FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Eliot

They had been unloading boxes all morning. It was hard, unrewarding work, especially when you take into account how hot the mornings were in Arizona. Not just an ordinary sort of hot. An advanced hot. Those words had been passing through North's head all morning as he helped Michael, his best friend, move everything into their new apartment. Lord knows why they decided to settle in Phoenix of all places and why they decided to make the move during one of the hottest summers on record. Sweat dripped down his fur and pooled somewhere in the vicinity of his lower back. At the moment he couldn't really be bothered to find out exactly where. All North knew was that a shower during a day like this rivaled heaven itself in terms of comfort. He bent down to pick up another faceless cardboard box that looked as if it once housed a lamp or something along those lines. Its contents were heavy and obviously round in structure. The latter trait caught his attention when he began bringing it up the steps and something rolled inside. He put it down by a small tower of other boxes, all of them labeled either 'living room' or 'junk' in dry-erase marker.

Feeling the sweat flow as he moved his upper body, he tiptoed past an exceptionally pissed-looking Michael who was presently leaning against the door frame with a cold beer in one hand a cigarette in another. For Michael this whole ordeal was a long time coming. He moved his wing to his neck and ruffled the feathers on the back of his head. Sweat stuck to his palm. He wiped it on a paper towel that stuck out of a box and put his can down. Looking down the steps to the entrance and towards their rented pick-up he could see North unload some more boxes. His best friend was a childish 20-something-year-old feline with a full head of dirty blond hair and a perpetual stubble that he refused to shave fully. Then again, he didn't need to. North spent most of his time in front of his console, in the darkness of whatever living room they presently occupied, with a can of Coca Cola to his left and some chips to his right. Michael cursed his physique silently under his breath. No matter how many hours North spent motionless, he never put a single pound. When they were younger, North always seemed like a creature of fantasy. An enchanted coffee table if you will. If Michael ever wanted to find him for whatever reason all he needed to do was find a nearby TV set with an AV outlet. Patiently Michael observed his friend as he lowered some more boxes to the ground and stood up straight, wiping the sweat from his brow with his wrist. North's fur was a straight black, without a single trace of any other colour, making him seem like a spectre of some sort, should you meet him the dark. Not to mention that his height and naturally thin physique made him seem more like an underfed basketballer. Michael had thought for a long time that North had some sort of disorder, probably brought on by his Coca Cola consumption. For as long as they've been friends Michael never saw him drink anything besides that and water. Tea made him physically ill and he couldn't stand natural juices of any sort. The only time Mike got him to drink a single drop of it was when North was ill a couple of years back. Within moments, he was in the bathroom, hunched over a toilet, heaving his guts out. Michael tore himself out of his memories with another drag of his cigarette and stepped aside once again to let North through. His black-furred friend stopped for a moment at the top of the stairs and keenly observed the cigarette that dangled out of Mike's beak.

"That's bad for you, y'know?" North said in a tone that sounded very familiar. Michael just frowned at him defiantly and took another drag "Do you think I smoke for shits and giggles?" He dropped the stub and stepped on it, extinguishing it with the sole of his leather shoe "We've had this talk before. I'm addicted."

North descended the stairs once again, shaking his head in disapproval, and went to pick some more boxes up. As he retrieved the next one out of the back of the red pickup he looked back up the stairs and locked eyes with his avian companion. Michael, or Mike, stood some five and a half foot tall, dressed from head to toe in clothing that reminded North irresistibly of a bizzaroworld James Bond. Leather shoes, khaki trousers that were neatly folded at his ankles, a freshly-pressed shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and a tie dangling from his neck. Brown feathers poked out of the hole in his trousers, blending in with the khakis. Like all avians, Michael lacked any hair on his head, his scalp home to a bushel of wet feathers. From a distance Michael seemed at least thirty-five or more. He wasn't even 26 yet.

"You could help me out. It wouldn't kill you." North's arms flew up in protest after he placed the last box on the ground, his face contorted into a squint due to a lack of sunglasses. Michael stepped down from the porch and finished his can of beer, placing it gently on the edge of the handrail. The moment North was sure that Michael had stepped away and gotten to a safe distance he picked up a tennis ball that rested in the open top of a box and threw it hard against the can, making it fall off the edge and into the grass below. The impact startled Michael and he jumped, blurting out a loud "What the fuck?!" as he did, his whole reaction making North laugh heartily. Upon seeing what happened, Michael joined in. Sometimes the cat drove him mad but most of the time he was great fun to have around, what with all his quirks and strange ideas about how the world worked.

