The August Lisa Mason Story
I first told this true story, event by event, on Facebook .and received such expressions of worried suspense and relief, delight and enjoyment that I was inspired to write the lovely story below, taken one fantasy level above reality.
Some time before we adopted Athena, we saw the outstanding documentary, “The Elephant in the Living Room,” about people who are compelled to keep wild animals and the wild animals that often live near—and endanger—our civilized homes (think huge serpents, mountain lions). I have to wonder about our domesticated cats and dogs, who sometimes still have one paw in the jungle, and why we love them so.
“Crazy Chimera Lady”
Lisa Mason
“It’s now or never,” Thomas says as we breathe the scent of lavender perfuming our garden. “We should adopt another chimera. And soon.”
“Before we get too much older and have to worry about the chimera outliving you and me?” I sip my chilled chardonnay.
“Yes.” My husband contemplates his cabernet sauvignon. Thomas prefers red, I prefer white. In the two-hundred-forty-five chimera years of our marriage, we’ve never had a wine fight. We’ve both come to think about time in chimera years. It has made us feel closer to them. “And so? What do you think?”
Midnight after a productive day. I’ve woven half a tapestry commissioned by a wealthy coder. Thomas has carved a dozen gemstones for a day-trader who, despite her abrasive manners, always pays in full and on time.
“I don’t know.” I sigh. It’s been fifty-six long chimera years since Alana died at the age of a hundred-twenty-six. A good long life for an ivory-wing, a breed not known for its longevity. Six chimera years earlier, Luna had died. We didn’t know Luna’s age when we adopted her from the animal shelter, but she was a blue-wing, which is a long-lived breed. She probably had been older than Alana.
After fourteen chimera years, the grief for my girls eventually subsided. Became a distant ache rather than tears streaming down my face while I slept. Now I’m not sure I can watch another beloved chimera grow from clutchling to full-fledged to oldster and die. Which they do. Usually before we do.
“I’ve loved chimeras since I was a kid,” my husband argues. “My dad always had a clutch of seal-wings in the house. I want a chimera again, Susan, I really do.  Before it would be irresponsible of us to adopt.”
“We’re having this conversation now that we’re four-hundred-thirty-four chimera years old?” I joke. “Not when we were two-hundred-ten?”
“Yes.” Maybe Thomas is in such a serious mood because we’ve just executed our wills, powers of attorney, and all those other fun documents that force you to contemplate your own mortality. That’s not something you do when you’re two-hundred-ten, either. “Now or never, for the rest of our lives.”
“Never, then,” I whisper.
He chooses to ignore that. “I wish you’d search the Web one more time.”
It’s not as if I haven’t. Though I’ve searched only for another ivory-wing like Alana—golden eyes, plumy white tail, white feathery wings. I’d found such an enchanted creature thirty-five chimera years ago. But she was—as her foster mom honestly admitted—a biter. My seal-wing, Sita, had been a biter. Blue-eyed and beautiful, with fawn-colored wings and paws, Sita had often made my life difficult. I was a university student, then a graduate weaver looking for a husband. She’d left a scar across my left hand.
I couldn’t have a biter who looked like my gentle Alana. That would have been too hard. I had to let that chimera go.
Going on Facebook hasn’t helped. Everyone, it seems, has a beloved domesticated chimera. Posts adorable photos and videos. Chimeras snoozing in the sun. Chimeras leaping in and out of crates. Chimeras flapping happily in aviaries, fetching Frisbees. The big wild chimeras, in zoos and wildlife preserves, have their own photo opps, too. Frolicking with their clutchlings in grasslands. Soaring over mountaintops.
A Facebook friend, a weaver in Australia, started posting photos of the silver-stripe clutchlings she’d rescued from a parking lot in Sidney, and I found myself straying into the pet supplies aisle at Whole Foods. Sure enough, the Whole Paws label offers high-quality canned chimera food and bagged kibbles with a low ash content. No soy, corn, grain, or dairy. Just whole ground rabbit fortified with B-6, calcium, and other vitamins and minerals.
Rabbit—not fish, fowl, or deer—is a chimera’s food of choice in the wild. Rabbits are the reason farmers domesticated chimeras centuries ago and bred down their size. Which is fine with me. If you think rabbits are cute, you’ve never tried to grow vegetables. There’s nothing cute about ravenous lagomorphs gnawing your carrots and spinach into mulch.
I push back my patio chair, go inside to the computer. “If it’ll make you happy,” I tell Thomas, “I’ll search now.”
“It’ll make me very happy,” my husband says and follows me.
I log onto the Web, go to the usual websites—Ebay, the Tri-County Society for the Protection of Chimeras, and Purebred Chimeras Rescue. Thomas stands behind my chair, leaning over the screen.
“Oh?” I click on an Ebay listing for a blue-eyed, blue-wing clutchling. “Damn! Her breeder is up in Redding. You must be kidding me.”
