Strays
by Anne Elliott
They made wild little babies with dripping eyes and bellies bloated with worms. Many were not even cute. Some dropped hefty, inbred litters, with markings so alike they looked like a single being, a furry amoeba throbbing around the water bowl. Some staged midnight gang wars in between the fence posts and parked cars. Some had lost eyeballs or hunks of fur and tail, or had oozing abscesses on their necks, pink holes of stinking goop. Some hunched alone on stone ledges, with paws curled under and perpetual hollow looks, disappointment set in deep. Others arched and emanated anger. Maybe they had good reason.
They all hollered after the door snapped shut. They seemed to be yelling at themselves, for yielding to curiosity, for heavy-stepping, for hatch-tripping, just for that sniff of sardine.
The sardines were on cheap paper cocktail plates. Lou baited in an assembly line, like cater-waitering, only everything cheap. The sardines were cheap. The bleach she used to prep the cages was cheap. The kibble she withheld for a week to starve them out was cheap. She covered each trap with an old bed sheet—also cheap—to mellow the beasts. They preferred the dark and enclosed. The only way to stop the whining was to toss a curtain over the cage. That’s all, folks. Shut up and sniff your fish.
Her landlady let her shelter the cats in the basement, before and after surgery, in the room between the garbage and the laundry. There were rat traps down there, the black and sinister kind, opaque so you don’t have to see whose life you’ve just stopped. So the rats can’t warn each other of the ruse. Permanent curtain. And mousetraps, too, the sticky kind, the kind that sickened Lou with their efficiency. The landlady didn’t bother to cover the mousetraps. The mice were too dumb. They became their own bait. They would see their brothers stuck and squirming out of their own fur and come over to see what the fuss was.
“Just like people,” said the landlady. “They see somebody stuck someplace, they want to get stuck there, too.”
The other tenants blamed Lou for the rat problem and the mouse problem and probably other problems, too. She saw their slitty-eyed looks. The thin-lipped, fakey smiles on the stairway. Crazy cat lady is making them all multiply, all of the vermin. I even saw a raccoon! In Brooklyn! The whispers, stopping suddenly, when she set a bowl of cheap kibble on the stoop.
Never feed a stray cat, Mother used to say. They talk. They invite the whole army.
Mother was dead now, and this army was starving. “I didn’t give birth to them,” Lou said under her breath to the un-neighborly neighbors.
“I didn’t dump them here.”
The landlady was better. “Don’t ask me for money because I’m not giving you any,” she said. “Those veterinaries just want to get in your pocket.”
“Not asking for donations. Except the basement space. Just for a week. I can probably get you a tax receipt even, if you want.”
“Well, since you put it that way.”
“Our nighttime opera will be gone.”
“They’ve been screaming back there since I was this big.”
“So you’ll miss it, then.”
The landlady laughed, slowly, thoughtfully, silently, the way she did. “I just might.”
*
Impossible not to name the critters, if only to keep them apart. Here in the basement were Stan and Rodney and Edith and Gladys, names Lou had gleaned from the cemetery across the street, where the cats courted. Also in the basement: Ariel, Simba, Pocahontas, and Nemo, named by Dwayne Junior, the landlady’s grandson, who was too old to watch cartoons but did, compulsively, up in the landlady’s apartment. He was another condition of the basement. The landlady wanted him to get out, broaden his vocabulary beyond the talking box in his room. He took an interest in the cats. He was the kind of kid who latched onto things. Not people so much—just things. He didn’t make eye contact. Lou decided she could get used to it. The cats didn’t make eye contact either.
Dwayne Junior was big for his age, which added to the mystery of his tics. Nearly diabetic, the landlady confessed, at a loss for getting vegetables in. Starchy staples were what he loved, and salty crunchy things in noisy bags. “I don’t buy chips, Lou,” said the landlady. “I don’t know how they get in his hands. I don’t think I want to know how they get in his hands.”
It took a few days to fill all of the traps, and the most gullible—or desperate—cats had to cool their heels in the basement and wait for the crafty ones to get caught. In the meantime, Lou and Dwayne Junior went down a couple times a day to dish out food and clean up poop in the traps.
“I have an idea,” Dwayne Junior said on the second day of cat storage. “We should have two sets of food and water bowls for each cage. We can get everything ready over here first. Like a kit.”
He laid out a sample kit very carefully: right angles, newspaper collated, plastic water bowl, paper dish of kibble.
“Dwayne Junior, that looks like a cafeteria tray.”
