Ray of Sunberry

Ray was three months old the first time the alley light refracted off his sunglasses and turned him into a rumor.

He had always been a small comet of a thing—orange fur like a smear of sunset, paws a little too big for his legs, whiskers that seemed to twitch a tune only he could hear. He prowled the narrow lanes behind the bakery where the crust crumbs were the size of coin treasure and took naps in the warm grooves of discarded cardboard boxes. He also had eyes that glowed, faint at first and then like twin marbles of molten amber when he was excited or frightened. When those eyes flared, little red threads shot out for a heartbeat—too brief to injure, but long enough to singe a corner of a newspaper, to shave a cat toy into confetti, to set the town’s pigeons into a panicked spiral. The townspeople called it a quirk. Some called it a danger.

So the sunglasses were sensible. Or so Maya said when she fashioned them for him out of an old pair of sunglasses and something with blinking lights and a knob that could be turned down to "friend." Maya was ten, freckled, and the sort of person who fixed radios and mended shoes because she thought they looked too sad. She found Ray under her workbench the night he’d singed the foot of her stuffed fox. She did not scream. She slid him the sunglasses like a crown.

"They'll diffuse the bloom," she told him in the soft, decisive way someone hands you a name and a job. "And hide your glow until you're ready."

Ray put them on like anyone who has ever been adorned by fate: with a lazy blink and a tiny, satisfied purr. The lenses dampened his light, turned his eyes into comfortable, ordinary glass. He felt cooler immediately. He felt safe.

Word traveled fast in small towns. At first people came for a look, as if Ray were an exhibit—an oddity to be admired over lemon tarts at the café. Children drew him with sunglasses bigger than his head and gave him cookies. Tourists snapped pictures. An elderly birdwatcher, Mr. Hollis, argued that the sunglasses were a costume and that any moment Ray would reveal himself to be a demonic force of laser heat. Most days Ray basked in his little celebrity, lapping milk from saucers and learning that getting pets behind the ear often meant someone's lunch fell. He liked being noticed.

But being noticed is not the same as being understood.

The first time the sunglasses failed them was a rain-slashed Thursday in late spring. The town of Sunberry was famous for two things: its clifftop festival and its old clock tower that rang the hours in polished brass and stubborn chimes. The clock mechanism was an elegant maze of gears and a complaining mainspring, and each spring the townsfolk wound it for the festival that marked the return of the fishing boats. This year, the bell had jammed—something inside had rusted into a stubborn knot—and the clock's hands had stopped with a final, accusing finger pointing at three minutes to five.

The festival depended on the clock. Lanterns would be lit when the bell tolled six times at dusk. Vendors would set up beneath the tower. Children would race each other around the fountain in circles as the band warmed its trumpets. Without the bell, the festival would be an empty practice.

Maya and Ray heard the clatter of worry as people tried to force the gears open and failed. They listened to the old caretaker swear into his beard and then to each other, voices spiking like frightened birds. Then they walked up the narrow path toward the tower together—Maya with her toolbox and Ray wearing the sunglasses as if that were the only human gesture required of him.

Maya had tuned the shades over many afternoons into a precise instrument. She had added a little dial that could focus Ray’s beams into a sharp, clean line—like a crafting laser you might imagine in a jeweler's workshop—and a lock that limited intensity so that the beam could either shave a thread or cauterize a cable, depending on need. The idea had been to keep Ray from accidentally flambéing the town, not to make him a tool. But the town had run out of other options.

"You have to promise me you'll use the dimmer," Maya said, hands steady on the knob, as they climbed the winding stair. She could feel the slight tremor in Ray’s body. He sniffed the damp air and twitched his whiskers; the sunglasses perched on his nose like the only sensible thing left in an irrational world.

At the top, the bell hung enormous and patient, its inside a dark throat. The gears below were a collage of iron teeth, and in the center—a metal rod had snapped, a remnant of seasons and metal fatigue—and the broken edge had welded into a jagged wedge that jammed the whole mechanism. The caretaker's face was the color of old rope.

"It’s wedged. We can’t move the escape ratchet without cutting this out," he said hollowly. "But no one has the tools...and if we try, it'll set off a tremor. The chimes could come down."

Maya stepped forward, breathed once, and stepped back. "Ray," she said, like someone offering a compass to a small, uncertain hand. "You can do this. You know how to be precise."

Ray padded forward. The tower smelled of cold metal and wood polish and the long slow seas. He eased into position with the lamp light catching the curve of his sunglasses. Maya flicked the dimmer to the smallest notch. A thin red thread winked from behind the lenses—a breath of light. Ray took a breath too, the way he always did before a big leap when he was still a kitten. He aimed with his tiny head, aligning the beam in the gap between the broken rod and the gear teeth.

Laser is not loud. It is a soundless thing that makes small, perfect changes, the way water makes a smooth path through soft earth. Ray's beam shaved the jagged edge into a neat sliver, then sliced the fused metal like a knife through cloth. Sparks popped like tiny fireworks. The caretakers held their breath. The clock's gears sighed like relieved old animals. The wedge loosened, tumbled away, and the mainspring unfurled with a thankful groan.

