Indoor Cat (sample)
The girl no longer goes outside. I know because of food times. It started shortly after that springtime jubilee where the water and food is dispensed an hour earlier. There had been instances, many across our acquaintance, when the girl would give me dry food and then go outside, returning later (truly on the brink of my starvation) for wet food, but now she stays inside and yet the food arrives no sooner. So something is amiss. Despite her material persistence in our quarters, I am not overburdened with her presence. She still has her room with her bed, with her laundry, with a door she can shut. More subtly, she also has her stretches where she is inside and yet distant, merely staring, disengaged. Her stares are not my stares, for a cat sees much that a human being does not, and in her, I see less—I see that her eyes are stripped of fire. And I see her, but to plainly see her and yet not her creates distress. We pass the cycles alone. The heightened girl, who used to live with us, is outside. A set of cycles prior to the springtime jubilee the heightened girl went outside and never came back in. Her unusual meow on occasion emanates from the girl’s slim black rounded glass, and her face appears there, too—but human beings in a glass are but illusions, like the other cat who I have observed in the medicine cabinet glass above the sink. He confounds me. The girl delights in holding me and showing me to him, as if she feels that we would do well to associate. It is not working out. The other cat has a girl who to the eye resembles my girl but is not warm and lacks her smell. I suppose she cannot help it. It must be very hard to not be real. One wonders how she feeds the other cat. The real girl—my girl—is warm, and she is kind. And she is soft. But she is broken, of late. I know because I feel the things she feels when I sit upon her lap. She gives me pets. She has not faltered in her task to give me pets. But her chemistry is all out of joint. I know that she is spiritless. I know the things a cat can know. I know that there is something to the girl that I miss that is her essence, fundamental, a quiddity, a thing that even cats cannot hear or see or smell. I fear she left it outside. Not the whole of it. Some minor spark resides within her still. I can sense it. Yet it fades. But I do not know why. And it troubles me, for soon it might delay the wet food. I seek the method to her melancholic mood. It cannot be the symbols or the faces in the small rounded glass that disturb her, nor those in the medium glass that she holds upon her lap to make it warm. (Not the glass itself, precisely, but the tray that adjoins it, at which she often paws.) I am tempted to blame the large glass, which she watches from the couch, for at times the things she sees there only fortify her gloom. On balance, though, to look at all those things must be rewarding, or she would not devote so much time to the looking. I rule out, at least, the heightened girl as a source of malaise, for she is gone, save occasional meows. The ensuing discourse has been acrimonious of late; the girl will hiss: “You know you could have changed your flight from melbin.” And the heightened girl protests, to which the girl replies: “No, it’s all shutting down. You can’t get into midway or oh hair.” (Hair is what the girl brushes off her dark skirts.) “Can you at least get me your half of the rent?” The meows convey frustration. Perhaps no one has fed the heightened girl and she wants to come in. The door to her onetime room is shut. I have scratched to ascertain if another human being (other human beings lived there once—the girl who sang the vexing songs, the girl who often sneezed) had taken the space in her absence. All there ever is is absence. And the girl. The girl stays inside. The girl sleeps and eats. The girl has learned from me.
One darkness, some cycles into the quarantine, I entered the girl’s room as she slept, or maybe meant to sleep, but only lay there. She reached for me and gave me pets, but weak pets, and then we shared the stillness, her breath close enough to make my ear twitch when she exhaled, which enkindled a smirk. It was small, but a cat can see much in the dark. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s gonna get better. We just gotta power on through.” Despite my fondness for the girl, our philosophies diverge. She preaches patience; one must wait, for hateful instance, for one’s food. As a cat of action, I believe that the world must be moved, and do my fullest part to yowl in entreaty of comestibles the instant I yearn. I might have told the girl so at the time, but her utterance brought her some comfort, and she slept. So I left her, patrolled the kitchen and, if memory serves, ate an ant. The girl arose with sunlight and provided victuals. We discussed this shadowed conference no further. I imagine she powered on through.
But a word about the girl: Her paws are slight and delicate. Her fur falls in waves. Her scent is one the species knows, the beacon of a true friend to cats, and to meet her is to understand on instinct that to snooze upon her lap is true contentment. She is terribly, terribly hard of hearing, for often my wails of malnutrition pass misunderstood or ignored. She likes to pick me up and give me kisses on the top of my head, which I find irksome. She is shy, but not in the kittenish way betraying youth and inexperience, but rather in a manner arrived at by one too many gropes at potential turned to dust in her paws. She gives me skritches. She is a quiet human being, when left to her own devices (her only devices, of late), but when amused, her laugh fills the room, and its traces flood her tender face with light. She is someone who is waiting for something. This was true even in the bygone cycles, when she went outside. I detect in her a longing, a hunger, for something like food, and yet more—the cryptic nature of this baffling need eludes me, or perhaps I do not dare to contemplate it, lest I be subsumed in the horror myself. I only know that it worsens, and I fear that even she is not aware of how lost she is becoming. She is sinking. But she cannot sink forever. Surely not. Not if any other soul can perceive her as I do. Because to be with her has always been to want her soft pets, to walk an infinity around and through her ankles, to bump against her body with your head, until she smiles. She is hoping for someone to smell her. Or see her. I understand that much. She is trapped. She is achingly gentle and frail. She is about to clean whatever I will shortly throw up.
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