“Not really. Cafeteria trays are made of plastic. And people don’t eat cat food. And we drink out of cups, not bowls. And we use knives and forks. And the cats don’t use napkins. A cafeteria tray would have napkins.”
Dwayne Junior didn’t take big leaps, she noted. It was a metaphor-free zone, this basement, among the dormant bassinets and bicycles, the recycle bins, the doomed mice, the dingy windows, the dusty steam pipes, the tenants’ curious children peeking in on their way to the laundry room, tagging behind bedraggled moms. The kids didn’t step into the cat room. They had been warned.
Lou helped Dwayne Junior set up cat cafeteria trays and tried to follow his design. Still, he corrected her: “The water is too close to the food.” She obeyed him. She was not sure if obeying was the right thing to do. She wanted a manual for this kid.
She folded the first sheet halfway back. Pocahontas tucked herself into the covered part, the dark and enclosed. Lou stuck large combs through the halfway mark, to trap the cat in the back. She pulled out the soiled newspaper. Some cats would shred the paper to cover their smelly inevitabilities. Some, like Pocahontas, just shat neatly in the corner of the cage and let the smell waft on up, as if to say: Look what you made me do.
Lou put new paper in, closed the cage, removed the combs, folded the sheet back over the clean end of the cage. Pocahontas migrated, and Lou reinserted the combs, then opened the other end of the cage and readied it for Dwayne Junior to insert the tray. He placed it carefully. She secured the hatch. Dwayne Junior removed the combs and replaced the sheet. “Shhh,” he said to Lou, though he didn’t have to. This was the best part: listening to the crunch of kibble.
“Can I do the next one? I know how to do it. I was watching you.”
“Are you sure?”
Of course he was sure.
What the hell. She nodded. “Just don’t stick your fingers in.” Lou had heard stories from the queue at the mobile clinic, the parade of cat ladies and their covered cages. One volunteer had been bitten on her thumb and lost half her arm to infection. A cat’s mouth was full of the unthinkable.
“I won’t,” he said. He was already kneeling on the floor in front of Gladys. Lou fought the urge to talk him through it. She had a feeling he didn’t like to be told what to do. He followed her steps exactly, as if he had a checklist: sheet, combs, door, newspaper, door, combs, sheet. Other end. Sheet, combs, door, food tray, door, combs, then he stopped before dropping the curtain. “I think Gladys is purring. Shhh. Listen.” He put his ear close to the cage.
“Careful, D. He might bite.”
“She. This is Gladys.”
“She might bite.”
“She won’t bite. She’s happy. Look. She likes it in this cage.” Lou knelt next to Dwayne Junior and put her ear to the cage. Gladys flopped onto her side on the clean newspaper, pushing her tangerine fur through the wire mesh.
“Hey, Miss Lou, you’re not supposed to put your fingers in the cage.”
She had done it without thinking. Gladys purred and pushed against Lou’s finger, relishing the scratch. She extended a paw in the air of her cage, stretching her pink toes apart. She was fat and happy and wrongly friendly.
“See, I told you. She likes it in there.”
This was a cat who had hidden behind gravestones at dinnertime, always out of human reach. “Maybe she’s more pregnant than I thought,” Lou said.
“You mean more kittens inside?”
“I mean further along. She might be fixing to give birth right there. I hope she can hold off.”
“I don’t. I could keep them in my room.”
“That would be up to your gran.”
“I could keep them all in a cage, in my room.”
“Cats don’t like to be in cages, Dwayne Junior, not usually. And it’s hard on them, being mothers. They don’t get to eat for themselves.”
“Like Ceres.”
“Like Ceres.” They had caught Ceres every night this week and let her go every night, after her fill of bait. Her teats dangled almost to the pavement, and her hip bones stuck out. Lou had no idea where she was hiding her kittens, only that they were killing her. They were probably fat, cute, and ungrateful. She wanted to get Ceres in for surgery, but a lactating queen would be refused.
“Can I clean the next one?” Dwayne Junior asked.
“You can do all of them, if you want.”
“Really?”
The landlady dropped by about halfway through the process. “Is Junior wearing out his welcome yet?”
“Not even. He’s great. Look. He’s got the system down.”
“Mmm.” The landlady leaned against the doorjamb with her hands in the pockets of her faded yellow smock. “It’s nice to see him actually doing something.”
“My mother would say we are crazy, doing this.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell her.”
“She’s not available to tell.”