Ray stopped, and without thinking he removed his sunglasses.

There was a pause—an audible intake from the humans clustered behind him. Ray blinked at the thing he had done: the rod was smooth, the gears moved, the bell was free. He felt eyes on him, and for half a second, the town's adoration and fear braided together into a strong rope and pulled him toward the edge.

Then a child shrieked—half with joy, half with theatrical horror—and the caretaker clapped his hands like somebody practicing thunder. The people crowded the tower stairs, their faces bright and wet and reverent even; they thanked Maya; they patted Ray on the head with careful affection; they called him a hero and a marvel and a dangerous angel by turns.

What mattered was not the names they gave him, but that his eyes had been seen. Without the sunglasses, his glow returned full and warm, the color of honey in sunlight. It made the scattered cameras flare. It made the eyes of the children widen into saucers. It made someone cross their arms like a judge. For Ray it was dizzying and honest. He nuzzled Maya's glove and decided the world wasn't quite as terrible as it had sometimes seemed.

After the bell rang—six long, patient sounds that made the lanterns swing and the band cue their first jaunty notes—the town said thank-you gifts and invitations and small fortunes of crumbs to take home. Then they spoke in smaller circles about rules.

"You can't let him go around firing those things," someone said. "What if he loses control?"

"He saved us," said another, hands still wringing. "He saved the festival."

Maya listened and finally said, "He saved it because we listened. He learned to be careful. We all did."

Ray learned the same. The sunglasses became more than hide-and-seek with his eyes; they were a practice in restraint. Maya added a remote lock for emergencies, a soft case for the lenses, and a tiny graduation ribbon from the school that said "Good Citizen." He learned to aim at problems rather than people, to temper the heat with gentleness: a scalpel of light to cut a stranded kite from a telephone line, a flourless dot to cauterize a rope binding a seal pup, a faint red stitch to weld a snapped fishing pole back into usefulness. People stopped whispering "danger" so much and started saying "help" when they saw him.

Not everyone adjusted their thinking. Mr. Hollis continued to watch with suspicious binoculars from the park bench. A city inspector once came down to test the strength of Ray's restraint with a clipboard and a very firm expression. Ray passed with a stubborn, polite stare and a willingness to wear his sunglasses at the inspector's prodding.

But the truth of Ray's life was simpler than the town's debates. He liked the taste of roasted fish on midsummer nights. He liked to chase the sunbeams that fell through laundry. He liked to curl on Maya's lap while she tinkered with the radio, her fingers moving like small, competent birds. Above all, he liked knowing he could be useful in a careful, considerate way. The sunglasses remained a part of his face, not just for show but as a promise: to choose what to reveal and when. In the pockets of the townspeople, on the backs of children, under the eaves where little hands would press palm prints for luck, you could find exclamations of affection: "There goes Ray," "Ray the Laser Cat," "Ray the Town's Pulse."

Years later, when the clock's gears needed a finer adjustment and the festival had become a tale told with more bells than teeth, people still came to see the kitten in sunglasses who could fire lasers from his eyes. He was no longer a rumor but a resident, the sort of neighbor who could offer you coffee and mend your heart if needed. He would sometimes sit on the ledge of the tower at twilight and watch the sea carry away a sun like an orange coin, sunglasses reflecting the horizon into twin, safe suns.

When visitors asked why he always wore the sunglasses, Maya would shrug and smile, and Ray would boot his little paws together like a gentleman. "Because even powers have manners," Maya liked to say, and Ray liked it because it made him sound sensible. People laughed. They always laughed.

At the end of every festival, as the lanterns twinkled and the band finished with a note the town felt like holding in its hand, Ray would climb onto the stage and take a bow. He did not fire lasers to show off—those were saved for work and emergency and once in a while, for cutting through the difficult thick tangle of netting the fishermen had caught by mistake. Mostly, he blinked through his sunglasses and let applause brush his whiskers.

There was one time, late on a winter night when the stars were small and pointed like pins, that a young boy sobbed on Ray’s knees because his father had to leave town for a long time. Ray pressed his warm head into the boy’s hand and felt the usual twine of sadness. He did not know how to fix long distances—not even his lasers could reach that far—but he did his best. He kept his sunglasses on so the boy could look at him without worrying beneath.

The boy dried his eyes and smiled, asked shyly, "Do you miss being a normal cat?"

Ray thought. He had never been normal, not in the small, ordinary ways that most kittens were. He had been dangerous. He had been an instrument. He had been adored and feared in equal measures. But he had also been loved, mended, taught. He had worn his sunglasses for all of it.

He purred, a low, steady drum. The boy wrapped an arm around him, and the town's lights blinked like a promise. Ray's beams stayed hidden behind the shades, patient as a tool in a craftsman's hand, and his heart—bright and absurd and entirely competent—beat on.

And somewhere beyond the harbor where the fishing boats cut the first cold breeze of sea air, the lanterns of Sunberry swung in the evening, and a small, sunglass-wearing kitten dreamed not of trophies, but of the next person who might need a little light.