Serah's reading of this story was truly lovely, and it was great to have her voice back on Escape Pod. But the story itself I ended up really not liking. I really wanted to like it—the premise is full of things that normally appeal to me, both the bioluminescent cats (because awesome!) and the human themes of motherhood and family and intergenerational legacies of trauma. But the plot was full of simplistic or underexplained turns. Like, how do you go from "my glow in the dark cat is flashing messages to me" to "OF COURSE the only explanation is that she's the granddaughter of my childhood cat and she somehow still has that cat's memories just like my daughter somehow has my memories and now that she's glow in the dark and able to (somehow) communicate via written English on her fur she can comfort both of us when we have nightmares"? It just didn't make any sense to me. I'm not someone who needs every technological element in an SF story to be totally explained and to make perfect sense, but I would have liked some sense of the mechanism behind both the writing on the cat's fur and the cat literally having her grandmother's memories. Either that or give the whole story a more fantasy or magical realist setting, but the jump here from genetically modified glowing cats (totally plausible in what seems to be a near future world) to the cat somehow being able to communicate in written English via glowing fur (much more magical seeming!) was pretty jarring, to me.
Incidentally, on an only tangentially related note, the glowing cat reminded me of another awesome non-fictional (sort of) podcast episode involving glowing cats:
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/. It's about trying to figure out a way to convey to humans 10,000 years into the future that they should stay far, far away from nuclear waste dumps, when we don't know what kind of written language they'll have (if any), etc. One of the proposals was to engineer cats that would act as feline geiger counters and start to glow in the presence of nuclear radiation, and then spread around a whole body of mythology about the dangers of glowing cats, because mythology and folklore is one of the longer lasting elements of human cultures. A very science fictional premise that I kept thinking of throughout listening to this story, although here the glowing cat symbolizes protection and healing, rather than, you know, nuclear waste and its dangers.