The landlady blushed. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I think she’s better off.” Lou thought of the hospice nurse, the glass drip bottles of mercy. The look on Mother’s face when offered a can of Ensure, that sneer at the straw under her nose. Then the other look, the look when that glass bottle was suspended overhead and plugged into her arm. Mother’s jaw unclenched, and the fear left her eyes. Not food. Not what she needed.
“I got a baked ziti upstairs if you’re hungry. When you two are finished.”
*
The landlady’s apartment was laid out just like Lou’s but was stuffed to the gills with stuff. Two sofas in the front room, where Lou had only a chair; pictures hanging in a hodgepodge over the inert fireplace; refrigerator covered in souvenir magnets shaped like state maps and state birds. Everything was clean.
Dwayne Junior took his plate down the hall, and a Looney Tunes theme arose from his room. “He’s an interesting person,” Lou said.
“Thanks for noticing. Most people see him as my cross to bear.”
“He’s kind of fun if you just let him be.”
Lou accepted a paper plate of ziti and sat at the kitchen table. It was clear the landlady usually sat here alone. There was a stack of magazines next to her place mat, shouting important news of celebrity divorce, with a TV remote control parked on top. Next to the entertainment supplies was a salt and pepper set, in the shape of Bo Peep and a straggler sheep. Both figures faced Lou, who sat in the only kitchen chair.
The landlady went into the other room for a second chair. “It doesn’t have meat in it,” she shouted through the archway, “but that’s real cheese.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not vegetarian.”
“I thought all you animal people were vegetarians.”
“Not this animal person.”
The landlady sat across from her with a much smaller portion. The pasta was chewy, not overdone, and there were chunks of homegrown tomato. The cheese stretched from the plate to Lou’s mouth. She had trouble breaking the strand with her fork. “I need scissors,” she said through her bite of food. The landlady nodded, accepting the compliment. “Miles beyond my mother’s ziti.”
“You miss her cooking?”
“She didn’t enjoy doing it.”
“You have to enjoy it. Or it won’t taste any good. Me, I don’t enjoy dishes.” The landlady tapped her plastic fork against the rim of her paper plate.
“She didn’t enjoy much, I guess.”
“That’s sad. You miss her?”
“Not particularly. No.”
The landlady cocked her head.
Oh. Lou felt her face flush. “I never said that before. I can’t believe I said that. That’s a horrible thing to say. I’m sorry. No, of course I miss her. That’s a horrible thing to say, right?” Lou felt a sick giggle erupting from her belly. She swallowed it back down.
“Maybe so, but I know what you mean. I feel that way about my own kid, for God’s sake.”
“Really? Dwayne’s mother?” The giggle was rising now into Lou’s shoulders. She could feel her lungs jumping without permission. She didn’t get it. Nothing was funny.
“Really. My own child. She was wild. She just came out that way, I think, or I made her that way. Did herself in with drugs. How many times I found that baby of hers in a cold, wet diaper. No, I don’t miss her. Junior’s better off. No, that’s not true. It’s me. I’m better off.”
The landlady looked Lou in the eye, and it was all over. She was laughing, too. Slowly, quietly, the way she did. Lou exhaled and let the laugh erupt. She took a swig of milk to rinse the words from her mouth. Her mouth was full of the unthinkable.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We are terrible,” Lou said.
“We are. We are terrible.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” Lou said.
“Don’t you dare,” said the landlady.
*
Back upstairs at Lou’s apartment, Julian was whining behind the door as she worked her key in the lock. He swished between her feet while she cracked open a can of fancy tuna. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, buddy. I got to talking.”
She left him to his dinner and settled sideways in the big chair to watch television, legs flopped over one fat armrest, back against the other. Julian came into the room licking his chops, then hunkered on her abdomen and purred. Lou thought of fat Gladys down in the basement, pushing her swollen gut against her cozy cage walls, getting ready to issue more needy beings. She thought of the way Julian used to hunker on Mother’s abdomen, same as he did now, in the hospital bed they had installed in Mother’s living room. Lou had to shoo the cat, over and over, off the skinny, sick belly in the bed. Until Mother shooed Lou away, too.
Go meet a man while you still have your figure.
Mother, I am not leaving you alone.
Why not? That’s what I’ll be doing to you.
Please, Mother. Don’t talk like that.
Nobody else will. Somebody’s got to.
Please, Mother.
Don’t be naïve, Lou.
Lou had missed her then. Standing by the sickbed, with the woman right there at arm’s length, Lou missed her. She wasn’t even sure what she missed. Mother was still breathing, still bearing the unbearable.
