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choking, eyes pinched tight. Finally, as the palace bell pealed over the city, Djazir’s body lost all tension.
    Al-Ashmar breathed heavily, wincing from the pain in his screaming shoulder. He cleaned Djazir as best he could and tugged him into position on the remaining bolt of white cloth. Then he rushed to Rabiah’s side and tried to wake her. He thought surely she was dead, thought surely this had all been for naught, but no, she still had a faint heartbeat. She still drew breath, however slowly. He slapped her, but she would not wake.
    The bell pealed. They would return soon.
    Al-Ashmar took a bit of the tonic still left in the phial and spread it under and inside Rabiah’s nostrils. She jerked and her eyes opened. She was slow in focusing, but eventually she seemed to recognize Al-Ashmar.
    “Where am I?” she asked, rubbing the tonic from her nose.
    “Not now. I will explain all later.”
    Al-Ashmar helped Rabiah through the grate, but before he could take the first of the steps down, she turned him around and wrapped her arms around him.
    “Thank you for my life,” she said.
    He freed himself from her embrace and pulled her toward the stairs. “Thank me when you have your new one.”
    Al-Ashmar knew they would have to leave for foreign lands, but it couldn’t be helped. He hadn’t expected this change in fortune, but neither had he expected his wife to die or to raise seven children on his own. He would take what fate gave him and deal with it as best he could.
    With Rabiah.
    Yes, with Rabiah it would all be just a little bit easier.
    Afterword by Bradley P. Beaulieu
    I heard an analogy years ago: that you draw yourself toward a goal similar to the way a rubber band pulls a weight across a table. If the pull is too slack, you end up moving toward your goal too slowly (or not at all); too fast and the rubber band breaks. It’s at those in-between times where the pull is not too strong and not too slack that you work at peak efficiency. I believe this is what happened to me with this story.
    “In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat” was written during Uncle Orson’s Literary Bootcamp in the summer of 2005. In Bootcamp, the campers are asked to write one story—in twenty-four hours. Well, that’s not exactly true. You take one day to brainstorm and develop the story idea; the story idea is critiqued by the group the following day; and then you’re expected to write the story in twenty-four hours.
    The guidelines we were given were interesting and may give some insight into how easy it can be to generate story ideas. First, we were told to interview random people. We were allowed to say why we were interviewing them, but beyond that it was simply a conversation with a person I didn’t know that would eventually (inevitably) reveal something insightful or enigmatic or thought-provoking—in other words: something I could use in my story. The thing to note here is that this was not only true of the person I ended up interviewing, but of anyone I might have interviewed.
    The young woman I met was a college student, still trying to find her way in life but interested in medicine. She spoke of a family friend who had had a stroke. During her recovery this woman would try to say one word, but a completely different yet perfectly intelligible word would come out of her mouth, as if the wires to the one word had been rerouted to the other. Out of this conversation, as you may have guessed, came the Empress.
    Another brainstorming technique was to visit a library or bookstore and simply browse. Just like a conversation with a stranger, this will eventually produce something that can complicate or enhance a story. I found a book on iridology, the discipline of assessing one’s health through examination of the iris and white of the eye. I’ll leave you to determine how this affected the story.
    I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t complete the story in the allotted time frame. I took an extra day, but I’m