INTARSIA
He woke knowing what would make the eye of the god.
The bedroom had a muffled and still quality signalling that it had snowed overnight. He inched out from under the quilts on the bed – the quilts, his wife’s life’s work, twenty-three of them, heavy over him, the weight no substitute for her loved and missed body, eight years gone – and fumbled for his cane. It was walnut and elegant, with a raven for a handle and a slender rapier within.
His feet touched the shifting ground and the cats scattered.
The cats: in the night, they had toppled three towers of magazines, which were now slicked over his bedroom floor. He sighed. The cats were his loves and his trials, eight of them in total though there was an additional, rotating cast of outdoors-only felines who also roamed his property. The indoor team required constant vigilance.
Later, when
