The Cat

She is not my cat. But she acts like she is mine. Or perhaps I am hers.

When I close my door, she cries. I can hear her plaintive song through the wooden door. When I open it at night, she stalks in regally, her eyes boldly challenging mine. She leaps onto the bed, studies my expression, licks her chops and settles in, hair by muscle by hair. Like watching a dust cloud disappear. Only the eyes remain, 2 pale pools that take me in.

In the summer, when the windows are open and she has rubbed enough ankles and shins, leaving her mark, no doubt, she climbs up onto the ledge with two paws and her eyes grow greener, the iris like wounded slits. She smells the birds, the wet laundry, the dirt, the wooden planks, the chicken wire, the weeds beneath the ground. She works her jaw a bit, in her mind she is biting down on feathery flesh. We watch her–we, the two tall things that stroke her head and back, she watches our expression, like scanning the sky for weather.

We are her storms, we are her placid seas. We are everything to her. When we leave, the quiet of the apartment folds her in. She settles on a soft spot and crosses her paws. She can watch a pattern of light until it disappears. Then she withdraws into herself, into the tiniest porthole of where we cannot follow. Everything is there but the world. There is nothing she does not know. For what little there is, she is sure, she knows everything.