Category: PETS ISSUE

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PETS ISSUE

The Bouncing Donut

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by Christopher Wral

My dog likes to curl up into a donut shape on the softest surface nearest me. His preferred surface is a human bed but a couch or rug will do. My at-home workspace has a guest bed next to my desk and this is often where the dog’s naps will take place. This guest bed is where he spends the most time as a donut.

My dog will occasionally kick his leg in a thumping motion while he sleeps. This causes his whole body to bounce up and down and up to a higher plane. For brief periods of time on this earth, my dog transforms into the bouncing donut.

I recently became immobile. Bad health and surgical wounds that won’t resolve. I’m a long distance runner, but now I’m not that. So I sit and watch my increasingly energetic dog hoping he can tire himself out. Knowing he can’t. 

In the past, I tried taking my dog on runs with me but he gets bored too easily. He’ll seemingly enjoy the run for about 5 minutes and then want to do something else. He’s had a similar issue on walks as he doesn’t want to repeat any route in exactly the same way. In a city using a grid system, I can weave him through different blocks to explore more of the local neighborhood.

A run along a trail offers little variation. I relate to the boredom and desire for novelty. Unfortunately, his version of novelty sometimes means pulling down an alley with a strong trash bin scent.

In many ways, I respect his refusal to accept anything less. I often wonder where he’d go without me if I didn’t keep him on a leash. How far he would go. And if he’d return.

Pompeii has a famous mosaic of a dog in a building called the House of the Tragic Poet. The mosaic says, “CAVE CANEM,” or, essentially, “Beware of the Dog.”

As much as my dog would like to think differently, generations from now won’t beware of him. Not because he won’t live forever, but because he isn’t that ferocious.

He looks to me for protection from other dogs and takes quite a while to warm up in a new dog park. Half an hour can pass with him standing at my feet before he finally finds the courage to run around. With this found courage, he’ll quietly orbit the other dogs with as little interaction as possible.

Dog parks are fine, but my dog never looks happier than when he’s sprinting at top speed.

If he reaches top speed I’m a bit more confident he’s had a good day. My apartment is too small for top speed. He tries carpet to couch to carpet to couch. But we both know it’s not top speed.

I dream of making it up to him. I want to take him to a dog store in the city.

George, a local chain, stands out with its designer choices, setting out to bring artisanal aesthetics to the realm of dog toys, and Le Marcel Bakery has a giant windowed-counter of baked goods for dogs while the owners make the treats behind the display.

If we’re ever close to one of these locations, my dog will pull inside no matter how tired he is from his running.

In my bad health I’ve felt like a monster. In this shrinking I’ve overcompensated with adorning myself with new clothes. Perhaps with enough clothes people won’t tell I’m repulsive. I bought a new striped shirt, American-made chinos, a vintage herringbone sport jacket, a raglan overcoat, and a cashmere scarf in just the right blue.

With all of my layers I essentially became a better bed for my dog. He can now donut even closer.

I recently came across a hand-painted ceramic from the Isle of Man that features an aging shepherd in a tweed green outfit sitting with a walking stick resting against his shoulder and his black-and-white dog sitting in between his legs.

As my black-and-white dog is going to live forever, he will be there to sit with me in old age. As he does now.

Regardless of the years that pass, there’s something about taking a rest from all the running around out in the world, and just sitting together. We can guard each other… one sleeps while the other keeps an eye on things.

I know there may come a time when this dynamic will run its course. When he has to look out for himself. When he’ll be forced to go into the world and befriend other dogs to survive. Perhaps the dog stores he used to go to will take pity on him and slip him a bone but I know he won’t have the cash to make that an everyday thing. He’ll have to find himself in this new freedom. And this will be a new version of himself that doesn’t involve separation anxiety from me.

I imagine he’d remain a city dog instead of heading for the woods. He can only change so much.

There’s an interpretation of the CAVE CANEM mosaic that it was meant as a joke… the dog in the mosaic is featured in a play bow and doesn’t look all that ferocious itself. I’d like to commission a mosaic called Beware of the Bouncing Donut.

The runs may have been the happiest, but resting near each other brings us both to a higher plane.

Christopher Wral is a writer in San Francisco. His website is christopherwral.com.

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PETS ISSUE

After Lindsey

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by Katie Haley

The therapist I saw after the breakup with Lindsey fixated on my teen years, talking to me about them in present tense instead of past. I couldn’t tell if this was because she’s a shit therapist or if my development was so obviously arrested the therapist couldn’t imagine there was anything more to talk about then the things that happened to me before I was twenty years old. 

