The Lady that Couldn’t Keep a Cat

“Ouch!” she hissed, sucking on her poor thumb. She had hit it with a hammer while trying to post yet another one of her flyers on a lonely telephone pole near a mom and pop.

She had always been a fairly even-tempered woman, not one to act like a basket case by any means. Nonetheless, she was pretty close to the end of her tether at this juncture. She fell to her knees onto the dying grass, sobbing gently with her stack of flyers under one arm and the hammer in the other. The nails were in her jeans’ pocket. They poked into her thighs, but she barely noticed.

She got a hold of herself, shook it off, and stood. Not only had she had enough flyering for the day, but also for the year. She pulled the stack from under her armpit and stared at the top page.

“HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” it read in giant print.

Underneath was a b/w photo of the missing feline, an unusually plump Turkish Angora she had been calling Zeren. Underneath that were her cell phone number, her landline, and her email address.

She felt like Charlie Brown, running to kick Lucy’s football once more despite the inevitability of its being yanked away before impact. This was because she knew with all certainty that no one would contact her and she would never see the cat again, though she still prayed that she would be proven wrong on both counts.

She was on her way home anyhow, just a half-mile away. She stomped on sullenly, arms tightly hugging her hammer and papers against the biting, early evening cold. She had always assumed that she would absolutely love living in the boondocks, with the rolling hills, the quaint general stores, the tapestries of foliage and fauna all around her as she read a delicious novel with her hunky husband snoring in a hammock near her side.  

But, in spite of herself, she had grown to dislike it.

In fact, she thought, I hate it here.

This was the first time she had admitted so much, though the feeling had been brewing for months. Now, she wondered, how do I tell him without seeming like a self-centered infant? What the hell am I supposed to do? She and her husband were technically still newlyweds after all, and this was to be the very start of their dream life together.

Still, looking around as she walked, she had to admit that she still kind of dug the Sendakian music of her surroundings: the rambling bushes, the wonder and obscurity of nature without bounds.

But something lingered that disallowed peace. It was the perfect place to raise a sweet little furry pet, yet..?

Her sneakers crinkled across deceased leaves and, as she tried desperately not to feel sorry for herself, she couldn’t help but feel that she was being observed. Not immediately, mind you. Rather, in a wispy, dreamy, ethereal, and most subtle fashion. It was no doubt just the sort of a trick the pattern-seeking mind always played - and she was no exception, being an author.

Dimensions might be overlapping here, her id leaked out before her superego could contain it.

Maybe someone could see her, but they didn’t know how or why exactly. Maybe she was a faint image from a place they could not dream of or locate, a peek into somewhere they didn’t (yet) understand they were peeking into.

She looked around and found herself seated on a hollow log in a favorite hiding place of hers, a softly rushing creek rolling under cover of giant, overhanging trees, so many branches drooping down that sunlight could barely penetrate.

She stood, groggy as if from a long nap, and continued to walk toward home.

She could see the house looming ahead, the little bit of sun left in the sky giving it a hue of amber as the loitering rays caressed the wood. It was the least remarkable yet most beautiful home she had ever seen.

Her man had been living in it for who knows how long. She was the interloper, the city chick who had wistfully equated sagacious inner peace with a lack of subways and parking meters in her general vicinity.

The garage, which was separate from their multiple-story home, was wide open. She could see two stick figures talking. The figures began to fill out as she approached. One was quite tall, her husband, the other a tad shorter, a regular customer. Her husband usually entered through the much smaller side door, but at the end of the day, when the sun was almost down like this, he liked to open the giant slide door in order to air out the dust and wood chippings.

The garage was large enough to hold three vehicles, but neither her car nor her husband’s truck was parked inside. There was barely enough room for a small work bench with sawing, sanding, and painting tools upon it in the center of narrow, improvised aisles.

This was because the space was packed to the gills with her husband’s intricate, strikingly crafted woodwork. The garage was a menagerie of demons, goblins, devils, monsters, witches, skulls, and unnamable things.

