He looked at the very old cat as it came close to him and could almost see cityscapes in its skeletal maze under its dark fur, see the shadows of late winter days in the fur, something of rivers in its slow steady walk with bad paws. He pet the cat behind its ears and saw it had little fangs like an adorable bat. The cat rested her tired head on his outstretched fingers, teeth in but he did not care and she fell asleep. The late day light and her curling into his armpit made her for a time look like she had become a kitten once again. He slowly pet her neck and back, a kind of soft covered architecture like dirigibles or bridges as the tired cat slept heartily on his slightly faded green sweater. A meteor could very well strike the earth outside and Thomas would not move from here, not one single inch.
Thomas saw the other cat circle him curiously then pat his leg. He was a strong young cat with a face like those old paintings and clocks, a gentle giant . He was the little brother of the older cat. He sniffed the nape of her neck off and on as though to check her scent as her being still with him. Thomas saw the large young cat tenderly pet the older female cat with his giant paws then fall asleep beside him. The day was nearing its end and the sun poured across them all with a kind of gentle, slow motion flood.
His neighbor in the tiny mountain town was away for a week. The man did odd jobs and even danced and sang in all the holiday presentations in the tiny towns dotting the mountains that spined on for a few hundred miles. The man was off this time though to a funeral for a distant relative who once had saved his young life on a hot summer afternoon decades past. The man left an old bent key for Thomas to come in once a day for this week to feed the two cats but Thomas was falling in love. The older cat had for many years refused visitors, would hide when anyone came by, was a shadow and enigma that had suffered some damage eons before the man had found her at a shelter. Now she was asleep on his chest, was resting her old teeth in his fingers, was trusting him.
The older cat slowly moved in tighter to the hill rise of his arm…her bad paw swiveling just so before Thomas helped her. Her teeth lifted then fell back on his finger and for a time she stared off toward nowhere in particular. He watched her body as she breathed and it was a tiny accordion inside mountain ranges, a tiny motor chugging and at times struggling a bit, her fur almost a collection of cities together after wars and great fields at once, and those eyes, those golden eyes peering off with such certainty and precision. The sun outside was surely a flabby ball of molten grease in comparison to the cat’s eye and gaze as she nestled in and fell back to sleep. The neighbor only needed these cats to be dutifully fed but Thomas was coming 2 to 3 times a day.
How can I not? He thought as the two cats slept.
Thomas sat for a time and began to nod off. He felt his head droop and a brief dream of birds and seas in rain and he knew it was time to go this day. He rubbed his eyes hard and pet both cats, the big young boy, head curled on his leg , the old female cat now in a ball asleep in the valley and cave of his armpit. It was so hard to leave. But he will be back next week. I will miss them so. I already do and 3 days are left, like a sort of pre-mourning Thomas thought this and felt tears well up as he gently carried the older cat to her bowl to eat then to her blankets in a corner to rest. Those golden eyes looked at him as he headed to the door. The younger cat yelped like a giant kitten and circled his legs and then he was outside closing a door.
Thomas paused for a second outside the door and instead of meows it was silent. A barrier that could be miles deep, sealed mine shafts, walled off cities, the length of oceans. It was of course inches in the literal sense, but this matters little in matters of the heart. He looked at the door as he locked at and then walked in that gauzy late winter sun back to his home. The dirt road seemed longer than before. The chill breeze cut through his sweater as Thomas neared his home.
Thomas made dinner with his wife.
So how are your new friends? She asked smiling while cutting vegetables.
Good. Good. Thomas kind of trailed off. He began boiling water.
That is it? Just good? She was a bit puzzled and almost hurt at his truncated report.
I.uh. Um. Sorry. He loved his wife more than anything. It was just hard to put in words, especially succinct ones.
It’s ok. Tell me tonight before we sleep. She smiled. She knew Thomas well, loved his big heart. She would hear later.
Thomas smiled and caressed her shoulder. He loved that she so understood him and tolerated his many quirks. She had been his friend for many years before they fell in love. They both had almost died in those friend years and each had been there just in time to save each other. His family had long wished he would marry her but their bond was best friends. She lost a job. She helped him to the hospital when he had those pains. He helped her when she felt all was lost. He asked her about books. This opened up those mysterious things of love and within a week he asked for her hand in marriage. He would tell her before they went to sleep.
They chatted during dinner about the wars in the world, the politicians hating each other along the cracked fault lines of specific ideologies and pasts, of the weird weather, of the evil person who had a downfall, of their jobs, of their now semi aged sweet cat curled up in the next room, of cities, of the rock slide up the road, of her idea for a new song to compose on their old piano. They never mentioned those two cats. Thomas cleaned up after and they sat and read together in bed.