Those years don’t do me any favors though. There’s a lot to talk about. Enough to fill a quarter of the pages in her yellow legal pad. There was the bulimia, which she seemed determined to blame on my mother’s habit of reading the nutrition labels on things like gum packets and toothpaste. The abortion I let Matty Parks pay for with money swiped from his dad’s nightstand that I haven’t thought about since it happened. And plenty of benzos in exchange for quickies behind the high school’s baseball dugout. 

I think the therapist latched on to the worst stuff, the most obvious struggles, not understanding what I needed help with most was the mildly unpleasant. An empty pill bottle in the back of the bathroom drawer with Moonie, the name of Lindsey’s cat, written in faded black ink on the label. The street I have to pass on my way to work that she lived on when we first met. My roommate’s dirty dishes in the sink. Lately, anything small consumes me. 

“How does it feel when your dad calls you a whore?” 

We stared at each other in silence while she waited for my answer, which I knew was expected to be insightful. I shook my head, reminding her I needed to talk about Lindsey and my dad hasn’t called me a whore in years. 

“Don’t you think your dad’s treatment of you will impact your relationships going forward?” 

Greta asks why I’m still making appointments with the therapist. I think I’m too ashamed to admit it’s because the appointments are something to do. Somewhere to go. An air-conditioned room to sit in. Greta says she has something she’s been told not to tell me yet but that she can’t help but tell me anyway. I get my hopes up thinking it will be about Lindsey. That she’s dating someone we both know, whose social media presence I can hunt for glimpses of her. That she isn’t dating anyone because our relationship was so significant she needs to be single for a while to rid her system of me. That I can shop at Saltzman’s again because she’s moved to a different neighborhood. But no. None of that was said. Nothing was said. Greta touched her palms to her stomach and smiled wide enough I could see most of her teeth. 

The baby shower was after a session where the bullshit therapist suggested I never got over the wound of my older sister leaving for college. I told the therapist my sister went to Sarah Lawerence so she didn’t exactly abandon me. At the shower, Greta assured me Lindsey wouldn’t be there. That the two of us were closer than the two of them. If only one of us could be invited, it was me. I did my best to hide my disappointment that the run-in I’d staged in my head was not happening. Her husband’s mother said the baby would be born with a full head of hair like her son, whose hairline hadn’t receded an inch all his life. She held up the sonogram and said a skull shaped like that is meant for thick hair. We ate cold cucumber sandwiches and were barred from wearing pink or blue or any kind of color that suggests gender. I went with a light green dress. Greta cried at her sister’s gift of a rattle engraved with their late brother’s initials under a small pair of angel wings. As much as I wanted the attention to be on Greta and the baby, all of mine was on Lindsey. I hadn’t found a way to casually bring her up in small talk I’d been making with the guests who knew her. It was my goal, to ask about her in a way that denoted I’d forgotten to until that moment. The hard part was picking the right friend to ask, someone close enough to have information but maybe not close enough to immediately message Lindsey to tell her I’d asked about her. Jess was out of the question as she and Lindsey saw each other almost every weekend and texted throughout the week. RJ couldn’t be trusted either as they did Lindsey’s hair, and from what I remember, she was due for a cut and color any day now. Liza would have to do. She liked to gossip but really only saw Lindsey a couple times a month. Although if one of those times should be the next day or sometime soon, if it was too close to the baby shower, one of the first things Lindsey would be told is that I wanted to know how she was doing. I took the risk. 

“Lindsey’s alright, she’s getting another cat I think.” It was all I could manage to get. 

It made me sad enough to spend the train ride back to the city crying. I’d begged Lindsey to add another cat to our mix, to give Moonie and I a friend, but she wouldn’t on account of our work schedules. What change had been made to her schedule that couldn’t have happened when we were together? 

The second therapy session following the shower was spent assessing if the pass my science teacher made at me in the eleventh grade was the catalyst for my sorry attempt at college. At least we’d moved up in the timeline of my life. 

At a dive bar I saw someone who looked like Lindsey walk out to the smoking patio with someone who didn’t look anything like me. When I had finally pushed my way through enough people to end up outside I didn’t see them but saw a girl who did look like me standing by herself, smoking the kind of cigarettes I’d just run out of. She let me bum one then took a book out of her purse to ask if I’d read it. It was her new thing, recommending it to strangers. 