Each one was more brilliantly carved and painted than the last, with breathtakingly fine detail and startling realism. There was a seven foot tall Cerberus, a three headed dog that frothed at the mouth in blood. There were long-necked men with twisted faces, with the legs and horns of rams, grinning with rapacious delight. There was a five-eyed, green skinned woman with an exposed brain, maggots crawling out of it, her wings like a hairless bat’s standing on end. There was a smiling, crowned skull, dark purple and three feet in diameter, with a jagged, red tongue lolling. There was a tiny bull with a man’s bearded face. There were giant red spiders with many heads.

There was quite literally one awful thing after another, big or small, skinny or wide. Each piece, if one stared long enough, seemed to morph into something not entirely alike what one had originally assumed it had been. It was layer upon layer of pain. Agonized faces. Diabolical faces. Tortured. Psychotic. Gloomy. Forever.

All of it would have been completely disturbing if it hadn’t been so expertly designed and executed. People came from miles around to purchase her husband’s pieces. In fact, she had initially met him at a chic art show in the city. “Things I’ve Seen,” his hit, critically lauded exhibit had been called. He was so successful with his work that she and he required no other income to survive, which freed her to write as much as she wanted.

She was now close enough to hear her husband joking with the customer as he boxed and packed up some of his work.

“There she is,” said the grinning customer, who had caught a glimpse of her approaching over his shoulder. He was a nice enough man, a regular with his long hair dyed jet black and several piercings in his nose and eyelids.

But the poor guy just looked so short and portly standing next to her husband, literally the best looking man she had ever seen in person, stacking boxes in his red flannel, jeans, and work boots.

“That’s her,” her husband agreed with genuine love, his gorgeous voice booming over the Chopin playing through a laptop connected to overhanging speakers. “My queen of the castle.”

He was so loyal to her, but why? She knew full well that she was a six on a scale of one to ten at best, and that would be after she had put on some makeup and heels.

She looked around the shop, not to study the many wood carvings – most of them, except the newest ones, were imbedded in her brain – but to avoid eye contact with him. Her husband grunted, instinctively seeing that his wife was yet again upset and inconsolable. He continued chatting with the customer rather than making a scene.

 “Wait,” said the customer, glancing over his shoulder then pointing with his head. “What about that little guy over there?”

Still turned away, she rolled her eyes as an unavoidable reflex.  She already knew what the man was referring to.

It was that stupid, evil, ugly little imp, the one that stood next to the side doorway.

“Not for sale,” her husband announced yet again. “You’ve asked me that before.”

Everyone who came by and saw it loved it so, but she didn’t know why. It was only about sixteen inches tall, but its beady eyes, candy apple skin, potbelly, multi-horned cranium, and pointy little tail gave her the creeps – big time. His mouth was bigger than the rest of his heinous little head, his eyes playfully beseeching upward like a sickly sycophant.

“Fair enough,” the customer chuckled. “I was hoping you forgot. Um, remind me you why won’t you sell it?”

The imp was the ugliest thing she had ever seen, and that was saying bundles with a garage like that. She simply wanted it to go away because it wouldn’t.

 “I just like how the little guy turned out, that’s all,” her husband explained. He and the customer each picked up a box to carry to the latter’s van.

She cringed at the certainty of the same old tired joke about to rear its ugly head. She silently mouthed the words as her husband said:

“Besides, it’s my self-portrait!”

The customer inexplicably belly laughed. “Oh, I get it. Your inner demon, eh?”

He and her husband chortled their way out of the garage.

 “Seriously,” she heard her husband out at the van as he lifted a box into the back. “It’s a familiar.”

“A familiar?” the customer wondered.

“Yes,” he said. “A little helper, to a witch or a conjurer or whatever.”

“Like an evil little valet?”

“Kind of,” her husband allowed.

Oh, how she wished he would sell that dumb little imp – anything so she wouldn’t have to hear the same stupid jokes again, the same lame trivia.

