By Aidan O'Donoghue

i
Winter. A cat wanders into our backyard during a thunderstorm. The cat stares at us through the kitchen window as we eat filet steak and garlic potatoes. She places a paw against the window and makes a sad face. The wind is knocking tiles off the roof.

~

ii
Cats usually bolt when we open the door to the backyard. We must give off a certain vibe. This cat doesn’t bolt. This cat comes right through the back door and makes herself at home on the beanbag. Not being cat people, we don’t have any cat food in the house. We give her the steak and garlic potatoes that the children have left behind. She devours the steak but leaves the garlic potatoes. Our children also hate garlic potatoes. I’ve yet to meet the child or cat that likes garlic potatoes.

~

iii
The next evening, the cat returns. Rain is erupting from the gutters, taking up where the thunder left off. Dinner is salmon and green beans. Lucky for the cat, our children would rather eat their own shoes. It is a win-win situation for everybody concerned. The cat licks herself for an hour, making sure not to miss a single square inch of her body. She falls asleep with her paws in the air.

~

iv
The children decide that the cat is ours. She has come now for seven nights, always around dinner time. No wonder, my wife says, she’s being fed like a queen. I remind my wife that the cat is eating what we are eating, which means that we too must be fed like queens. Yes, my wife says, but she is a cat. Cats only go where they are fed. Don’t we all, I say.

~

v
The cat has bitten my finger. I’d been rubbing her belly, and she bit my finger. Blood is drawn. My wife says it is because she is still half wild. If she does it again, she’ll have to go. Five minutes later, she does it again, this time to my wife. The children beg for one last chance, but my wife is a very determined person. She puts the cat out and tells it to go home. She doesn’t know what you’re saying, I say. For all we know, this is her home. Later on, we hear the cat mewing through the bedroom window. The rain is striking the roof like gunfire. My wife sighs and rolls out of bed. Without speaking, she goes to the kitchen and cooks chicken on a frying pan. She puts a cardboard box in the shed and puts the cat in there with the chicken. She comes back to bed. I can feel the rain on the soles of her feet.

~

vi
I’ve always assumed the cat was a she. It exhibits an innocence, a kind of pure love that only females can possess. In saying that, I check to make sure. It is a she.

~

vii
The cat has become the orbit around which our lives revolve. There is a change in the children I cannot describe: a tenderness I’d forgotten they had. When they’re not at home, they are wishing they are. Every cat we see is nowhere as beautiful as our cat. We buy cat toys and cat treats and a bed made of fleece. There is an entire industry out there for cats that had never entered my consciousness. There are literally grown men and women sitting around in offices thinking about these things.

~

viii
I am anxious about going away for the weekend. A hotel break that we’d booked ages ago. A wedding anniversary or a birthday, I don’t remember. The children are crying, saying they don’t want to go. I tell them that it cost a lot of money, but they are not in a sympathetic mood. The ultimatum is that either they stay or the cat comes. I tell them horror stories of cats detained in hotels, taken away to pounds, ending up in curries. My wife says cats are independent animals, that she’ll have a blast here all on her own. The children can tell we are lying through our teeth. We leave food and water and her toys. We leave the shed door open. We are all crying as we drive out the gate.

~

ix
There is a flash flood in the hotel lobby. Nobody sleeps with the noise. The hot water doesn’t work, and the breakfast buffet is like something from a school canteen. The children sleep in the car on the way home. When we get back, the cat is gone.

~

x
We walk up and down the road until midnight. We ask the neighbors. We call for hours from the backyard. A day goes by, then a week. The children make posters and hang them on telephone poles. The guilt weighs like steel. The absence is something you can hold in your hands, press to your chest. Her bed, her toys.

~

xi
In time, the children move on. I no longer see the world the way they do. I see ends where they see beginnings. Maybe it’s unresolved grief from my father, I tell him. Maybe I didn’t get it out of my system at the time. It’s possible, he says. I ask him where he thinks all that love has gone. If the energy of the universe is finite, it must have gone somewhere; it can’t just simply have disappeared. I realize I’ve spent half of a session talking about the cat. That’s thirty-two euros and fifty cents talking about the cat. I ask him if this is unusual. I am not here to judge, he says.

~

xii
He tells me that I should connect with my grief. That in order to move on, I need to own the painful emotions as well as the happy ones. That moving on doesn’t mean forgetting.

~

xiii
The cat is gone.