“It’s just that good,” she said. 

A copy of a self-help book about dreams was in her right hand, the sticker promising a price that ended in ninety-nine cents was half picked off the front cover. She let me read the blurb before reading me a passage. 

“Your past flies overhead in the shape of a vulture and your future is at the end of the pavement before you. Don’t get distracted by the sounds of the vulture’s wings that you fail to look at what’s waiting for you.” 

She looked into my eyes like she was impressed to not see tears. I asked her what if the past isn’t a vulture flying above with the intent to maul you but a park pigeon whose begging for bread crumbs stresses you out so much you want to run as if it were a vulture? 

“It hasn’t said anything like that yet. But I bet it will. At least something similar,” she said. 

I put the cigarette out under the toe of my boot and thanked her. She said, “No need,” then went back to who I assumed, by the barely there brown eyeliner and the soft wave of her hair, was a date. I made a mental note that a book about dreams is a good thing to have on hand for a date in case the conversation dulls. Though I don’t know when I’ll be on a date next. After Lindsey, how little I am attracted to anyone else just makes me cry. 

Staying up late, thinking of the cat I wanted that Lindsey probably now has, I decided to adopt my own. A cat I could name anything I wanted. Anything but the name I wanted to call the cat I wanted with Lindsey because she’s probably using it now. Before falling asleep I decided to come up with a new name once I had the thing in my hands and could see it. There wasn’t any particular breed on my mind, just that it had to be a girl because boy pets came with a dick and a pair of balls. She’d get arm & hammer litter and eat out of a ceramic bowl. If she could tolerate it she’d wear a purple collar. 

The next morning I went to the shelter up the block and picked the only cat that didn’t come with a ‘but’ from the kid working. 

“She’s really smart but… she sent two previous owners to the hospital with bites.” 

“She’s sweet sometimes but… she swats at blondes.” 

“She’s great but… she has chronic worms.” 

We got to the cat I finally picked and I waited for the “but” for a long time. There wasn’t one. There wasn’t anything to say about her other than she’s smart, sweet, and great. Her gray fur had a patch missing on her leg from something that happened during her birth. It was the one part of her body she didn’t like touched. While wiping up her first shit I wondered if Lindsey was doing the same with her new cat that could’ve been ours and then wondered if, on the off chance that she was doing that, if she was thinking of me. Thinking about the little I asked for and when it became too much. 

At the next therapy appointment I mentioned the new cat, who I thought made a good Margie, and how Lindsey’s cat was my idea. The therapist asked if Margie reminded me of Cookie, the cat I had in my teen years. I said no because Cookie was a slow stray I lurred into the house with cookie dough and kissing sounds. 

“Cookie was with you after the abortion right? You said she laid on your stomach. Have you always felt connected to cats?” 

I didn’t want to talk about the abortion again so I ignored that part. 

“Always. Moonie, Lindsey’s first cat, was slow to warm up but she’d sleep on my chest sometimes.” 

“Did Lindsey like that?” 

It was the first time she’d asked me anything about Lindsey. Or spoke about the present. 

“I think so.” 

“Did she like you?” 

“I hope.” 

Katie Haley is a writer and gossip from California with honest work in/on Hobart, Vlad Mag, Somewords, and elsewhere. 

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PETS ISSUE

LOST AND FOUND

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by Suzy Eynon

My cat escaped in Colorado. We lived in three different states together, Kyle the cat and I. Colorado was the pit-stop between two other places that felt more like home. We stayed with my friend Larry, Kyle’s former owner. We had worked together at a grocery store back in Arizona. Larry and I, not the cat. Kyle was his cat in Arizona, but when he moved to Colorado six months ahead of me, Larry gave Kyle to me. He was going to stay with his mother, and she had a cat already. I was always falling in love with a friend’s cat, accepting other people’s strays.

I stayed Friday nights on Larry’s couch after my shift at the grocery store in Arizona because my roommate had a new girlfriend who had walked into my bedroom completely naked to ask to “borrow” lotion, then lubed up with her leg hiked on the side of my bed. Larry and I would get nachos from Aliberto’s drive-thru and watch movies with Kyle circling the periphery until I passed out. Kyle would wake me the next morning as desert sunshine seared my eyes through the miniblinds. He would jump off the window ledge above the couch and onto my head, and I would say good morning. It was the best sleep I got at the time even with Kyle’s greeting. I watched as the cat knocked Larry’s mugs off the kitchen counter to the linoleum floor.