An hour later they had finally stuffed all the boxes into the apartment and parked the pick-up in the driveway. The house was a spacious two-floor semi-detached. The ground floor consisted of a medium-sized kitchen that had everything you'd need to cook a decent meal. The worktop was made of dark marble, with the shelves it stood on extending into the dining room area where it formed a bar of sorts. Above the bar section hung pots and pans on hooks, reflecting the morning sunlight, making the living room look like a disco. The dining room was rather plain. Four chairs in around an empty table. Behind it stood a shelf with a glass display that housed several dozen orange and red ceramic plates. The living room was just two couches facing each other at a 90 degree angle around a knee-high coffee table. The TV shelf was completely empty but North wasted no time hoisting his flat-screen television onto it. Empty bookshelves lined the walls side-by-side, interspaced by the odd photograph of some city skyline. Mike ventured upstairs, followed closely by North who was examining everything like a combination of a meticulous housewife and an elated toddler. For a second his expression was one of concern as he ran his finger over a dusty sideboard but seconds later he'd be smiling, glaring with wide eyes at something that caught his interest. The house had three bedrooms. Two shared the same wall, both with pull-out double beds and deserted nightstands. The whole house shared one generously spaced walk-in wardrobe that stood at the end of the hallway. The last bedroom was placed beside the bathroom, sharing a wall with it, and had no furniture in it besides an empty bed frame and corded telephone that sat on the floor, collecting dust. Satisfied with their lodgings the duo descended down the stairs and sat down on the couch to wait.

Each of them thought about how they would organize their lives in this house. Michael was a writer with one book already published and another in the works. For now he could put his feet up, write as much or as little as he wanted to, and wait for the royalties to trickle in. In his mind he was already arranging the clutter on his desk, his pens and pencils, his laptop and tabletop boombox. As for the cat, he was per-emptively maneuvering phantom Coke cans and chip bowls around the coffee table, trying to get the best view of the TV's screen and still have space to score a rapid head-shot without dropping the source of his mysterious powers. Each to his own, Michael thought to himself and smiled a little. North stopped dead at one point, repeated three or four identical motions with his hands and then clapped happily to himself. Michael stifled a giggle. The feline stood up, stretched his tail and back and walked over to a box labeled as 'North's crap'. The label was Mike's work. North was a part-time programmer of something that Michael couldn't understand for the life of him. Whenever he was questioned about his job, North would break out into a series of extremely technical descriptions that usually left the uninitiated baffled. The bird scratched the matted feathers on his head and just went back to drumming his talons against the leather couch. A mass of cables and tail walked past Mike's head and bent down, plugging something into the TV. Within ten minutes the Xbox was up and running, North busily hammering away at the keys, bouncing around a skeleton monster in some game called Dark Souls. He had his tongue clenched firmly between his lips and would occasionally mutter an incomprehensible piece of profanity into his chin, doing this whenever he died. To Mike's surprise, this seemed to happen more often than usual. But the cat was tenacious. The next two hours were spent in silent bliss, the only sounds penetrating the veil of quiet exhaustion being the mashing of buttons and the odd "Fuck" or "Shit", courtesy of Mike once the controller got passed to him. They were playing with North's 'guest' controller, partly on account of Michael's talons that would badly scratch any controller that wasn't made of titanium. The feline was violently protective of his gaming hardware. Mike was almost completely sure his friend's greatest accomplishment was the collection of unique controllers he picked up at various conventions and expos.

The house they had rented already had one tenant, a tenant that seemed to not exist if their personal effects were any indication. Matter of fact, there were none. The house looked deserted. They had found this mysterious plus one on Craigslist. It was a woman apparently, one that worked almost all day and had no use for a house this big if she lived on her own. Besides, the ad stated that she needed roommates because the rent was too steep. Upon arriving at the house a couple of hours earlier, the out-of-place duo found a post-it note on the door that read 'I'll be back at 4. Make yourselves @ home' in neat cursive. After a few hours of waiting, Mike began checking his watch again and again, hoping that he would be able to accelerate time by staring at the seconds hand as it did its rounds around the clock face. Finally, 4 o'clock arrived, and not a moment too soon. North had fallen asleep with his head thrown back, no signs of life coming from his limp form besides the momentary rumble of his stomach. Michael stood up and paced to the front door. Casting a glance at the door, he prepared to turn around and sit back down. Suddenly the lock shifted and clicked as someone unlocked it, or at least tried to. Finally it opened, revealing a peculiar sight indeed.

A female snow leopard with an unlit cigar in her mouth and a heavy briefcase appeared in the frame, her paws struggling to free a house key from the lock. About halfway through her routine of tugs and yanks she stopped and looked up, finally noticing that someone was staring at her. Michael locked eyes with her and she stood still, like a deer in headlights. Many weeks later Mike would think back to this moment and silently thank whatever force was watching over him for the passing police car that drowned out the dull thud of a cigar falling to the ground.