“You’re kidding.”
The small creature, barely the size of a stray cat, blinks up at me, assuring me that this is most certainly not a joke.
“This is supposed to be a Jabberwocky?” I ask. The Jabberwocky in question happens to choose this moment to purr. Maybe I’m going insane, and this actually is a cat. A small spurt of fire from its nostrils quickly tells me I am not.
Just insanely unlucky.
“What am I supposed to feed you, anyway?” I murmur, kneeling down. The Jabberwocky immediately paws at my leg, clambering up. It scrambles onto my shoulder and poses like a gargoyle. I twist my head to look at it, and its composure breaks while it nuzzles into my cheek.
“Are you a girl?” I ask, and it nods. “You’ll need a name, too,” I say aloud. “How about… Munelia?”
She hisses at me, tossing her horned head away from me.
“Okay, not that,” I say. “Amile? Merndole? Bristen? Sandyr?” She perks up, whipping around to face me. “Sandyr it is, then,” I say. A spine on her back pops up, and I absently stroke it flat. Sandyr purrs loudly at this, coiling around my neck like an abstract scarf. I continue to pet her, wondering what on Earth Lewis Carroll was thinking. “The jaws the bite, the claws that catch”, I mean, this little guy looks like she couldn’t catch a fly if she tried!
At the moment, Sandyr is attempting to grab a gnat out of the air, batting her unproportionally large, clawed, and fuzzy paws at it. I’m watching her amusedly when she grows annoyed and decides it’s not worth her time to bother the old-fashioned way, and spits at it.
I’d have laughed if the gnat didn’t disintegrate.
I sigh and scratch her under the chin. Maybe Carroll wasn’t as far off as I would have believed.
“Alright, Sandyr,” I say. “Let’s go home, yeah?”
She purrs and latches ahold of me through my shirt, which is definitely going to have holes in it later. I sigh again.
This is going to be a long, long day.
I loved this it was really funny and I want a Jabberwocky now!