Force of Nature

Stella Madre
Aug 21
7 min read

Updated: Aug 23

A Regan Grace Chronicle

ONE

The labour begins.

Penny, the dextrous and dainty tortoiseshell cat, pounces, purrs, and then settles beside Eleanor Grace, heavily pregnant and over it. Squinting, the feline rests her speckled paw briefly on Eleanor’s belly as if to say, “There, there, child. I’m here now.”

"Penny,’ Eleanour whines, ‘I’m too hot for your pawing!’ Penny pays Eleanor as much mind as any cat ever does, and as Penny’s combustion engine purr belies her size, she gently kneads Eleanor’s unborn child. Despite the muscle and mucus, the flesh and the blood, baby girl and mystical cat are reunited.

A door appears.

It is suspended in the air. Is this air? I feel myself (who is myself?) lean into the liminal space. This is familiar but foreign. A tortoiseshell cat (what is a cat?) purrs and smiles. Yes. smiles.

Her Amber eyes look into me. I wonder if I should be afraid, but then she says, “You. We." She corrects herself. “Have done this many times before." There is a familiar affection that makes me feel safe.

She sits as cats do, with her bottom down and her chin up. Her grin breaks a thousand laws of nature, and I am blinded by her light. She is proud of me. I can tell. Everything is crystal clear. Clear as a bell. (diNNNNNNNNNNNNG)

Wait. Am I the bell? The cat and I burst out laughing. It’s the laughter that is the birth of a newborn. As I get closer to my birth, I remember less and less.

“Breathe,” the cat instructs. Even as she speaks, it’s going in one ear and out the other.

Wait. I don’t have ears yet, do I?

“Just remember, it’s not your fault.” She says, her voice getting softer as my heartbeat gets louder. There is a hum, a constant hum, stretching out into eternity.

With her paw suddenly on my heart (I have a heart?), she lowers her voice.

“Remember, they chose it - you all agreed - but it’s not your fault." She is fading away as quickly as she appeared - but I know she will never leave me. Even as I remind myself to remember, I am forgetting. I feel my matter pulling me towards my birth. The cat nods towards the glowing portal as if to say, in you get. I step in.

I am nothing but a point of light for some time. Then.

She is breathing for me. She is my breath. She gives pieces of herself to me so that I may live.

Then I am bone and flesh and blood, I am throbbing through the birth canal, tearing through a Woman, the Woman who has been breathing for me. Who breathes for Her? I navigate the point of entry.

I gasp for air. I must breathe with my own lungs now. Give pieces of myself away so that I may live. Be my own home. As I know it, I am forgetting it.

The girl tumbles into this world.

Her mother, after depositing the Fight for Life within her, departs. Eleanor Price laboured for precisely seventy-two hours, thirty-three minutes, and fifty-five seconds. It is as it must be on the path of a Magi.

While Erik Grace weeps over the woman he loved, his mother, Athena swaddles the newborn. “I will love you enough for both of them, little one,” Athena says to Regan Grace as she lays the child beside the softly purring Penny. “You gained and lost a world today, your life is already expensive.”

I watch the sun setting over the old place.

It’s sorely in need of maintenance. We have that in common, I think, aware of my approaching thirty-third birthday. I get out of the car and stretch. I hear squawking as three crows land in the mango tree, and Penny, Gran’s ancient cat, materialises, as if by magic. Goosebumps skitter down my neck, and I take the deepest breath I have taken in the longest time. I feel as if there is something important that I’m forgetting. Or remembering?

Penny threads herself between my ankles then dashes, as cats do, down the path toward the beach. It must be the organic field mouse diet - this cat is older than me and in fucking great shape.

In minutes, I stand on the 'point' - an enormous grassy dune with a small forest of milkwood trees behind it. How odd that my dead grandmother's thirty-four year-old cat has outlived her. As the thought strikes me I see it. Oh, the moon. It is breathtaking and for the first time in aeons, I cry.

'It has the same effect on me,' says a voice beside me. I suck back my snot and jump up, swiping at the corners of my eyes, but when I swing around, I see no one but Penny, the cat. She purrs. I take another furtive glance around. Am I mental?

My father's voice tearing through me like a barn in a storm.

