The wind was hot.
It was a burning wind — it burned through Susan's sleep like acid on silk, reaching deep into each smooth furrow of her body. The nightgown was too much. Her breasts felt as though covered with sand, with insects, as though she lay buried to the neck in an anthill in a hot summer storm. By turns it was terrible and then sweet — a tickling, moving, crawling sensation. An awareness of the physical that not even sleep could override.
Her fingers moved to the neck of her nightgown, traveled down its front and parted it over her body. The feeling remained but it was better now, more purely pleasure, less frightening in the complexity of its overwhelming sensuousness.
Her tongue moved over dry cracked lips. Her fingertips went to her breasts, plucked the nipples up, caressed them as through layers of sand. A groan escaped her open mouth into the blasting wind.
~ * ~
What was that?
Elizabeth sat bolt upright in bed, listening.
Some sort of cry.
The sound had poured through her sleep, snatched her into wakefulness, its final tendrils dragging over her like scraps of vine.
It had come from outside.
She leaned toward the window, her fingernails brushing the wire mesh screen. She looked down through the branches of the tree to the street. It was empty. A gust of wind slid a sheet of newspaper along the sidewalk, rustled the shrubbery below. The entrance to the building was silent.
A dream, she thought.
The newspaper lay stirless in the gutter. She listened to the sounds inside her apartment. The clock ticking, the distant hum of her refrigerator, the dense silence.
She was beginning to feel sleepy again.
Something screamed, it sounded like a child's scream and just beyond the screen something hurtled through her field of vision, a sudden pale blinding flash of movement.
Then stopped.
And meowed.
A cat.
A slim white cat with a black-spotted tail.
You little shit, she thought. You scared me half to death.
The cat stared in at her wide-eyed, wary. It paced the ledge. Must have come from the floor above, she thought. Living dangerously, making a jump like that.
Her heart was still pounding.
The cat sniffed the ledge and window screen, its pink nose twitching. It gazed at the tree and seemed to contemplate the downward climb. Then it glanced back at Elizabeth. It did not seem terribly comfortable with her there, close enough to touch were it not for the screen. She wondered why. Cats usually took to her immediately.
Poor thing. It really did look scared out there.
The tip of its ear was missing.
There was only a little blood, it wasn't much more than a scratch, but the wound looked very recent. The blood was still glistening. Catfight, she thought. The eyes looked alert, frightened.
Frightened of her. She could swear it.
"What's the matter?" she whispered.
It was as though she'd hit it with a stick. The cat jumped out onto the nearest branch, ran to the main trunk of the tree and then raced suddenly down, disappearing into the shrubs below.
She watched until it was out of sight and then fell back away from the window into the cool softness of her bed. She lay a moment staring at the shadows playing across the ceiling and then closed her eyes.
Too bad, she thought. I could have patched her up a little.
The cat's amber-yellow eyes appeared before her, bright and full of some strange knowledge, before she fell asleep.