Crazy Cat Lady Character Spotlights, an ongoing series of flash fiction backstories featuring the cast of the The Crazy Cat Lady Cozy Mystery Series.

Lynley’s granddaughter Seleia Voxx has finally turned eighteen. Though finishing up her freshman year at Portland State College and heading for an eventual major in astrophysics, the lovely young redhead still manages her job at the Cupcake City Bakery with friendly enthusiasm.

Seleia enjoys a close relationship with her doting grandmother that only improves as she gets older. She even helps Lynley with her sleuthing on occasion, when the danger isn’t too great.

Lynley is quoted as saying on numerable occasions, “Seleia and I are as close as sibling kittens,” and since Lynley is the cat lady, she should know.

Even so, like all teenagers Seleia has a few secrets in her past that her grandmother never found out about…

Photo by Rodolfo Sanches Carvalho on Unsplash

SELEIA

“Oh, man,” Seleia sighed. “This is wrong. So wrong.”

She giggled as she passed the bottle to Marjorie who wiped off the rim with the tail of her blouse and took a swig.

“Yup,” Marjorie belched. “Wrong, wrong, wrong. But fun, right?”

Then both girls laughed out loud.

“Shh!” Marjorie put a warning finger to her lips. “Mom’ll hear us.”

“Oops!” Seleia whispered. “Wouldn’t want that. No way.”

“I’d be in so much shit!” Marjorie proclaimed, pronouncing the four-letter word as if it were new to her. “And she’d tell your mom, ‘n you’d be in shit too.”

“My mom wouldn’t care,” Seleia huffed.

“Aw, come on. You can’t tell me she doesn’t mind if her sixteen-year-old daughter gets shitfaced.”

“Lisa lives in her own world—I doubt she’d even notice. She never notices anything I do.” Seleia gave a dramatic sigh. “Now, my grandmother—that’s a different story. She’d be livid. She’s a recovering alcoholic herself, and she’s always telling me how alcoholism can run in the family. It’s a genetic predis…” She faltered. “A predis…” she tried again without better success. “It’s genetic,” she finally spat instead of attempting to tumble over the word, predisposition, once more.

“Yeah, that’s what they said in health class, but I doubt you’ll become an alky over one little drink.”

Seleia grabbed the bottle and took a long draft, gaging at the acrid taste, yet loving it at the same time.

“Make that two.”

Seleia appears in all the Crazy Cat Lady cozy mysteries, and is specially featured in Cat Call, where she assists her grandmother as a cat handler for a hexed film production that winds up with murder.