Black, beautiful, and wild described Pombagira Rodriguez. Her promiscuous nature would have doomed her to perpetual pregnancy if it hadn’t been for a certain medical procedure a year ago; as it was, she was known for staying out all night and then gaining access to the house by climbing a tree and entering through a partly open window.
“She’s a second-story cat,” Celine Rodriguez would say with a sigh. “What a naughty girl!”
“You treat that cat as if she were your child,” people would say from time to time. “What a pity you never had children of your own.”
“I teach, I blog, I write. I have brain-children, and I labor just as hard bringing them into the world as women who give birth to physical children,” Celine would reply. She was referring to intensity of effort, not physical discomfort, although she did sometimes have to retire to her bed with headaches.
Happily, Pombagira and the dogs, Joel Collie and Eleanor Labrador, were available for the cuddles that books, posts, and lectures couldn’t supply.
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Five minutes before the knock sounded on the front door, Celine gazed out the window at the rain blowing through the front yard. “Remind me again why we got married in October?”
“Because we got a fifty percent discount on a last-minute deal for a cruise to the Bahamas,” Eduardo reminded her. “We decided to make that our honeymoon. Stop worrying—the weather forecast says the rain will stop at six o’clock. We can still go out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary.”
“And that will be the only good thing about this gloomy fall Saturday,” Celine said.
But she was wrong, because the knock on the front door turned out to be the United Parcel Service delivering a package addressed to her and Eduardo.
“Who’s it from, Celine?”
“It’s from my sister priestess Serafina,” Celine said. “How nice of her!”
“You open it, dear,” Eduardo said, handing her the box cutter. “Knowing her, it could be anything.”
Eagerly Celine undid the wrappings, slit open the seams of the box, opened it, and gasped in delight.
“It’s Bastet! How beautiful!”
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