“Since you like him so much,” Larry said, “do you want him?” 

I moved into my own small apartment. This was still in Arizona. I did want the cat. He was a beautiful Siamese tabby mix with startling blue eyes the color of shallow tropical waters. Pizza delivery drivers commented on his attractiveness. Larry didn’t have a cat carrier, so I bought one at the pet store on my way to retrieve him, then drove across town to my new apartment while the cat screamed at a high pitch. I took backroads because I was afraid of driving on the highway, and of making left turns. I was living alone for the first time in my life. Kyle and I became roommates. I had no couch or cable to receive any TV channels as reception was blocked by proximity to a mountain, but we had a tidy quiet place, just a couple of single youths.

When Larry left Arizona, I felt adrift. I was from the place everyone else left, permanent when everyone else was passing through. Then I left too. I picked Colorado since Larry was already there and it wasn’t too many states away. That, and I was probably in love with him. I told myself that I would visit my family every month on the Greyhound, since my fear of driving had expanded into a fear of flying. Larry wanted to move out of his mother’s place, so we could be roommates and he’d be reunited with Kyle.

The morning in Colorado when Kyle escaped, I’d woken up early to go to a breast cancer walk. Did you know you have to pay to participate in those? I didn’t. In those days, Kyle didn’t always want to sleep with me because he wanted to hang out with Larry, his former owner, who always had a clique over, carrying on in a raucous manner late into the night. Kyle would cry to be let out of my room where I hid and watched The Office DVDs and ate curry takeout, which I’d picked up on my walk home from the college where I was a thirty-year-old undergrad. My closest friends during this time, my first time moving away from home, were the cat and Pam Beesly. That morning I opened my bedroom door and the quality of light in the hallway was wrong, too bright for the early hour. It felt surreal, like entering a portal. 

I sleep-shuffled to the kitchen and poured cat kibble into a dish. It was drafty inside. I’d had trouble adjusting to the cold in Colorado, wearing the wrong type of coat and boots, soaked and slipping through that winter. As I went to grab a sweater, I saw that the front door was wide open to the landing outside our second-floor apartment. 

Larry was asleep in his room with the door closed. Our front door had an unfortunate quirk where if you didn’t slam and lock it, it wouldn’t always latch. It slowly swung back open over time. I glanced in the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding in there. Since this was Boulder in 2008, no one was in the apartment while we slept with the door wide open, keys left on the kitchen counter for the taking. Kyle didn’t come running from his spot in the living room. The dish was untouched.

I started out the door without the sweater, without shoes, calling for Kyle. He’d never been outside before. He was an inside cat. I wasn’t even sure he’d encountered stairs before. I stood on the landing, frozen for a moment against my rising panic. I turned to run down the stairs and there was Kyle, light on his feet, jogging up and then past me right into the apartment, as if we were pals passing in the hallway. He let out a chirp as I hurried in behind him and slammed the door before he could change his mind. He purred loudly as he ate.

“Sorry I almost lost the cat,” Larry said when he came out of his room.

 I felt lucky that Kyle was smart enough to return for food after a brief adventure. It horrified me that I came so close to losing him that day, that I had been asleep while he was running down the landing outside to frolic in the night or galloping down Arapahoe alongside cars in the dark. He’d been lost and found without my knowledge while I slept dumbly. I was young then and carried less anticipation of loss. I wouldn’t lose him for another 13 years, after we’d moved together one more time, to another state and finally to a house where he had more space to play, and he was my cat again. I let Larry know when the cat wasn’t doing well, gave him health updates along the way, until the final day.

After Kyle died, I wanted to find a piece of him previously unknown to me, a secret final message from the other realm he’d moved to. I’m not a religious person but I still looked to him for guidance as I did for years. We’d traveled through phases of life together. I picked up an old digital camera in hopes of finding forgotten photos of him but there were none I hadn’t seen before. I scoured the house for hidden memories and was frustrated to realize I couldn’t find the stuffed red monkey he’d once loved, the one that made a too-long shriek when its tummy was poked. I feared I’d given it away years earlier, before I fathomed losing him, when it was just an annoying monkey doll. 