She remembered the way Mother used to hold Julian, her fluffy baby, in the bend of her elbow, and carry him around like that, folding shirts and dusting sills and opening doors with her other hand, full of tender intention, before those arms gave up.
To be held. To be held like a treasure. Mother-arms: muscled, bones not yet brittle, fat still bewailed in moments of vanity. Skin not yet turned to rice paper, mind not yet stuck in a bitter circle. Lou missed this. She missed it, then wondered if she was imagining or remembering it. Can you miss the nonexistent? The never-was?
Don’t be naïve.
Lou scratched Julian’s neck, under his collar, the way he liked, the way Mother used to. He thanked Lou by poking his claws through her shirt into her belly fat. “Be nice.” She did not shoo him off. She shook him by the scruff of the neck. His skin went taut over the bones of his pushed-in, pedigreed face, and his eyes looked surprised. His lips pulled back from his teeth in something like a smile. He went limp.
He let go.
*
Surgery day arrived, and Gladys was no different: still alone in her trap, purring, and beside herself with hunger. “No food today, sweeties,” Lou said. “It will all be over soon.”
Dwayne Junior rode along in the old, behemoth station wagon, fiddling with radio buttons until Lou put her hand on his to make him stop. In the back, not a word from the cats. Julian would be yowling bloody murder by now. Lou kept checking over her shoulder to make sure they were still there. Dwayne Junior, too, was quiet. He leaned his head on the window and watched the blocks go by.
Generators buzzed at the mobile clinic, parked outside a North Brooklyn shelter. Lou waited to fill out papers while Dwayne Junior brought cages from the car and stacked them at the curb. “Who’s your helper?” said the cat lady ahead of Lou on line. Lou recognized her. She had a hairy overcoat and homemade hat and the air of someone who doesn’t know when a conversation is over.
“My neighbor. He’s been great.”
“I have three kittens this time,” said the lady. “I think they might become friendlies with just a little work. You?”
“Just the ferals. No friendlies. A couple young’uns.” Lou tried to avoid the woman’s eye as she hastily turned in her clipboard.
*
She and Dwayne Junior returned a few hours later for pickup. The chatty lady had found an audience in one of the techs, who had the exhausted smile of the habitually kind. Lou hoped to avoid further discussion, but another tech emerged from the vehicle and announced the results of her trapping: “You had six boys, four girls. One pregnant. Third trimester.”
The chatty lady clapped her hands. “You caught a pregnant one! That’s terrific!” She slapped Lou on the back. “Just in time!”
The tech didn’t congratulate, just ran over his instruction sheet. “They’re still a little jumpy from the drugs. I think you can let the boys go tonight if you want. Keep the girls another forty-eight hours, unless they get super restless. Except number—” He looked at the sheet.
“Number seven.”
“Gladys,” Lou said.
“Yeah. She’s had a rough day. She might need an extra day or so inside, if you can manage it.”
“Of course we can manage it,” Dwayne Junior said.
The tech locked eyes quizzically with Lou, and she nodded. “We can.”
Dwayne Junior didn’t say a word as they loaded the cages back into the station wagon. On the ride home, the cats mewed and banged their heads against the wire, waking up to their disfigurement: snipped ears to mark the occasion, glued incisions, important parts missing. Dwayne Junior, too, banged his head against the window. Lou stole glances, but traffic was difficult. The kid was in a state. “Want to find us something on the radio?” she said.
He shook his head.
“You sure? I liked that disco station you found before. Anything you want, though. Even sports. I don’t listen to sports, but if you want.”
He didn’t look at her. He looked out the window. “What happened to her kittens?” he asked.
“They were euthanized.” She could have lied, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her.
“You mean killed.”
“Yes, I mean killed.”
“I could have taken care of them,” he said.
“I know. You would have done good.”
“I thought you loved animals. Gran said you’re an animal lover.”
“I am. I feel like I am. It’s complicated.”
He went back to banging his head against the window, scratching his temple occasionally. Lou feared he would dig a bloody patch.
“Will you still be able to help me take care of them in the basement? Just for two more days?”
“Will I be able to, or do I want to?”
“Do you want to?”
“I have to think about it.”
“OK.”
From the back of the car came a thud and a whimper. One of the cats had tried, and failed, to stand up, still woozy from the anesthesia. Dwayne Junior didn’t even turn to look.
*
He decided not to help her with the post-op care. The landlady was disappointed but didn’t force him. Lou brought the boys to the graveyard that night, one by one, in their traps, and they scrambled from the cages into the shrubbery. She tended to the girls in silence, in the basement, alone, using the cafeteria-tray method Dwayne Junior had invented.
