Free The Wikkeling by Steven Arntson

that, homing in on the small sounds of the attic, and its enormous green eyes with their wide black pupils watched her.
    Henrietta placed the
Bestiary
on the coffee table, and approached the cat. It stood warily on its long, thin legs. This was the first time she’d seen it at its full height, and it was considerably taller than an ordinary housecat.
    â€œI want to change your bandages,” said Henrietta, “to prevent infection.”
    The cat sat, and Henrietta gently removed the tape and gauze she’d applied the night before. The wound looked bad, but better. It was scabbing and didn’t appear swollen or infected. She replaced the bloodied gauze with a fresh square.
    â€œI think it’s okay,” she said. She reached out to pet the cat, hoping to comfort it, but the moment she moved her hand toward it, it retreated to the far end of the couch. “I wish you’d let me pet you,” she said. She thought she would never get enough of looking at it. It was the strangest, most wonderful creature she’d ever seen. “I wonder if you’re hungry.” Her eyes wandered over to the coffee table, and the
Bestiary
. She studied the baroque lettering on the cover, and then took out her phone to look up the word. But the phone was frozen again, just like the other night. She tapped the screen, and then returned it to her pocket as she remembered the dictionary on the table between the wicker chairs. She brought it to the couch and flipped through the
B
s.

Bestiary (n)
bes’che-er’e
A compendium of animals, commonly including those fictitious and those extinct.
    She looked up
compendium
(“a concise collection of detailed information”), and then opened the
Bestiary
. The pages were thick, rough, and discolored into a variety of yellows, unlike the smooth plastic pages she was familiar with.
    The book’s text was written in a loopy, long cursive. Henrietta marveled at how much time must have gone into the making of it. Early in the year, Ms. Span had shown the class the cursive alphabet, though they hadn’t ever practiced it. This book was written more beautifully than the precise, typed examples their class had seen. It flowed like a river. Henrietta touched it with her fingers and followed the lines of the word
Bestiary
on the title page. Below was another line, which she had to look at for some time before she could unravel its meaning. “Researched and Written by Aristotle Alcott, Henrift, and Many Friends.”
    She wondered if this Henrift might be Henrift Andi, Humanitarian and Forward Thinker. The movie at school never mentioned him being an author.
    Henrietta turned a few more of the brittle pages. Some of the paper crumbled under her fingers. She reached the table of contents and scanned it until she found a section labeled “House Animals,” and the subsection “Housecats—Wild.”
    It seemed unbelievable that this book should have such an entry. She’d never read or heard about wild housecats anywhere before today. Why didn’t her teachers ever mention them? She wondered, for the first time, who decided what would be taught at school. Henrietta noted the page number of the chapter on House Animals, and flipped to it.
    Endemic to Attics and Root Cellars. Because of its habitual reclusiveness and a lack of Research (due partly to difficulty of retaining Specimens and partly to poor persistence in captivity), few facts about the animal are known with Certainty.
    The Wild Housecat’s diet remains unobserved; despite its probable unreliability, it seems appropriate to report the opinion of Tradition, as a popular Children’s Rhyme suggests a subsistence on “Cobwebs and Rat Tails, Dust and Rust.”
    This Animal is considered beneficial to Humankind, as it is held not only to control Rat populations, but also to keep houses free of Spider Webs and Insects. For this reason, many Homes contain so-called “Cat