Now that grief has dulled, my aging mind and the passing of time occasionally provide memories new to me, a photo I’d forgotten or a memory like the time he got out. I hope he had fun that night. Now I tell the story to friends like one might share the tale of a lost night in youth, reminiscing about a cool friend who disappeared for hours only to return wearing nothing but a cape, embellishing the story with each telling. It’s part of his lore. Maybe there was snow on the ground into which he sunk his striped legs. Maybe he met the raccoon that lingered in the strip mall behind the apartment complex and they ran free together through the field. Like a close friend, some parts of him remained unknowable, unreachable, even after spending 15 years together. I’ll never know what he saw or did that night. Kyle, my old friend.

Suzy Eynon is the author of Terrestrial and the chapbook Being Seen. She lives near Seattle with 3 cats.

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PETS ISSUE

Speaking Terms

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by Alexei Raymond

We’re no longer on speaking terms. 

We’re still close, but she’s stopped talking, or responding at all. A whisper-quiet treatment. I look at her in the mornings, how she serenely sleeps, sometimes twitches in dreams. I get the urge to kiss, caress, hold her to my chest. On weekends I watch her walk beside me, or run ahead. I, of course, cannot help myself and call out her name, trying to say whatever remains. She acts as if she doesn’t hear and refuses to stay near. Maybe she really doesn’t hear, or my voice is no longer dear. I cannot know for sure, but perhaps it’s depression that mars us so. I see the way she lounges on the couch before the TV, her gaze downturned to some sad corner of the room, away from me. I’m sure anyone else, had they seen her, would tell me I’m simply overthinking, projecting, she just looks tired, looks peaceful to me, but trust me, I know what I see. And this depression—no mere seasonal thing or vague distaste. She feels abandoned by me, hurt immeasurably. Sometimes it’s as if she’s finally looking at me, but I know that cannot be, for her mind is elsewhere, far from me. It’s why even on sunny days when the weather is godly and the wind flutters against her face, her sweetly shut eyes—a sight the very picture of animal contentment—my heart remains pinched. I know those moments, to her, are alternative grace. There are, also, nights when I am struck by fear, that by now we are simply strangers to one another, in this new configuration, no longer near. How they wound me, these moments in which she seems wholly new, materially immaterial, as if never before have I laid eyes nor planted kisses nor palmed caresses unto her. Never before held close. Are we through? No recourse? I do still believe in her soft spot for me, somewhere in her distant heart—should luck do its part. And yes, memories of better days do keep me afloat, but as we drift further away, as on separate boats, what good are they? Yesterday I felt as if our eyes finally locked; she could see me; I her. I wished she’d see into my very core and I’d peer into her, praying we’d overcome whatever drives her secretly sorrowing, avoidant heart. But the moment was a far cry from cinema and its minute facial nuances, last-minute reconciliations.
My face was frozen, matching hers, across all these photos and videos.

Alexei Raymond offers his heart, shaped by life and love in the Middle East. He chases visions of unspeakable loveliness. Find pieces of him in a variety of publications. https://x.com/enemyofcruelty

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PETS ISSUE

The two pets that I want most

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by Mariya Kurbatova

The two pets I want most are a fish or a rat but I live with two roommates and one has a cat and if I understand right, fish and rats are a cat’s favorite meals (though this particular cat is too old and fat to hunt but maybe orange enough to try) and our landlord used chatgpt to write the lease and she’d asked chatgpt to specify that the lease allows only one (1) cat, and though my hypothetical fish and my hypothetical rat would be contained (aquarium or cage respectively), I don’t know if she’d consider additional pets to be a violation of our chatgpt lease, and by the way our landlord apologized for using chatgpt to write our lease (she knows we’re all writers and it’s probably destroying our jobs but she still used it to write to the lease) and anyway, I don’t think I’m in a good place right now to be taking care of something living, something that needs my money for pellets and gravel and little calcium-fortified blueberry rat treats because I don’t have a lot of spare money right now and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this house I share with two roommates and a cat, and I don’t have a lot of spare space right now in this heart, because I’m used to hoarding all my love inside myself like a hamster bubbling its cheeks with grain because even though it (the hypothetical hamster) lives inside a cage inside a house with a human who has a paycheck to spend on grain for a hamster, the hamster doesn’t understand that it’s safe from starvation forever and so its survival instincts make it still hoard, but I’m slowly becoming less hamster and more human because you are so kind to me and my heart and maybe one day we’ll have enough money for our own house and we can fill our house with all the pets we want, and did I ever tell you that when I was little, I had a pet betta fish in a one gallon fish tank that I put on top of my bookshelf one day and just kinda forgot about until the fish slowly starved in its own slime, and also when I was little I begged my parents for a pink hairless rat, a rat hot dog creature that we took home in a petsmart cardboard box, and it died weeks later under my care because our house was kept so air-conditioned that my hairless rat got hypothermia, but you make me want to try again in the future to take care of something small and precious.

