“The New Familiar” • by Lorraine Schein

Soot, my old familiar, was gone. Balancing on my broomstick had become too difficult for the old cat, and he’d fallen off.

I had mourned for months, until a friend in my coven offered me a kitten from her litter. I picked up a mewing gray one. “Good choice,” she smiled, without explaining further.

One blustery night, my new cat’s tail shot up and he yowled. Stormy nights were best for magic. I mounted my broom, and he leapt up behind me.

Aloft, I looked back, and saw the cat drop off the broom. I scanned the clouds wildly. Then he rose back up, calmly riding the air currents alongside me.

I didn’t know a cat could fly!

That’s when I named him Storm Cat.

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Lorraine Schein is a New York writer. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Enchanted Conversation, Mermaids Monthly, and in the anthology Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from Mayapple Press: www.mayapplepress.com

Lorraine’s most recent appearance in our pages was “Corrections.” 

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction piece playing off at least two of the following key words: cat, poker, storm, sandwich.

More stories to come!