Alternative Dimension by Bill Kirton

he hadn’t understood why people wanted to do that when there was such a wide choice of human body shapes and sizes and so much variety in the features you could give yourself. He watched the feline avatars stand there with their ears twitching and their tails swishing from side to side and found his curiosity growing about the actual physical nature of the persons who’d chosen to represent themselves in that way. The more cats he’d met, the more fascinating they seemed to become. There was one in a pale tiger skin who wore bling necklaces and jewels and looked sensational. When she occasionally used one of her other avatars – a blue-eyed redhead with the statutory perfect figure – he felt less inclined to spend time with her.
    It was Lucy who explained it all to him. She’d appeared on a dance floor once, weaving her own individual moves among the others, who were all coupled in the tangled intricacies of the samba or else glued together and swaying through one of the slower dances. At one point she’d bumped into Milton and apologised. Milton’s partner, a Goth with red teardrops tattooed on both cheeks, had told her to fuck off and Lucy had stopped and said, ‘My dear girl, I understand that your apparel expresses your desire to resist convention. Such resistance is always the refuge of those who are struggling with a sense of inadequacy. I’ve no doubt yours is very deep and I should feel sympathy for you instead of amused disdain, but telling me to fuck off provokes just one reaction. Shove it up your ass, sister.’
    The Goth could only manage another ‘Fuck off’ and Lucy resumed her solitary gliding. But she did take the time to send Bob a personal message and, eventually, the two of them became close friends. Strangely, the Goth was somehow changed by the incident. She spent the rest of the evening complaining of a headache and pains in her neck and, just a week later, she failed to sign on at her usual time and Bob never saw her again.
    Milton and Lucy were never lovers, always friends, and hung out together whenever they could.  Bob was surprised to find that she liked the occasional visit to a BDSM site and was happy to send personal messages to him while she allowed herself to be strapped to various devices and ill-treated by more or less articulate masters. It was all part of what she called ‘full-on living’. She craved sensations, was always looking for new experiences. As a human avatar she’d quickly exhausted the possibilities but launching herself as a cat forced her to think in different ways.
    ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think I even move like a cat in normal life nowadays. I’m more aware of my body, I can achieve an amazing stillness when I listen for something. My reactions have sharpened. Oh, and I don’t need anyone. I’m totally self-reliant.’
    ‘Weren’t you like that before?’ asked Bob.
    ‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘Always needed reassurance, or at least confirmation that I was making the right choices. Not any more.’
    ‘And you think that’s come from being a cat?’
    ‘No doubt about it.’
    As the weeks and months went by, Bob heard more and more about Lucy’s everyday life. Her real name was Beatrice and she lived alone in a smallish town in the foothills of the Alps. She’d had a husband but one year he went to Rio for Mardi Gras and never came back. She had no living relatives and earned money by proof-reading manuscripts for a publisher in London. Her days were spent at her computer and her only pastime, apart from wandering through various virtual worlds, was to take long walks or ride her chestnut pony in the hills after the sun had set.
    Then she told him about Sukie.
    Sukie was a kitten who’d just walked through her front door one day, three years before, and sat looking at her. She was tiny, with two white paws and a perfect diamond of white fur between her eyes. Beatrice had picked her up, she’d snuggled into her neck and Beatrice knew that