Mariya Kurbatova (she/her) is a fiction MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. She’s the Book Reviews Editor for The Arkansas International literary magazine. Her work has previously appeared in HAD and the Tightwires Anthology. Please send her pictures of your dog via Instagram @dogenthusiast.

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PETS ISSUE Uncategorized

Animal Control Blotter, Northwest, CT

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A.T. and Adam Soldofsky

Torrington | 290 block of Church St | Report of a dead muskrat on the sidewalk, unknown if Muskrat Suzie or Muskrat Sam | 2:31PM – 03/29/2026

Torrington | 970 Torringford St (Walmart) | Report of a dog that jumped out of a vehicle and engaged in the art of fisticuffs with another dog and the dog’s owner | 20:32 – 04/18

Torrington | Highland Ave @ Ford Ln | Report of a pig crossing the road, unknown if it made it to the other side but the caller is wrestling the pig in an attempt to keep it safe | 18:20 –

UPDATE 18:24: The owner of the pig is on scene with cage

Adam Soldofsky is the author of the poetry collection Memory Foam, recipient of an American Book Award and Telepaphone, a novella. His latest collection, Three Short Novellas, is available here.

A.T. writes captions, among other things

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PETS ISSUE

Billy with a Y 

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by A.T.

Driving Route 5 West Side I overheard a regular rider named Elena talking to another passenger about her cat. “Oh, Luna does this . . . Oh, Luna does that . . . It’s the cutest thing . . . Luna is thee best cat.”

Bus drivers are not supposed to talk to passengers. There’s a DOT safety poster in the break room stating “unnecessary conversation is not only distracting, it’s PROHIBITED.” But Elena had crossed a line. 

“I  think you’re exaggerating.”

Elena glared at me in the overhead mirror. “Excuse me?”

”There’s no way Luna can be thee best cat. Maybe a distant second. I know this because I have the best cat. Her name is Billy, Billy with a Y.”

We adopted Billy ten years ago. I’d been the one hold out in the family when it came to having a pet. The kids wanted a cat. My wife wanted a cat. “But cats puke everywhere, and I’d be the one cleaning the litter box,” I’d say.

When I finally did go to the shelter it was under duress. The wife drove. I had agreed to go only if it was while the kids were in school so they didn’t beg for every cat they saw and whine when we left empty-handed. I got out of the car with my mind made up but prepared to pretend. The miasma punched me as I walked through the door. A thick, dank, disrespectful concentration of both pre and post-processed animal chow, wet dog, cat piss, and disinfectant. Dozens of dogs incessantly barked in some back area I would not venture. 

A lady with bloody scratches on her arms told us to look around. I followed my wife into an enclosure with scattered condos and scratching posts where cats could mingle and lounge, and hope to con their way out of an overcrowded nightmare of shared litter boxes and donated food and into a new home. Use their big eyes, head tilts, and rollover playfulness to prey on lonely, affection-starved saps looking to buy a friend because they didn’t have any.

I watched them all with a cold heart, arms close to my sides. I couldn’t be fooled. I didn’t need friends. And they all seemed to know it. 

All except one. 

A solid female Tabby came out of nowhere and jumped atop a cat condo I was standing next to. She stared into my eyes, ready and willing to be petted. When I didn’t give in, she leaned forward and rubbed against my sternum with her full body weight, as if we were old buds. Nice try. 

But something was different about this one. She didn’t vibe like the other idiot cats shucking and jiving for an easier life. Maybe she was just a better con. Or maybe she felt the same way I did about this whole ridiculous process and saw that in me. They say animals can tell what’s inside a person. I reached up, paused, then scratched her head, stroked her back. Her spine arched and she purred, headbutting me. I hung out with her for a few more minutes. Just to make it look like I’d made an effort. She seemed nice and I wished her well. On the way out I found her picture and information on the wall. A four-year-old stray someone at the shelter had named Millie.

My wife was wearing a big ass grin as we turned out of the lot. “So? Did you see any cats you liked?”

I almost mentioned Millie. Instead I folded my arms, looked out the passenger window like a petulant child. “No.”

