“Keep your hat on!” Ajoke’s mother yelled as she watched her daughter leave for school.
“Yes ma!” Ajoke yelled back, pulling her cap tighter over her head by its brim as she ran out of the house and headed toward the bus outside.
Ajoke was born with a cat on her head, just like her parents, and just like their parents before them.
The cat was her destiny, her fate, and like all the other children around, she wasn’t allowed to see her fate until she was old enough. She didn’t see the point of that precaution, not for her family anyway. Her parents had small fate cats, and Ajoke knew that it was because of their small fates that they were people who never did anything important.
The pressure of a huge fate was too large for a child’s mind. There was no way to know for sure which kind of fate cat a child had, so they couldn’t look at it or talk to it, until they were old enough to control the cats.
Everyone had a fate cat, the location was different for each family, but every child knew to keep the location secret. Because of the fate thieves.
Fate thieves were usually people who were supposed to be nothing but refused to accept it, people with fate cats that were so small that the only way they could make something of themselves was by stealing from others.
Ajoke passed the armed guards at the entrance of the school with a smile as she swiped her ID card. Fate thieves targeted schools because they could only snatch the fates that were not yet solid things, that had not yet fully merged with their owners, and that could only be found in children.
A small force bumped into her from behind as a girl took her hand.
“That’s a new hat. It’s cute. Can I try it on?” The girl’s eyes sparkled with curiosity and something else that Ajoke couldn’t put her finger on. She frowned, her hat wasn’t new and Mimi knew it. She knew that Mimi didn’t want the hat, she just wanted to see her fate cat. Everyone else had their cats in places that could be hidden by clothes or socks, but her family’s large assortment of hats were a clear indication of where their fate cats were. No matter how invasive she was being, Ajoke did not snap at her friend. Mimi could not get angry at her, Ajoke would not allow it.
Her friend Mimi wasn’t like their family.
Ajoke turned around to see a sleek black car driving off. It was Mimi’s family car, it dropped her off and picked her up. Mimi was popular and important because her family was popular and important. Her parents both had large fate cats, so she would too. No one knew where Mimi’s fate cat was but with how well her parents treated her, everyone knew that it had to be huge. Some even whispered that she probably had a lion as a fate cat.
A lion. The current president had a cheetah as a fate cat. If Mimi had a lion, Ajoke knew that would make Mimi too important to be her friend. And yet for the past few weeks, she had been just that. A miracle. A dream she never wanted to end. So even if Mimi wanted something strange, she did not say no.
“Are you ready?” Mimi asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to change your mind again?”
“I won’t.” Ajoke’s voice was firm. The last time she changed her mind, Mimi stopped talking to her for two days. Those were the worst two days of her life. When she was friends with Mimi, it was like everyone else who liked Mimi liked her too. So during those two days, she became invisible to everyone in their class.
“Okay. After school, in the cafeteria. I’ll tell my guards to wait until an hour after school to come pick me up …” Ajoke could only nod as her friend made all the arrangements.
After school, the girls met with a shared smile of anticipation.
“Are you ready?” Ajoke asked her friend, who only nodded as a response.
Ajoke felt a brief moment of hesitation before she took off her hat.
Silence. For a long time, there was only silence. Until the first giggle.
The laugh came from Mimi, and the other girls followed suit.
“Other girls?” Ajoke thought. “That’s not right.”
“I knew it. There’s nothing there but a tiny baby cat, pay up,” Mimi said to a few figures who were hiding in the shadows. When they merged, they were all familiar faces. They were girls from big families, born to parents who had big fate cats. They were girls who had never taken the school bus. Ajoke’s ears began ringing as she looked at her friend in shock.
“Why?” She finally got a word out amidst the laughter that rang around her.
“Why not? You’re a nothing person,” Mimi continued, her pleasant features taking on a twisted look.
Ajoke’s vision turned blurry as her head began to hurt. Their friendship of the past three weeks now felt like a cruel mockery.
“Kitten,” a small voice in Ajoke’s head said. “A baby cat is a kitten.”
With the instinct of a small animal facing a predator, Ajoke felt herself want to cringe away from the voice. She tried to lean away, to separate herself from it, but there was nowhere for her to go.
“You’re the kitten on my head?” she asked.
“They’ll stop laughing if I get bigger, do you want that?”
A pause. Ajoke wasn’t thinking straight, the cat’s voice seemed to be both in her head and outside it, reducing the sounds of laughter to background noise.
“Yes.”
“Good.” The word came out slowly, like the cat was savoring it. There was a thrum of excitement that flowed from the cat to her, and she could feel the moment it decided to pounce. She could feel the thread between her and the cat, a flimsy thing on the cat’s end, stronger on hers.
Mimi was still laughing when the cat stretched its paws to her. Once the cat landed on her, it reached out to her back and pulled out a large formless shadow. The thing struggled briefly as the cat lowered its head and took a bite. Ajoke watched in fascination as the cat ate it up, sending bits of shadow flying about. When it was done, it lunged from Mimi to her friends and soon, there was a terrible sound only she could hear. It was the sound of bones being broken and flesh being torn apart. Ajoke smacked her lips, there was suddenly a sweet taste lingering on her tongue.
Ajoke frowned, the girls who were mocking her just seconds ago were staring blankly at nothing now. The cat returned to her, still chewing something, and her head felt heavy with the added weight.
“What did you do to them?” she asked the now-lethargic cat.
“Nothing, they’re fine. They’re just missing something they would never have used. Not well anyway. They won’t feel the loss. They won’t even remember how they lost it,” the suddenly much larger cat said as it stretched out lazily.
Ajoke’s mind spun as something finally clicked into place.
“You hurt them. You took their fates.”
“We took their fates,” the cat said simply.
“So … they’re nothing now?”
“No, they were nothing when they were born. A fate is a possibility, an option. They could not protect it, so it’s gone now.”
“I don’t want to be a fate thief. I don’t want to be a bad person,” she mumbled in a small voice.
“You’re not a fate thief. You’re important. More important than your parents ever were.” The cat flashed its black paws at her, before it calmly began to lick the shadowy blood off its fur.
“If you were meant to be unimportant, you wouldn’t have me.”
“But you are small.”
“I was small, I can grow.”
“That’s not allowed.”
“Do you know what is allowed? You staying small all your life, and your children being just as small. It’s not fair.
“If the world isn’t fair to you, why should you be fair to it?” the cat continued. Ajoke only had to consider it for a moment before she nodded.
“Your name will be in the history books, but first, let’s go home.” She could feel the cat’s satisfaction in how it purred those words. Ajoke couldn’t see it, but the more the cat asserted itself, the stronger its side of their bond grew.
Ajoke walked home alone, cap in hand. Against the backdrop of the flat granite and long expanse of road, she looked small. But before her, her fate cat cast a shadow that stretched from one side of the street to the other and pushed so far down that it seemed to touch the horizon.
Olufunmilayo Makinde is a Nigerian lawyer and writer who, to her dismay, finds herself doing more of the former than the latter. You can find her work in Full House Literary, The Periwinkle Pelican, Flash Phantoms, and 100 Foot Crow.
Image: pinterest.com
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