I wake with Penny’s paw on my chest. She purrs and kneads my ribs around my heart, as if she is trying to help soften the organ that should be flesh, but feels like stone. I haven't had such vivid dreams since I was a child. What is not clear to me is what I’m supposed to do with them. I have felt like this my whole life. I sit up and reach for my notebook. Writing syphons the pain out of me. Out of my mind, out of my body, so the thoughts can loosen their grip on me.

I write about Gran’s last breath in the hospital, the cancer swallowing her whole. As if she were already a ghost, I watched her thin lips stretch tightly over her jaw as she sucked the life out of the room. I carried her back here in a wooden box. She has been sitting in the cupboard under the stairs since I arrived.

I am no stranger to death.

Penny, who has curled up in the enclave of my legs, opens her eyes, kneads my bottom, and squints at me. I read somewhere that this means they trust you.

I crack an eye.

It’s been years since I woke up without the ceaseless ringing of a device. I remember, my Grandmother is dead and I am alone. I must have dozed off, and as I come around, the pen slips out of my sweaty fever-dream fingers and rolls under the bed. I reach for it, but my fingers find something else. I part my legs wide and pull the box between them. 'What the fuck is this?' I say.

Penny joins me on the floor and sidles up against the box, then places her paw on top of it as if to say, “Go on, open it.” The box holds a dark brown leather folder. Old and official-looking. The folder has a long strip of leather wound around it with a toggle in the center. I unwind the leather as if I'm removing a bandage. I scan the first few pages and feel my eyes widen.

Gran has left me everything, the house, and something called the Trust. I scan the document and hear myself ask, 'What’s the Trust?' It's only then that I notice a handwritten note on top of the book, still inside the box. Ink, black as coal on paper, pale as milk reads:

Regan,

If you are reading this, I've been relieved of my meat sack, and Penny has found you. Scatter my ashes at the point, will you?

I leave you the Book of Brightness.

In it, our ancestors speak about a relationship with the Earth in a way that personifies Her.

Specters, spirits, and deities like the ones from your dreams and visions (you have been having dreams and visions, haven't you?) go by many names and shapes. Angels and Demons. Monsters and Miracles. It's all in here. Use it wisely and add to it. Penny will guide you. She has been waiting all this time.

Like tides of the ocean, the women in our lineage have washed up against these shores. We have kissed it with our lips, toes, and labia and always will. Now it’s your turn.

Little Bird, It’s time to let go of the past and step into your destiny.

I'm proud of you,

Much love and Multiple dimensions,

Gran!

The book has an emblem on the cover, a golden circle, and a mandala with a grid inside. At the centre, a tree, whose roots weave into the circular border, and the canopy does the same. The tree trunk is a woman’s torso. Her head is crowned by the canopy, and the grain of the wood contours her breasts. The kettle whistles.

I take my coffee and the book out to the porch and sit on what Gran called the daybed. She would read to me here. This memory triggers another, and my small body rests in the nurturing enclave of her skinny arms and ample breasts.

I was three, after my father took his own life because he simply couldn't stand the sight of me. I overheard him saying it to Gran when she came to fetch me. “At least he called me first,” she would mutter to herself when she wrestled with him in her mind and she thought I wasn’t listening.

Something stirs in me. Some forgotten place begins to shift.

This sensation is familiar yet distant. There are suddenly hundreds of birds in the nearby trees. A moment later, three cacophonous crows arc over the field, screeching at me.

The breeze lifts my platinum on-purpose hair from my pale brow, and the childish dream catchers we made dance in the sunlight. I suddenly long to be out in the sun. I close my eyes and hold my pale, eczema-dappled arms up to the sun like an offering.

I feel a tickle on my left palm. I blink, ready to wipe away a bug, but it’s a magnificent Monarch Butterfly. A second lands on the dreamcatcher, then another and another, their flames flickering. Hundreds set it ablaze, fluttering and swooping.

Penny, materialises in the golden light of the morning. I look into her eyes. She is breathtaking, ancient, and I know it. In a lucid flash, I know who she is. I remember:

I am three.

Just before the last crack in my world split everything apart. Gran - and no one else - believed me when I told her Penny could talk. I seek out my reflection in the kitchen window. My roots are showing - but my eyes are clear. I might be mad, but I am not dreaming.

“Happy Birthday, Little Bird," purrs Penny.