Veil of Time by Claire R. McDougall Page A

and I’m not sure we’ll make it. I slept all last night with her dying outside in the barn in the cold. I shudder with the familiar guilt of not being there.
    “It’s just a cat,” Jim is saying.
    Just a cat, but another life I was responsible for.
    “Shut up.”
    We drive in silence except for “Turn here” and then “Pull up behind the green car.”
    I dash into the surgery in my dressing gown with my black bundle of fur and try to explain but cannot rightly answer the details. I wasn’t there. I have known this before. I have known this before.
    They make me wait in a chair with her on my lap, and then it’s, “The vet will see you now.”
    They shake their heads, make me wait, shoot her full of fluid with a dash of electrolytes. I object to nothing, ask no questions. They give me antibiotics, probiotics. I do not object. I hang on to the possibility that it could all have some effect, and I drive home with Winnie eerily quiet in the backseat.
    I fill the syringe and hold her tight to get the medicine down her throat. But she doesn’t have much struggle.
    I lay her back down, flat out on the table. She won’t purr.
    By the evening, she raises her head as I walk into the kitchen. Her eyes seem more awake. But she can’t get up to take the water I offer. I use the syringe to get more fluid into her.
    Jim Galvin taps at the window and mouths, “How is she?”
    I shrug. He comes in, though I still have not forgiven him.
    He starts to make tea, while I sit watching the feeble life of a stray cat that I need to survive suddenly more than my own life.
    Someone has to be held accountable. “How could you leave her out in the cold? She nearly died.”
    “Aye, well.” He drops a tea bag into each cup. “We all die.”
    I sigh. He’s right. It seems we spend so much of living trying not to die. But then death happens anyway. Time is such a useless measure of anything. The most you can say is that we are born and that we die. What comes in between is a short pause. In the great expanse of the universe, the pause is nothing more than a few breaths. We try to make it mean something by adding it up in years, but it doesn’t add up. We’re here; we’re gone. Something else takes our place.
    I get up from the table and lean on the kitchen counter. Jim slides the cup of tea towards my hands, then leaves.
    The next day, Winnie manages to pull herself up andwalk to her bowl of water. My heart jumps, and I’m smiling when Jim comes through the door.
    He says, “I said she’d be fine.”
    “No thanks to you.”
    I pass him a bowl and a box of cornflakes. “You want your milk heated up for that, too?”
    “If it’s not too much trouble.”
    It is too much trouble. Life is too much trouble, but we can’t help but shuffle it along. I crunch my cereal across the table from him.
    He says, “Are you still in a bad mood?”
    I sigh. “I’m not going to grace that with an answer.”
    Oliver couldn’t stand my moods, either, but then, when I was having them, I couldn’t stand him. They were often the precursor of a seizure, which gave him more reason to hate them. I wonder what Jim Galvin would do if I started one right here in front of him, and I am beginning to feel that heat in the soles of my feet, so it behooves me to get rid of him before I find out.
    I take his bowl of cornflakes from him. “I have a terrible headache. Do you mind?”
    He’s saying he doesn’t mind in the least and quite understands, but I am only seeing the part of him that speaks, the lips and teeth; all else has swum out into vague light, and he’s only just out of the door before I feel my way to the bedroom and drop against the pillows.



8
    I lla was gone when Fergus awoke from the Samhain celebration in the commoner’s house, his head in the lap of the older daughter of the house. The thighs of a woman formed a soft-enough pillow, and he was still fatigued from the journey from the Britons, still a bit queasy from the fraoch he