“What is that, a four-hour drive from Piedmont?”
“Try five, and that’s just one way. This won’t work. I can’t see ten hours on the freeway to adopt a chimera, no matter how sweet she looks.”
Thomas brings me my glass of wine. “Keep searching.”
Tri-County has hundreds of listings of the usual domesticated chimeras. Though they look appealing and desperately need homes, we can’t find a likely candidate. We’ve both been raised with seal-wings. For the last chimera we will probably ever own, we want an exotic.
I go to Purebred Chimeras Rescue. The website has three pages of promising exotics, but they’re all males. Ara, our flame-wing who died sixty-three chimera years ago, had been a lovely boy chimera, but he didn’t have that loving maternal instinct which, in my experience, all female chimeras possess. The last chimera we will ever own has to be a girl.
Then there she is.
Baby Blue is a nine-month-old clutchling surrendered by an ailing, aging breeder to the San Jose SPOC. Purebred Chimeras Rescue took her from San Jose to their headquarters in Davis for registration, then to a vet in Salinas where she was de-wormed, given surgery under anesthetic to spay her, treated for fleas and lice, and given the full battery of vaccinations. From Salinas, PCR took her to Chimera Hill in Santa Cruz for adopting out.
“Born and bred in cages and carrying crates all her life,” Thomas says, “with a history like that.”
“Yes.” I frown. “They’re calling her a blue-wing mix, but look. She looks like a lilac-wing bred with an ivory-wing.”
“They must have named her Baby Blue on account of her eyes.”
Oh, her eyes! Her slanted, almond-shaped eyes are the color of a cloudless summer sky. Her description says she’s shy. Fearful of people. She struggles to escape when a human handles her. Possibly, the description says, she will be a problem chimera. A biter. A clawer. A potential killer.
You see that now and then on the Web. A chimera kills her human.
In the shelter’s four photos, Baby Blue looks shy and fearful and gorgeous. She looks like Luna and Alana miraculously combined into one chimera. A blue-eyed ivory-wing with a lilac face-mask, artistic splotches of lilac on her silky white coat and wings, and a plumy lilac tail.
My fingertips hesitate on the keyboard. “What do you think?”
“Fill out the application,” Thomas says. “Do it, Susan.”
“A problem chimera?”
“She’s young. We can train her.” He adds, “She needs us.”
I feverishly navigate through the website. “You know, it will be a lot of extra work, caring for a chimera again. Just when our businesses are doing so well. Our careers transitioning into Act Two.”
I can picture who will take care of the chimera. Clean her eyes, trim her talons, floss her fangs, brush her coat, comb her wing feathers, feed her rabbit meat, change her drinking water, clean her litter box, take her out into the aviary, toss around chimera toys, ooh and aah.
That will be me.
Thomas looks at me. “I’ll take care of her, too. I promise.”
“It’s till death do us part. When she dies, we’ll be a whole lot closer to our own deaths. Are you prepared for that?”
“Absolutely. I’ll work harder than ever on the gemstones. Please, Susan.”
I click on “Apply.”
The application asks a lot of nosy questions. Are we married? Do we rent or own our home? Do we have children living there? How about other animals? Are we financially secure? What is our estimate of an acceptable veterinarian bill for medical services? Do we have heirs or other arrangements for the chimera if anything happens to us? Do we know how to train a chimera? What is our position on neutering, de-taloning, de-fanging, wing-clipping?
Neutering, yes. Everything else, no.
The application requires that we provide two local personal references and their phone numbers. It’s sobering and a little saddening to realize that, at four-hundred-thirty-four chimera years, Thomas and I don’t have a lot of local references. Friends have died or moved away. We’ve each run our independent businesses for a hundred-seventy-five chimera years, deal with gallery owners and clients and agents, but don’t have business partners or employees. Thomas’ parents and step-parents died many chimera years ago, as have mine. His cousins live in Washington State, my only sibling in Colorado.
I understand, I suppose. Purebred Chimeras Rescue is serious about adopting out chimeras to legitimate people. Not to people who would adopt an exotic chimera, then resell her for three times the price. Or de-talon and de-fang and clip her wings. Or sell her to a research laboratory. Or sacrifice her in some satanic ritual.
I shudder to think of it.
We’ve got Stuart as a local reference. Stuart is my tech guy at General Computer Store who replaced the motherboard on my aging Dell. And we’ve got Yoshio, a recluse who’s lived in our neighborhood for two-hundred-and-one chimera years. Yoshio owns a hundred-forty-year-old blue-eyed blue-wing. This last March, he asked us to feed, water, medicate, and fly her while he went off on his annual hike in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We gladly did.