She looked around and remembered that she did not like to be in the garage alone. She marched over to the house.

Later, after closing up shop, her husband walked inside. He found her sitting at the computer in the living room, printing out more flyers.

“That’s ten cats in 13 months,” he said gently.

“I know that!” she screamed. “Don’t you think I know that?”

It was true. First there was the big, fat, white tabby. That one had disappeared the fastest, a mere 72 hours after she had first moved into her husband’s house. Then there was the British longhair, which lasted a bit longer at a week before it went missing. Then there was the chubby, black Bombay, which lasted five days. Then the pet store wouldn’t sell her any more cats, so she went to the animal shelter, a more worthy place to find a pet anyhow. These cats were uglier and skinnier – Burmese and chaussies and chartreus and even a Don sphinx - and each lasted two to four weeks respectively. But this last one, the angora – she had to beg the lady at the shelter to give it to her.

“It looks like having a cat around the house wasn’t meant to be,” her husband said in a reassuring, concerned tone. “Perhaps we should just-”

Abruptly, she ripped the stack of flyers she had just printed into shreds, the paper dumping into her lap and the surrounding wood floor.

“There’s a pet store two towns over,” she announced. “I’m going there in the morning.”

He husband said nothing, just grunted as he pretended to look through a drawer in the kitchen.

“You know,” she called, “you don’t have to go with me. You could stay here and practice trying to carve something cute and normal for a change, like a bird or a beaver for Chrissakes.”

“I’ve been trying to make butterflies,” he whimpered seriously. “They’re just not very good yet. I’m not used to them.” He paused, choosing words. “I’m sorry that my art…” He trailed off, head down.

She saw him there, bent over the kitchen sink. “Look,” she offered. “I know that your carvings are our gravy train. I get it. But you say that you carve things that you’ve seen…”

“Yes?” he said.

“Well, don’t you ever see anything pretty?”

“I see you.” He smiled.

 “This is exactly my point. Listen to you. You’re such a nice, beautiful man. Why is it that, when you close your eyes, all you see are these horrors? What does that say about you?”

“Not much at all.” He frowned. “Believe me.”

“And what about me?” she continued. “What does it say about me, that I can’t even keep a sweet little cat in a perfect environment like this?”

She began to cry again, her head in her hands. He approached her slowly and began rubbing her back. They embraced, ate a little dinner in silence, took a shower together, and went to bed. 

But, just past midnight, she awoke to find herself alone.

She rubbed her eyes, then noticed the sound of a sander spinning and squealing against wood in the distance.

Her husband did that a lot: got up to work on something in the garage in the dead of night. Maybe he was working on his butterfly. She exhaled in irritation and tried to go back to sleep.

This was one of those times when a little kitty cat at the foot of her bed would have been soothing.

The next morning, she woke up a little later than usual. She found her man at the kitchen table, checking customer emails, sipping coffee.

“What were you working on last night?” she asked.

He reached underneath and pulled out what seemed to be a distorted cockroach with two pancakes strapped to its back.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A butterfly,” he said.

They both laughed.

“You know, you really don’t have to come this time,” she offered once more.

“No, no,” he countered. “I’ll drive.”

They took the truck and rode many miles without a word, save for the Chopin playing on the stereo. She felt silly that she kept getting new cats, but each disappearance filled her with even more defiant determination.

“I’m getting a tabby again,” she announced.

Her husband’s giant hands gripped the wheel tightly, but he said nothing.

“I’m getting a tabby,” she repeated, “and I’m never ever going to let it outside. It’ll be an indoor cat. That’s the only way this’ll work.”

He cleared his throat. “Sounds like it’ll defeat the purpose of getting one.”

“What?” she demanded. She already knew what he meant, but she felt like arguing, and he was always so easy and willing to be beat up on.

“You never had a cat the whole time you lived in the city,” he explained needlessly. “The whole reason you’re getting a cat is because you live out here with me.”

