Episode 4

Groaning like a storm gathering slowly around an oasis in a jigsaw puzzle, the shards of glass came together, easing their broken sides into each other’s joints. Seven years of bad luck is a blessing, considering what mirrors go through when they break. All that complaining reflects badly on us, really. But then so does broken glass.

Lady sat far enough from the mirror, watching the reconstruction in progress. Only humans worried about bad luck. Silly, considering that the bad luck part lies in the very fact that they showed up as humans this time around, which in turn means they probably broke a mirror in their last life. An endless road of bad luck. It really was like a dressing room with mirrors on both sides, the fat thighs of the schoolgirl bouncing off the mirrors over and over and over again, screaming for her to jump into a big fat bowl of anorexia. At this rate the human race would outlive every other species, unless someone found a way to endanger mirrors.

Anyway, that was not Lady’s problem. She didn’t care much for the future of either mirrors or humans. The only use she had for the former was that they helped her get from one life to the other, and the only use she had for the latter was that they fed her in all nine of her lives. Whichever one she walked into, bam! There was a human setting out food and speaking in an affectionate soprano. If you put up with all the milk, the meat at mealtimes was really the best reason to have so many lives! Of course, if you’re lactose intolerant, you are screwed. Humans come with a mandatory unshakeable belief that cats love milk. Which is bullshit. That’s like saying humans love beer. Some humans go through their entire lives not touching a drop of beer, like Grum the gin-soaked boy in one of Lady’s other lives.

The mirror had all but fixed itself, when Lady heard something that made her blood curdle. Her eyes grew wide, the fur on her back stood at wonderful obtuse angles to each other and she let out a high C that almost shattered the glass again.