I electronically sign and send the application. “When I was at the university,” I tell Thomas, “I saw an ad for Sita in the Ann Arbor Gazette. I drove to a farm outside of town, handed over ten bucks, and left with my clutchling, fleas and all. No questions asked.”
“It’s a different world,” Thomas agrees.
The next morning a woman emails me. She identifies herself as Gwyneth from Purebred Chimeras Rescue, asks for my phone number and when is a good time to call for an interview.
An interview? Yes. She informs me that twelve other people have applied for Baby Blue. That we shouldn’t be too disappointed if we don’t get her.
“What?” I shout at Thomas. “We finally find a chimera who could be our last and they’re playing games?”
“Send her another email,” Thomas says. “Insist. You’re good at insisting.”
I send Gwyneth another email reiterating how much we want this chimera. I beg and plead. I send the Web address of my weaver’s website, which features two pages of Luna and Alana, two pages of my husband’s carved gemstones, and twenty pages of my award-winning tapestries. A photo of Thomas and me on our wedding day. A photo of me holding Alana in our kitchen. Her furry white arms wrapped lovingly around my shoulders, plumy white tail curled around my waist, white wings fluttering. Thomas took it, one of those once-in-a-lifetime photos you cherish forever.
Gwyneth calls exactly at three in the afternoon.
“So you were this hot-shot industrial weaver and you left it all to make art?” she begins. For someone who wants to adopt out a chimera for a hefty fee—two thousand dollars, cash or check, no credit cards—her tone sounds  a bit belligerent.
My story is no secret. I’ve laid out my checkered life on my Bio page. “Yep,” I say amiably. “I love the craft of weaving. I just didn’t fit into an industrial setting.”
If she thought I was going to pull an attitude, apparently she doesn’t think so anymore. “I know exactly what you mean,” she replies. “I’m an architect myself, but I didn’t like dealing with clients. Now I run a boarding facility for chimeras. Go figure.”
“Which is amazing,” I say and mean it. I looked up Chimera Hill on Facebook. Found photos of a clapboard house beneath a giant avocado tree. Gwyneth is expanding the house, constructing aviaries adjacent to the cages so the chimeras can stretch their wings in the sunlight. “Really amazing.”
She gives a little chimera-like trill. Quizzes me about my previous chimeras. Had Sita, the biter, been de-taloned? Yes, she had. Vets did that in those unenlightened days. Now they won’t because it’s cruel.
“Oh, some vets still de-talon,” Gwyneth snaps. “That’s probably why Sita became a biter. Talons are a chimera’s first defense in the wild.”
“That’s a good point. Extract the talons, and the chimera has to resort to her fangs.”
“Exactly.” Gwyneth sounds pleased. “Do you understand about chimera nutrition? You and your husband look like New-Agey types.”
She’s baiting me. “I totally understand. Chimeras are obligate carnivores.” I recently stumbled upon this term in a chimera magazine. I’m happy to trot it out now.
“Obligate carnivores,” Gwyneth echoes as if she’s never heard the term before, either, but will use it to good advantage with some hapless interviewee in the future. “How do you feel about adopting a female chimera? Some people think they’re inferior to males.”
“Oh, no! We definitely want a female.”
“Okay.” A rustle of papers on her end. ”Just so you know, we’re keeping Baby Blue in a cage with two males. When the vet spayed her two weeks ago, she wasn’t pregnant.”
I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t want our chimera staying in that cage one more night. “I’ll come and get Baby Blue tomorrow.”
“I’ll pencil you in for Saturday.” Gwyneth is paying for the long-distance call but that doesn’t mean she’s allowed to bully me.
“Gwyneth, Saturday is the Fourth of July. Traffic will be hellish up to Santa Cruz. Drunk drivers?”
“Yeah, but tomorrow’s not good.” More rustling of papers. “Our reference checker has to teach class tomorrow. How about Thursday?”
They’re actually going to call Stuart and Yoshio? “Thursday, it is. I will be there for my chimera and I will see you then.” I’m not taking no for an answer.
“I’ll email you directions. Is Thomas coming with you?” Her tone turns coy. “His gemstones are beautiful.”
So she has given our website a going-over. How many of the other twelve applicants have a website with two pages of chimera pictures? “Nope. Thomas will be taking the chimera tree out of storage. And the water bowls and food bowls and chimera toys. And staking up the aviary in the backyard. Our new chimera will be the heiress to the bounty of our chimeras past.”
“Wonderful,” she trills. “But I do hope Thomas will come. I’d love to meet him. He’s really cute.”
I smile. “Yes, he is.”
For the rest of the brand-new August Lisa Mason cat fantasy story, join Tier 2 on my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=23011206.
Donate from your PayPal account to lisasmason@aol.com. Thank you!
Visit me at www.lisamason.com for all my books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, blogs, roundtables, adorable cat pictures, forthcoming works, fine art and bespoke jewelry by my husband Tom Robinson, worldwide links, and more!