He told her suddenly of why he could not speak in more than fragments of that one cat up the road:
She is probably 20 now. Those times before, when you fed her she never even came out for the food. She was only a name to me. Her body is failing her yet she runs across the room to eat now. This stranger sleeps on my arm. This stranger is so tired and weak and the shadows on her bones are of something more I just can’t place. I cried as she sunk those little teeth into my finger and it was not pain (it was a tiny sensation) nor was it purely sadness for her age and frailty. It was a great joy at her opening up to me, I already mourn the three days we have left before he comes home. I hope this makes some kind of sense.
When you fed her those times over the years she hid and you poured a bowl for a name. Once I came with you and saw a flash of a back of a healthy cat and a meow then nothing. That is how Cassandra has been all these years. She was afraid of people, angry too as you told me. Now I meet her long after our neighbor stopped asking. It was like she was gone long ago. I hold away the shakes of arthritis in a cat too old and frail to clean itself now or barely even meow and it is like poking a stick at something out of reach in space in time if that makes any sense. It is like visiting someone after a last goodbye and being there for them in a time of need you would have never known. Sorry I am crying again, it is hitting me in ways I honestly can’t fully explain, maybe don’t really understand.
His wife Elsa nodded and smiled while caressing his hair.
I understand. I saw that look in your eyes when you held her after we fed them yesterday. She loves you. I kind of mourn the future already too. Visit 3 times tomorrow. Elsa said softly.
They fell asleep soon after and he had that dream again.
Thomas awoke and his wife was kissing him goodbye as she headed off to work. She taught in the tiny school down the way. He soon would work but times were slow at the shop he helped out in. The tourist business for old ghost towns was thinning it seemed and this town was almost one, only a skeleton population remaining and no amazing stories of great loves, crimes or disasters to bring people up into the hills. Thomas had “time off’” so he went to go pet some cats.
Thomas walked to his neighbor’s house and heard the kitten meows of the large male cat and the tiny frail meows of the older cat behind the door. He came in and carried the older cat to a bowl and filled it with food. He then fed her brother and the room seemed to smell a bit more of stale smoke than usual, seemed to be missing a chair he could swear was sitting cracked in a corner the day before. The sunlight seemed dimmer somehow for this time of day but he watched the cats eat. The older cat stole at times from the younger cat’s bowl and he let her. It was adorable. The cats in that tiny room almost orbited each other. The giant younger one was as gentle as breezes with his sister, saw the portent in her bony shoulders, this to Thomas was both deeply moving and clear.
Thomas watched the older cat amble to her blankets on the floor a bit quicker this day. He walked over and laid out across the floor and held her as she slowly fell asleep, arthritis coming in waves as he held her body to reduce their tremors. Her brother again sniffed her to make sure she was o.k then walked across Thomas’ back making his silly kitten noises. The cat shivered a bit, her ears almost looking invisible in the light as they had no hair, the white almost the prism shade or milky water before the shadows and piled blue blankets. He felt tears ebb and fade almost with each tiny movement of her frail, almost charcoal sketched front legs and his fingertips along the old cat’s valleys of bone and fur. Her body language was neutral but it had great tides to Thomas; he for a second almost swore he sensed his aunts who had long passed , something of how he never felt there could be a proper goodbye, something of his childhood and near passing himself from a rare ailment that ended suddenly like the end of a freak storm, he felt almost the sense of kittens, of new things, of freshly baked bread somehow. The cat stared again at some spot in space with those deep golden eyes.
Thomas this time had no sleeping fangs in his finger. The cat plodded slowly away to sit in another part of the floor. It was time to go. Her brother cat was busy in a box spinning slowly. It was early afternoon and the sun did not have any deep honey glow, nor did it cascade just so through the window. It was to Thomas as though a spell had broken somehow, some sort of perceived magic had fled. He felt foolish but still felt great love for those two cats. Maybe a love was enough. No need for some magic connection and daily epiphany in near sunsets. He closed the door and it did not feel like a great vault, path or distance, just a door, but a distance nonetheless. He wished the cats well as he heard the younger cat play with a box and meow like a giant kitten. Thomas walked home wishing for work. The open spaces in time were sometimes a bit much to bear, a forest of worry.
The sky was blue but that thin blue, the high clouds and atmosphere blue, not the deep rich blue of lazy summers. This sky radiated lack and night on its way on its edges, of the drought as well, not of lushness of languid long hours. Thomas kicked a stone on the dirt hill path and watched it spin and bounce ahead of him then veer off the path. The edges of the hills seem to oddly be faded in the light, incomplete almost. Thomas felt for a second as though this moment had happened before, many times in fact, a kind of chill running through him as he tried to kick another rock and missed. The sky seemed almost frayed on the western horizon, smudged on the north, missing a tiny thread of that dull blue to the east, something like the bald spots on that sweet old cat. Thomas shook his head and walked on.
