SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN. DON’T BE AFRAID.

 

SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN. 

DON’T BE AFRAID.

Let’s get one thing straight: in the beginning, the girl didn’t have cat ears. Those showed up later. She had normal ears. Normal for a human, anyway. On a cat, they would have looked completely bizarre.

Oh, right, I’m supposed to tell you that this all took place in medieval Japan. On a tiny island somewhere in Japan. Totally fictional. Both the Japan in this story and the island itself. This isn't historical fiction, so you can relax.

Where was I? Cat ears, right. Well, like I was saying, or trying to, the girl wasn't born with them. Until she was eleven, her ears were nothing more than your run-of-the-mill appendages. Are ears appendages? Maybe? Doesn't matter. They were the kind of human ears you can still find stuck to the sides of most kids' heads today.

And that’s where the cat comes in. A talking cat, obviously. If it didn't talk, what would be the point of dragging the cute furball into this mess, right?

The cat appeared to the girl at sunrise. A white cat. No. Black. No. Orange. Oh, wait a second… It was a white, black, and orange cat. A Calico? I think that’s what they’re called. Anyway, the cat appeared to her just as the sun was coming up (hence my confusion about the colors) and said: “Something is going to happen. Don’t be afraid.”

The girl, who even in a fictional world was stunned by the fact that a cat was speaking human-ese, jumped and said: “You can talk? But you’re a cat!”

The cat must have rolled its eyes (I definitely would have) and simply repeated: “Something is going to happen. Don’t be afraid.”

The girl woke up immediately after and realized it had all been a dream. She felt much better right away.

Until she ran her hand over her head, thinking there were two tufts of hair in the wrong spot, and realized that… well, obviously… she now had two cat ears right there.

Strictly speaking, in a dimly lit room with no mirrors and no electricity, you can't exactly tell that two tufts of fur in the wrong spot are actually cat ears. But you can tell they aren't just messy hair.

The cat had told the girl not to be afraid. We know the cat told her not to be afraid. She heard the cat tell her not to be afraid. So, what did the girl do? She panicked.

The whole house was jolted awake by the girl’s screams. 

It’s worth pointing out that even in a completely fictional medieval Japan, the walls of traditional Japanese houses are still paper-thin. 

So, instead of the usual rooster crowing, the family was woken up by the poor girl’s caterwauling.

It was a house full of women: grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, plus the girl who’d dreamed of a talking feline and was moments away from realizing she now had two cat ears.

The men – grandfather, father, uncle, brothers, brother-in-law – had all died in accidents: an earthquake here, a shipwreck there, or in the war, which is one of those accidents that not everyone remembers to avoid.

Once they finally managed to get the girl to stop wailing and sit still, the three younger women – mother, aunt, and sister – carefully examined the tufts by lantern light. They had to do it like that, because it was still so early that even the rooster was asleep, or way too confused by all that caterwauling to dare crow. Roosters do know what happens to them if they start crowing out of order. 

One after another, the three women clamped their hands over their mouths to keep from shrieking. Not just because they were all genteel women, but because they knew perfectly well that shrieking at this point would only send the girl spiraling back into a panic.

Only the grandmother declined to inspect the girl’s head. No one thought much of it; the woman was an elderly lady with long white hair and eyes nearly the same color due to cataracts. 

However, none of the other women were prepared for the question she asked:

“Did she grow cat ears?”

“I grew cat ears?!” the girl cried. She demanded someone fetch a mirror so she could finally see what on earth had sprouted from her head.

The task fell to her aunt, who had lived in the local feudal lord’s court back when she was married to a samurai, and had received a mother-of-pearl framed mirror as a wedding gift.

The aunt brought the mirror, but her hands were shaking so violently that the girl's older sister had to take over and hold it steady. Only then could the girl finally confirm that there were indeed two small – I’d even go so far as to say cute – cat ears on her head.

And it was then, for just a split second, that the thought crossed the girl's mind and she asked: “Am I turning into a cat?”

Without budging from where she sat, the grandmother calmly replied: “Into a cat? Of course not. You are turning into a Daughter of the Silver Moon.”

The girl actually kind of liked the sound of it. It felt important. Until that moment, she’d just been the brat of the house: the youngest of all the sisters and brothers, the one nobody paid attention to, and the one everyone bossed around. Even the gardener and his wife, who helped with the cleaning, thought they could tell her what to do. “Don’t step there, miss, it’s muddy. 

Don’t walk through there, miss, the tatami was just cleaned.” But now that she was a Daughter of the Silver Moon, things were definitely looking up.

The other three women must have been thinking things were about the change too, though not exactly with the same optimism. The sister dropped the mirror, the aunt couldn’t hold back a scream, and the mother dropped her lantern, nearly setting the whole place on fire.

What the girl with the brand new cat ears didn’t know was that, on that island, being a Daughter of the Silver Moon was far from a blessing. It was a curse. And a curse so ancient that only her grandmother even remembered it existed – or that it could strike any family.

Well, “any family”... that’s not exactly right. Some families had actually made deals with interesting devils. Devils with cat ears.

Unlike roosters, however, humans don’t always realize that there's a cost to their actions.

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©2026 CE @NoirOnTheVine 

Author’s Note: This is a snippet from the new version of a novelette I wrote a couple of years ago, now with a different setting (Japan) and genre (science-fantasy). It’s also a gift to a friend.