“Maybe it’s too spacious out here,” she wondered, ignoring him. “They just keep running away. I buy the right food. I buy the right toys. I give each one of them a loving home.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

Finally, they pulled into the dirt parking lot of Pluto’s Pets.

“I checked the website,” she said as she opened her door. “They have tabbies.”

“Well,” her husband said as he put the truck in park. “Let’s try and keep an open mind.”

As she went to step out of the cab, he grabbed her wrist gently.

“Baby,” he said. “Aren’t I your companion? Don’t you and I have a loving home?”

“What? Oh…” She kissed his giant, warm hand. “Of course you are, baby. Of course you do.”

They walked inside arm in arm.

“All of our domestic animals come with a one year health guarantee,” said the young girl behind the counter. It had taken her several minutes to get over how handsome this mousy lady’s husband was, to stop blushing in his presence so she could concentrate on what she was being asked.

“What about going missing?” the lady asked her.

“What about what?” replied the girl, chomping on her gum. A parakeet squawked on a perch over her left shoulder.

“If the animal goes missing, is there any guarantee about that?”

“Honey,” her husband interjected, trying to talk her down, “of course they don’t offer-”

“That’s funny you ask that, actually,” said the girl, blowing a bubble. “Where did you two say you were from?”

He told her.

“No kidding?” said the girl. “Oh, wow, man. My gramma lives there. She has nothing but bulldogs now, but she used to have cats when she first moved out there. All six of them came up missing within a few months.”

“You say,” said the lady as she jabbed her husband in his side, “Did you just say that your grandmother’s cats..?”

“Bulldogs, eh?” her husband blurted at the girl. “Do you have any in the store?”

The couple walked about the shop, peering at aquariums and terrariums, perches and plastic ponds. They finally found the cats, which were in a sort of giant play pen in the middle of the storeroom, along with several puppies. Three of these were bulldogs.

He bent his towering frame at the waist, reached down into the pen like a handsome scarecrow, and picked one of them up. He cupped it to his chest and it licked his ear.

“Just look at this guy, honey,” he said.

But it was too late. She wouldn’t even glance in his general direction. She had already spotted the gluttonously bloated white tabby as it lounged in the far corner, like a sumo wrestler in retirement. It wouldn’t even bother to lick itself. It surveyed the menagerie before it like it owned the place – but was thinking of selling it.

“Meow,” she told the cat, leaning in.

It stared at her, as if trying to make something out through spectacles made of Jell-O.

“Meow,” it finally said back.

She smiled.

Over his wife’s shoulder, her husband stared at the tabby in horror, shuddered.

As soon as they pulled up to their house, the woman sprinted ahead of her husband, who stoically marched far behind, voluntarily carrying the tabby, yet trying to do so as if it were a small stack of firewood rather than a breathing thing one could coo to and cuddle. He didn’t seem averse to the tabby – not exactly – but he would not look down at it. He stared ahead, concentrating all of his consciousness on the doorknob in the distance as if he were a Zen Buddhist.

As for his wife, she had already run through the door, through the living room, to the kitchen, and down to the basement where she kept the cat toys, the cat bed, the water and food dish, the kitty litter, etc. She kept the kitty accoutrements down there and out of sight during the many periods of time when her cat went missing. It was a ritual she had inadvertently grown to enjoy, her silver lining in a sable cloud of erstwhile pets.

The giant, rotund cat surveyed its new surroundings, not bothering to move its fat ass of course. It just sat there in the middle of the living room, watching the husband cook spaghetti across the way in the kitchen.

Feeling lovey-dovey, the woman approached her husband from behind, wrapped her arms around his chiseled chest, and pressed her face against his back, smelling his shirt. He placed one hand on hers as he stirred with the other. She then peered around his torso to look into the pot.

“That’s WAY too much spaghetti, hon,” she said. “Are you especially hungry from our trip to the pet store?” she teased.

“A man needs his sustenance,” he replied, maybe finding humor, maybe not.