Thomas grew up in a home with two parents and brother that was haunted. His brother first saw the old man. He floated 2 feet above the ground, was nearly bald, was made of lines like a drawing almost and was shy. The thing sucked into a wall when their eyes had first met his brother swore, the man looking sad and apologetic before sucking into young Thomas’ wall. The old man wandered around the house for near 20 years, often ducking into walls when seen. He especially loved hovering around Thomas’ mother’s bed after she fell ill. Her nurses saw him almost daily for the last few years. They also heard the bath fill up that never was, heard the doors late at night try to open on their own. One nurse asked to bring her dogs to the bedside. When his mom died the home was sold to a nervous man who was not told of the old man, the body that fell in that non existent bath, of the doors trying to let in or out something of past and the dead.
Thomas’s home with his best friend/wife was actually haunted too. They kept losing forks for many years. A soup in a bowl moved clear across a room one night. The old woman would materialize like a cloud at the front door and race (slowly vaporizing again the whole time like fog burning away) to the bathroom door. A chair once moved in a slow circle. The oddest was the time Thomas heard a voice as he washed his hands in that bathroom.
“I am so cold and hungry. Please help me” The voice said, coming seemingly from a wall.
“Did you say something?” Thomas asked his wife awkwardly.
“No..but .I heard it too.” His wife replied from the bedroom, book in hand.
Thomas heard that voice one more time. It called me by name he had thought. This time he again was in the bathroom and again he asked his wife if she said something even though it was obviously not her. It just seemed like it was something to do out of disbelief. That was a few years ago. The ghost had retreated to just a once in a great while sad ball of light and those missing forks. It was almost like a second dying Thomas once thought while washing his hands in the quiet. He could of course bring her no food, no warmth, not even a comfort of gesture. His fear over time of this moment moldered slowly into a deep regret as though he had someone come far away for help and he turned them away.
His aunt a few years before had suddenly become very ill. The family had gathered at her bedside as the doctor said she had a few days to live. The first day she was so ill that she muttered to their dead grandmother for hours about how she saw her and how she was coming to be with her then muttering mommy mommy like a little child. She was 64 years old almost to the day. She looked so small and frail in the hospital bed in those moments and Thomas wanted to run up and hug her tight but hospice policy was the patient could not be touched but on the hand or by a doctor or nurse. On the second day she was alert and telling stories all day like nothing was wrong. It was surreal, as though she were a living ghost, the young woman he was too little to know in the bed of someone else. She sat up in bed for hours telling funny stories, smiling, laughing. The doctors said it was a sort of death rattle. The body with advanced cancer beyond care or surgery let this day and seeming clarity go as it began to let go.
Thomas walked home that day to hug his wife and speak of the day he almost met his aunt as a young woman. He hoped against it all that this would be the case the third day when he and the family would return to bed #23. There was no third day. She died the next morning. Thomas ran and ran until almost off a high cliff but he stopped. He dangled a leg off to return home to cry in his wife’s arms. He carried that urge to race over and hug his aunt in his body like the coil of snakes and the sadness of the unborn moment at once. He also could have gone the next morning early like some did. He could have been there at her end. He could not go that day. This guilt he carried as a kind of haunting inside, deep and raw. Within five short years time his mother’s entire side of the family would be dead, a rope to past burned away link by link to ash by random incidents, illness and age.
Thomas got home. He waited for a bit sitting in his favorite old chair. His wife Elsa came home from work and they began to make dinner together.
So how are your new friends? She asked smiling while cutting vegetables.
Good. Good. Thomas kind of trailed off. He began boiling water.
That is it? Just good? She was a bit puzzled and almost hurt at his truncated report.
I. uh. Um. Sorry. He loved his wife more than anything. It was just hard to put in words, especially succinct ones.
Thomas did not notice that this was the same conversation as the “day” before. He never did.
Thomas had that dream again.
Thomas woke up and his wife had already gone to work. He went to go feed the cats. Along the mountain dirt trail he thought the sky seemed almost to be a bit faded on the eastern edge, almost a little too dark in the north like it was a film shown on the rocks like those new drive in things he had heard about. He saw his hand have dirt and stone pass through it for a second then back to his favorite sweater and chapped skin. It was a drought year. He loved how that older cat was so strong even in her frailty. Something really moved him about her golden eyes just staring off at some invisible dot or horizon. He could sense the way cities survive wars with basements and some rooms intact in the buildings left as gone in her fur and bony body. He missed his relatives who had passed away the way many did, that survivor’s guilt, that sense of not doing enough.
He did not see the tourist family pulling up in the minivan to check out the ghost town. He would never see their faces and the others that came to see the bank that had ghosts of 3 prisoners, the church that was said to have the voice of a long lost choir, the couple that passed each other each day, once as young before their parents would accept their love, once as older and lost in their work, each set of ghosts a kind of self aware film against the mountains and rocks. He would never know of their main attraction, the man who for decades after his death had to do that task so important in life and share his news of it with his wife, all lost in that freak storm.
No. Thomas had to feed those cats.
