The apartment was the cold and dark of wet ash. Not one source that wasn't window. Sullen light of low atmospheric ceiling, cloud cover pillowy as stained quilting. The floorboards none too gently warped by time, echoing creakily as I paced. Noticing the screens over the windows are freckled with punctures from hail. How long have I been here? If it's where I think, it was at least a decade. But the outside doesn't match up; I was at ground level, albeit on a hill, whereas the view would suggest I'm higher than five stories-- perhaps ten. There is nothing lit in the city surrounding me. City as cemetery: every edifice, every fa
Brightening the crepuscular dim comes the gentle chirp: Olive, my last cat, still a kitten. As I turn she comes bounding across the unfurnished room. In the dark her creamcolour as a siamese has gone russian blue. Perhaps Olive shares her soul with Ghost, an earlier, childhood pet. In this ended world their kind spirit is cojoined. My child's view of a kitten an uninterrupted lineage of love, one affection-hunter to another linked in a non-finite chain of kinship, reminding my adult self that youth is but the central, irritable grain around which the soul's pearl is formed. One cat is not all cats, but may be all cats one has known. Olive presses shoulder to my ankle, awaiting my hand.
