pews in a slinky riot of white, black, and marmalade. On Reiher’s side of the aisle, his Avian relatives loomed over everyone mammalian. Cranes, egrets, lesser herons, and a notorious Pelican bookie who kept betting slips in his beak.
It was a zoo out there. Fidgeting kittens and squirming chicks, startled colts and squealing leverets. And it smelled funky, like a barn on a hot day. No one had thought to bedeck the hall with fragrant flowers — half of the guests would have assumed they were part of the wedding buffet, anyway.
When the first plaintive notes of Saint Saëns “March of the Lions” rang out, Gwyn strolled down the aisle, her aunt preceding her (dressed in an aqua green satin gown that flattered her feline shape and blue-gray coloring). Reiher waited for her at the altar, following her progress with a piercing intensity.
Well.
That was done.
They were married.
3. The Marriage
When you get right down to it, Gwyn and Reiher did have a lot in common. Both were somewhat nocturnal, with a fondness for voles, trout, and frogs. Both tracked their prey silently, then swiftly pounced — Reiher with his razor-sharp beak, and Gwyn with the whetted talons sheathed in her white paws.
Neither was very talkative — as much as Gwyn complained about the utter taciturnity of her husband, she was equally guilty. Neither of them liked peas. Reiher because they were so difficult to hold in his beak, and Gwyn because they tasted like fresh hay and hay was for ungulates.
But there were points of contention. Reiher complained that Gwyn was always sleeping. Gwyn countered with Reiher’s habit of ending an argument by becoming airborne. Reiher thought that Gwyn’s Cheshire smiles were insincere. Gwyn would’ve appreciated even the tiniest twinge of expression on her husband’s face.
Were they happy? The expression, “two cats in a sack” applied here, even if one of the cats was a bird. There was a lot of friction.
And due to the trans-species nature of their relationship, children were out of the question. They could adopt, Gwyn suggested. An abandoned puppy, perhaps? Maybe a dachshund so that she could laugh at his attempts at a Downward Dog?
But Reiher said no. He just couldn’t relate to an animal longer than they were tall, covered in fur and liveborn. Reiher really wanted to sit on a clutch of eggs.
Gwyn was not having feathers. How could she possibly groom her baby without tearing out the quills and shredding the downy barbs with her sandpaper tongue? Besides, baby birds were… tasty.
It was a stalemate.
Grooming was not negotiable.
Eggs were not negotiable.
They contemplated foreign adoption, but apparently, Australian platypus were decent parents, and very few of the monotremes ever came up.
Besides, platypuses loved swimming underwater. How could a cat mom supervise that? Dad-heron’s only method of corralling a diving platypus baby would be to stab them with his beak.
Why won’t you accept a baby bird asked Reiher?
Why won’t you accept a puppy said Gwyn?
As was typical, Reiher flew off with a great thumping of his huge wings, and Gwyn curled into a ball in front of the fireplace and closed her eyes.
Their divorce was granted on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. If you asked anyone who’d been in the church on the day of their wedding, they’d say they’d always known it wouldn’t last.
Gwyn and Reiher were too, too different.
Auntie didn’t seem too disturbed when Gwyn interrupted her Grecian holiday with the news — although that could be because she was too busy partying with her wild Santorini relatives.
Well.
That was done.
They were divorced.
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About the Author
Margot Spronk (they, them) is a retired air traffic controller who finds writing to be just as stressful but less life-threatening. They graduated Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio in 2015 (Southbank 2014) and have previously been published in Pulp Literature. In real life, Margot is owned by Lucas the cat (AKA Agent Orange) and Remy the 80-pound doodle, who both rightly assume they are the center of the universe.