At dinner, the man did indeed eat a lot, though it never seemed to be enough. There were no leftovers and the only reason he didn’t lick his plate clean was the fact that his wife hated it when he did that.

“Sweetie,” his wife said after she had finished her little portion, “I’ll get the dishes since you cooked.”

As she washed, her husband did something that always surprised her: he sat in front of the living room fire, the current cat in his lap, petting it tenderly. He did not speak to the cat or so much as look down at it, but he sat with it almost reverentially, as if it were worth its weight in gold.

Many years later, when she would be a very elderly woman in her late nineties and in the last few weeks of her life, this image of her husband petting the tabby would literally be the only thing she could think of. And she would wonder, still: Why, oh why, did I have to keep buying those damned cats?

In the dead of that night, she awoke from her cozy sleep, annoyed yet again to find her husband gone and to hear the sound of wood being sanded in the distance.

No matter, she had the tubby tabby to snuggle on, which lay at the foot of the bed beneath her feet.

She pushed forward the thick covers and reached for the tabby…

Which of course was gone.

“No,” she moaned. “Nononononononononono!”

Still in her nightgown, she catapulted out of bed and flew downstairs. She knew this time that it would be a waste to search the house. She quickly stepped into some boots and wrapped herself in a giant coat after encasing her head in a beanie. She grabbed a flashlight from a kitchen drawer and ran out into the howling wind.

She rushed past the closed garage, not even bothering to stick her head in to tell her husband where or why she was going. Besides, he was so immersed in his work that all she could hear was the wood grinding - no Chopin.

Good, she thought bitterly. You concentrate on that damn butterfly while I’m losing my frickin mind over here.

She was about to call out the cat’s name as she stumbled through the field and into the woods, then remembered that this cat did not have a moniker yet. She cursed herself again for having not named it immediately, for jinxing this retrial of feline ownership with subconscious pessimism. She sighed and decided to go with the cliché: “Here, kitty kitty! HERE KITTY KITTY!”

She marched drunkenly, shining the light every which way as the cold continually punched her in the face like an expert pugilist. She had no particular locale in mind, but found herself at her creek with the overhanging trees.

She was vaguely aware of a faint, smacking sound, but she was too distraught to wonder about it. She waved the light around wildly, not so much looking for the cat anymore as for the hollow log, where she could sit and cry or scream.

She finally found the log. Her beam fixed on it from about three yards away.

What she saw there confused her, so she pulled the light back over her head while stepping back a few feet, creating a spotlight effect.

Upon the log sat an exact replica of her husband’s stupid, ugly, evil little imp.

The only difference that this one was not made of wood but of living flesh. It stank putridly, like rotten beef mixed with dinosaur dung. Its head was down, too immersed to realize that it was under the scrutiny of light.

In the little imp’s itty bitty hands was the fat tabby.

Intestines, blood, and fur dangled from the imp’s lips as it feasted joyously.

Luckily for the cat, its neck had already been snapped. The imp was holding it up mightily with both hands, chewing and swallowing giant gashes out of the torso with teeny rows of razor sharp teeth.

The woman gasped, dropped the flashlight.

The imp heard the gasp, stopped.

She cupped her mouth so as not to scream or vomit.

It narrowed its red eyes, which glowed in the dark, as did its pot belly.

For some time, all was quiet. No more chewing. No more gasping. The fierce wind was muted by the thick foliage above. Each waited for the other to do or say something.

The fallen flashlight’s beam lit up one of the imp’s feet, which was a tiny hoof. A pointy tail unwrapped itself from around it self-consciously.

Full of foolish curiosity, the woman bent to pick up the flashlight. Slowly but steadily, her arms shaking, she returned the device to its spotlight position.

What she saw in the imp’s horrible, sloppy face was the last expression she would have guessed to see. It wasn’t psychotic rage. It wasn’t devilish amusement. It wasn’t ravenous hunger. It wasn’t foreboding lust. It wasn’t even predatory curiosity.