Within a week I was back at the shelter. Alone. I hadn’t told my wife I was going. Just in case I came to my senses and turned around before getting there. A different lady with deep scratches on her arms had me fill out a questionnaire, so they could determine if our home was safe for Millie.

“Will the cat have an emergency savings fund of at least $2,000?”

“What specific brand of organic, free-range, grain-free holistic food do you plan to feed?”

“If you move, break up with a partner, or have a baby, how will you prove the cat is still your primary priority?”

“Are you willing to surrender your entire couch set to structural compromise?”

“What is your philosophy on feline behavioral discipline?”

I didn’t have two-grand for myself, let alone for a cat, hadn’t considered pet food yet, and I was for sure, without a doubt, never getting a divorce. I adjusted the truth and was handed a clipboard with adoption paperwork. 

As a staff member slipped away to do whatever they do with paperwork I called my wife, who was surprised to hear where I was. “The kids are gonna be so happy!” She didn’t like the name Millie because she’d had a dog named Millie and was against the idea of using it again. But I was reluctant to change an animal’s given name. She might hate it and decide to ignore us whenever we called her. When people claim their pet doesn’t know their own name I want to say maybe they just don’t like it. As a compromise, the wife suggested Billy, because it sounded similar. I looked into the enclosure and saw Millie, now Billy, sitting atop the same cat condo as when we first met, looking at me through the glass. I waved like an idiot. The staff member went in, grabbed her by the scruff, and stuffed her in a cardboard carrier with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy yowled and yawped the whole ride. 

When I got back to the house I brought the carrier down into the basement and opened the top, expecting Billy to leap out. But she just stayed there, looking up at me like What the fuck is happening? I tried to coax her out by going psss, psss, psss, and then with treats, but nothing worked. I considered turning the carrier over and shaking her out like pruned limbs from a trash can but decided that might be taken as a poor welcome by an already scared cat. I thought about how friendly she was during my first visit to the shelter and briefly wondered if I’d been given the wrong cat. I checked the time, saw I had to pick Holly up from preschool and bolted out the door. Holly burst with excitement when I told her about our new cat. 

I figured Billy would have taken advantage of her alone time to explore. But she was still in the box. Staring up at us with that same look on her face. I told the kid we would just have to be patient. We set up a litter box, put out a bowl of water and a bowl of food, but several hours later Billy was still in the box. So I poured her out. She scrambled across the fake wood flooring, and found a place to hide. And that was the last any of us saw of her that day. My wife and Sam came home, looked everywhere and couldn’t find the cat. The following day, Sam caught a glimpse of green-yellow eyes reflecting light from under a piece of furniture. By the time anyone else got there they were gone. This is how it went for a couple months. It was almost like we didn’t have a cat. The only reason we knew she was there, somewhere, was because food and water would disappear, and there’d be something for me to scoop from the litter box.

I felt like a moron. Billy had conned me afterall, which I kind of respected. But my kids had wanted a cat and I managed to adopt one that didn’t want anything to do with us. 

One night, Holly said, “What ever happened to the cat we had that day?”

I hate to admit it, but I considered seeing if I could take Billy back to the shelter and exchange her for a different cat. My wife had enough. She enacted a strict daily program of exposure therapy that became known as “Billy Time.” After dinner was cleaned up she’d drag the cat out by the scruff from whatever piece of furniture she was hiding under and bring her to the couch where we could all pet her. At first the forced integration sessions only lasted a minute or so before Billy dug her claws into someone’s lap and escaped to one of her hiding places. But the time she tolerated this gradually increased. A couple minutes became ten, ten became twenty. She stopped digging her claws into our laps. Her body relaxed. She began to purr with the attention we gave her. By six months Billy was voluntarily coming out to hang with us, appearing in the living room at “Billy Time” all on her own, pausing to look at us like, You forgot to drag me out from under the dresser. She even began begging for food. Loudly and insistently. She was still skittish with Holly because little kids are full of energy and like to dress cats up and carry them around like a baby, which Billy usually tolerated with nothing more than an indignant expression. And when she simply had enough of being forced to wear a tutu, Billy would lightly scratch H, who would then cry and claim to have done nothing to deserve it.

