Your Cat
by Colin Lubner
In a different kind of story, the transformation occurs overnight. I wake up without explanation and with one purpose in mind. I correct my mistakes; I win back my body; I win you back.
But my change takes place over the course of weeks, nights. One night, while you’re at work, I text you asking about your day; you tweet a GIF that says, unambiguously: you feel stifled. Later that night, claws sprout from the tips of my fingers, blood-tipped and sharp. I clip them with kitchen scissors, and yelp when I cut too close to the nerve.
A week later, I recommend to you “Your Cat,” a song by a band I once was sure you would love, and you do not reply. My hackles, over the course of several expectant hours, rise. I duct-tape them to my spine, only to tear the tape away when the hairs continue to grow.
Unprompted—or so it then seems to me—you tell me you need space, fucking space, it’s fucking pathetic, I’m like a fucking puppy, all you want is for me for just one fucking second to leave you the fuck alone—and so I do. The tail that sprouts in the aftermath of this outburst twitches in my wake, picking up dirt and clinging burrs. I stalk into the night, and I do not look back.
The change takes months to run its course. I see neither friends nor family. I slink through rank alleys and overgrown gardens. I feast upon fear-tainted meat. I purge myself of my excess self. I shrink.
I do not know what I am waiting for until I see your Instagram post. (By this point I have taken to stalking that one Buddhist friend of yours—Marie? Marianne?—on her walks through Penn Treaty Park. After meditating, cross-legged beneath one of the park’s oaks, she slaughters hours sampling her various feeds.) In it, a man who looks like an updated version of me is feeding you from a comically large spoon. It is September, and the stew is appropriately autumnal—butternut squash and brown rice, an abundance of warming spices. You are laughing, and he is laughing. The post is of love, is you sharing your shared love, and is loved. Your friend—Marie, Marianne—responds: *heart emoji*. Then, after a brief, unhappy pause, she moves on.
It is tempting, at this point, to say that I, after seeing this post, likewise move on. After all, after I first left, I made myself a promise, paraphrased a lyric from another song I once was sure you’d love: I am happy if you are happy. Nothing else to say about it.
I want to keep this promise. I do. But “Your Cat,” the song to which you did not listen, the one song my nascent feline brain cannot forget, contains these lines: I’ll make it through this if it kills me, / and when it kills me I’ll come back. / Jesus will make me a disciple, / or maybe he’ll let me be your cat.
It takes me a week, but on a crisp October morning you find me cleaning myself on the first step of your brownstone’s stoop. In my weeks away I have fought off dogs, foxes. I’ve passed trials that in another story, a different story, might have been symbolic, but that in this story, our story, have left me with only one ear and an ache in my gut that won’t go away. Which is to say: I look like shit. I’m a mess. But you, upon spotting me in this condition, take me in. You say (with a tenderness I have so sorely fucking missed, dear): Oh, you poor thing. You take me in.
And later that same day, after calling off work, you take me to the vet.
There, you take notes on treating my wounds, attending to my needs.
Quietly, I accept my shots.
We go home.
The man with whom you once made stew is gone.
You do not say where he went.
I want to and cannot ask.
At least once a day, you tell me you love me; you love me; you love me.
The ache in my gut has not gone away.
I do not, cannot tell you this, and this is okay.
Twice a day, you feed me food I do not enjoy.
Gratefully, I eat.
Years disproportionately pass. One for you, seven for me. I balefully regard and hiss at and claw a succession of men—Alex, Tam, Prav, Colin. You scold me, but in the aftermath, always, you thank me for my discernment.
And still the ache in my gut grows.
One day, not long after a word—old word, ugly word; cancer—has occurred to me, Ben arrives. And Ben is good for you. You tell me this, not knowing I already know. You whisper it into my graying belly fur, unaware of the other transformation eating at my insides, only inches away.
And I agree: he is good for you. He is. He makes you happy. You are happy. I am happy. I curl between the two of you at night, stretch out between your parallel lengths. I purr when I am pet. Either by you or him. It does not matter. I tell myself this. I am content. Only in other stories, different fictions than ours, is there a final re-transformation. But you are happy, and so I am happy. I am. You do not yet know that cats purr to express both pleasure and pain. You do not know, and this is okay.
Colin Lubner writes (in English) and teaches (math) in southern New Jersey. His work has either appeared or will appear, temporally speaking. Recent pieces can be found through his Twitter: @no1canimagine0. He is keeping on keeping on.