It was embarrassment. Pure, simple, innocent embarrassment.

It dropped the partial cat into the grass. It wiped its mouth frantically, like a five year old who had been caught with chocolate-covered face just before dinnertime.

Then the imp drooped its head beneath its shoulder line, put its hands on its knees, and heaved a gentle sigh. Alas, the embarrassment had thickened and grown exponentially in mass until it had become shame.

The woman was about to speak to the imp, but it spoke to her first, in a warbly, high-pitched screek:

“I’m sorry… my weakness…”

But it just trailed off.

It seemed so forlorn and in the dumps that she almost wanted to run over, pick it up, and give it a hug. Yet the truth was that it smelled and looked so horrible that she wished for it to go. Not to mention that the damned thing had eaten all of her cats.

As if reading her mind, the imp stood up sheepishly. It dropped what was left of the tabby, which was about fifty percent. Now shorter than it had been seated, the imp walked around to the far side of the log, facing away from her.

There, just in front of where it stood, appeared a sort of whirlpool, about twelve feet in diameter and crackling with intermittent, red bolts of lightning. Just inches above the grass, it was perfectly vertical, as if hanging on a wall rather than hovering. Perhaps it had always been there, but had only become alive and ready for use due to some sort of motion sensor, like in a financial district bathroom.

Reluctantly but deliberately, the imp stepped through it.

Dumbstruck, the woman watched all of the imp disappear, except for its tail.

The tail remained on the other side for a beat or two, then disappeared as well.

The woman assumed that this was because the imp had left, but in fact it had made a 180 and returned headfirst.

Quickly, head still down in full melancholy, the imp picked up the semi-cat, tucking it under its arm.

Without looking back, the imp ran back through the whirlpool.

The whirlpool vanished.

The woman kept her flashlight aloft for five or six more minutes, waiting for more to occur.

Then she snapped out of her daze and realized she needed to get the hell out of there.

She huffed and puffed and ran and ran and ran some more, a foot occasionally sinking into a mud hole, the flashlight creating a dancing dot in the distance. She had to tell her husband as soon as possible that some sort of wicked porthole had been opened. Her breathing and heartbeat rang in her skull.

Most of all – and strange as it would first seem – she subconsciously reveled in the satisfaction of Solving the Puzzle, the holy grail of homo sapience. Finally! She had learned the reason why all those cats never came back. Like any good bipedal chimpanzee, she knew that The Answer was all, no matter how awful or divine, big or small.

The lights of the house and garage finally appeared after what felt like an inordinate amount of time. Indeed, she had gotten lost and run in a wrong direction several times on the way back.

From the garage, the sound of wood squealing underneath a sander had not abated.

She burst through the side door, the wail of wood blaring within. She cupped her hands around her mouth and screamed her husband’s name repeatedly, demanding he stop immediately to listen to her.

The only problem was, save for all the carvings, nobody else was there.

Her husband was nowhere to be found. This was odd, since the sound of busy woodwork was very real, loud and clear.

Her head darted back and forth like she was watching a crucial tennis match.

Then she looked up at the overhanging speakers.

Then she found the laptop and clicked the mouse.

Then she turned off the prerecorded MP3.

Then all of the sanding sounds stopped abruptly.

All was quiet.

There was another pathetic attempt at a butterfly on the work table. She picked it up and threw it in the garbage.

She turned to leave and there by the door was the imp – the wooden version.

She knelt, sat on her heels, and considered it until the sun came up. She did not cry, because it was too late now.

She waited for several years. The police eventually cleared her of any wrongdoing, and the proceeds from selling the house and remaining artwork of such a renowned craftsman made her a very wealthy woman.

She sold all except for the imp of course, which she brought back with her to the city and never parted with. She refused all interviews and visitors.

Never again did she see her husband, the most respectful, helpful, dutiful, compromising, caring, hardworking, devoted, modest, patient, loving, and literal man she would ever know.

By Dave Kostiuk, © 2012