Over a short period of time even that changed. Holly and Billy were becoming best friends. Billy even seemed to enjoy being dressed up and smothered with hugs and carried like a baby. As Holly grew and calmed down they spent more and more time together. Holly became her favorite person in the house. Billy didn’t sleep in anyone else’s bed. She would perk up when Holly got home from school, lay across her math homework, and no longer bothered shaking off the hair ties Holly draped over her ears, wearing them with purring, slit-eyed regal satisfaction and pride. As if she’d been crowned.

Billy also became my writing companion. There was never a time she wouldn’t curl up next to me as I typed or scribbled in my notebooks. 

The kids discovered the box containing Billy’s adoption papers and saw her name had been changed from Millie. It was a major scandal. 

“Changing someone’s name is mean!”

“You should have asked us first!”

My wife explained the decision behind the name change. The kids weren’t swayed. They were angry we would do such a thing, angry we hadn’t consulted them. There was a revolt. In protest, they started calling her Millie. If I called her Billy, Sam would say, “You mean Millie.” But their attention spans were short. Millie became Billy once again. Peace returned to the valley. But only for a time.

In the divorce my ex-wife got the house. I got the cat. Billy didn’t appreciate being stuffed into a carrier and emerging into a strange new place with strange new sounds and smells. She expressed her displeasure the only way cats seem able to: puking. But, like she did with the family all those years ago, Billy warmed up to the new situation and even seemed to enjoy having a new home. My ex-wife had added a puppy to the mix, a development Billy and I did not care for. In no time she was strutting around as if my new apartment had been her territory forever. At this time, so early in the breakup of the family, there was no love lost between me and the ex, but I remained grateful to her for three things. Two of those things being our kids. The third was forcing me to go to the animal shelter the day I first met Billy.

Sharing custody of my kids, who I’d seen every day of their lives up until then, was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Having Billy snuggled next to me as I read or watched tv in my sad, depressive state helped a lot. I suppose I did need a friend.

Time went on. Scar tissue covered old wounds. People adjusted. Billy got old. She was nearing eighty in cat years. Meds for a thyroid condition made her weight go up and down. Then only down. She went from twelve pounds to six, then four. She started to look like skin and bones. One weekend she began to have trouble breathing, then lost the ability to meow. Her not being able to meow was possibly the most heartbreaking part to me. She could no longer perform a cat’s sworn duty to annoy their owner with incessant cries for food. She didn’t ask for food at all. 

The vet said it was heart failure. After having fluid drained from her lungs, Billy started eating and meowing again, but I was warned that is temporary. That she will get worse again. It lasted fifteen days.

Billy rode in the back of my car. I’d placed the towel containing her body inside a cardboard box. I thought about the cardboard cat carrier from the shelter with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy was leaving us the way she had arrived. 

The pet crematory was in a dark building atop a hill. In a reverse procession, I carried Billy to the door behind my ex-wife and kids. A man with a big mustache let us in. The main room had shelves and shelves of urns and keepsakes, such as necklaces and bracelets one could put their pet’s ashes in. The mustache directed us to a small room to lay Billy out on a cushioned counter. The little room had dark walls and was dimly lit. There was a bench to sit on while we said our goodbyes. On one side of Billy’s cushion there was a statue of a frog sitting in the lotus position. On the other side were a couple of children’s books about death. On the wall above, a framed image of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet holding hands and walking away below the phrase “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” And goddammit I cried even more. Sam wanted a hug, then didn’t want a hug. I don’t know how long we were there. We said a difficult final goodbye to our Billy, walked out of the room and then the building. It was the first time we had left her with someone who was not one of us. 

At home, afterimages of Billy haunted my peripheral vision in the form of a couch cushion, a shadow, a hoodie left crumpled in a corner. I was careful to watch my step in places she had always been underfoot. Drying tears left a salty film on my glasses.

That day when I told Elena that her cat couldn’t possibly be the best cat in the world, that Luna could only be a distant second best cat at best, she took playful exception to this hard truth. From then on, whenever she got on my bus, Elena would greet me with, “How’s the second best cat doing?” And I would dutifully reply, “I don’t know, you tell me.”

The first time I saw Elena after Billy’s passing she was waiting at her usual stop in a downpour. I knew telling her what happened was going to require everything I had not to cry. And it still wouldn’t be enough. I briefly considered sailing past, pretending I didn’t see her.

But I hit the four-ways, eased to the curb, pulled the E-brake, and the bus kneeled down before her. I opened the door. Elen boarded, closing her umbrella, and looked at me with a mischievous smile. “How’s the second best cat in the world?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

A.T.