When the time came, she took the girls, all but one, and let them go, too. She bleached the cages in the basement sink and stacked them up against the wall. Dwayne Junior did not drop by. She went upstairs to bed.
Julian curled up on her belly, under the covers. She let him. She pet his head, slowly, and scratched under his collar, until she felt his purr go quiet. He was asleep.
She could not sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the same picture. It made her shoo Julian off and get up; it made her paw through the pantry for a can of milk; it made her put a coat over her pajamas and flip-flop down to the basement. A single, covered cage was adrift in the middle of the floor; inside it, Gladys, silent. Lou lifted back the sheet. Gladys hid in the rear of her trap. Her ear was scabbed where they had lopped off the tip. She was a different cat. She was not the cat who had lolled and rolled in the same cage, yearning for what was coming next, yearning to be yearned for. The cat did not move when Lou opened the hatch. She crouched and waited while Lou poured a small dish of milk. She waited for Lou to close the door. Then she stepped forward and drank.
A small gesture, and probably not enough. Lou stayed and sat and watched the cat drink. She did not go back upstairs to sleep. She knew the picture would come back; the picture would stick with her, the way sticky pictures do. It would sneak into a perfectly pleasant afternoon; it would undo all the good of her intentions, this thing she had imagined but never seen: a shiny sac in the palm of the tech at the mobile clinic, and a needle poking through the sac, through new orange fur, and wet skin, and ribs, into the throbbing light of the unwanted creature, into the throbbing light.
Anne Elliott is the author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, released by Ploughshares Solos in 2014. Her stories can be seen in Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Hobart, Bellevue Literary Review, Fugue, r.kv.r.y, and others. She lives in Portland, Maine, and is at work on a novel. “Strays” appeared in the anthology Among Animals 2: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction by Ashland Creek Press.
by Anne Elliott
They made wild little babies with dripping eyes and bellies bloated with worms. Many were not even cute. Some dropped hefty, inbred litters, with markings so alike they looked like a single being, a furry amoeba throbbing around the water bowl. Some staged midnight gang wars in between the fence posts and parked cars. Some had lost eyeballs or hunks of fur and tail, or had oozing abscesses on their necks, pink holes of stinking goop. Some hunched alone on stone ledges, with paws curled under and perpetual hollow looks, disappointment set in deep. Others arched and emanated anger. Maybe they had good reason.
They all hollered after the door snapped shut. They seemed to be yelling at themselves, for yielding to curiosity, for heavy-stepping, for hatch-tripping, just for that sniff of sardine.
The sardines were on cheap paper cocktail plates. Lou baited in an assembly line, like cater-waitering, only everything cheap. The sardines were cheap. The bleach she used to prep the cages was cheap. The kibble she withheld for a week to starve them out was cheap. She covered each trap with an old bed sheet—also cheap—to mellow the beasts. They preferred the dark and enclosed. The only way to stop the whining was to toss a curtain over the cage. That’s all, folks. Shut up and sniff your fish.
Her landlady let her shelter the cats in the basement, before and after surgery, in the room between the garbage and the laundry. There were rat traps down there, the black and sinister kind, opaque so you don’t have to see whose life you’ve just stopped. So the rats can’t warn each other of the ruse. Permanent curtain. And mousetraps, too, the sticky kind, the kind that sickened Lou with their efficiency. The landlady didn’t bother to cover the mousetraps. The mice were too dumb. They became their own bait. They would see their brothers stuck and squirming out of their own fur and come over to see what the fuss was.
“Just like people,” said the landlady. “They see somebody stuck someplace, they want to get stuck there, too.”
The other tenants blamed Lou for the rat problem and the mouse problem and probably other problems, too. She saw their slitty-eyed looks. The thin-lipped, fakey smiles on the stairway. Crazy cat lady is making them all multiply, all of the vermin. I even saw a raccoon! In Brooklyn! The whispers, stopping suddenly, when she set a bowl of cheap kibble on the stoop.
Never feed a stray cat, Mother used to say. They talk. They invite the whole army.
Mother was dead now, and this army was starving. “I didn’t give birth to them,” Lou said under her breath to the un-neighborly neighbors.
“I didn’t dump them here.”
The landlady was better. “Don’t ask me for money because I’m not giving you any,” she said. “Those veterinaries just want to get in your pocket.”
“Not asking for donations. Except the basement space. Just for a week. I can probably get you a tax receipt even, if you want.”
“Well, since you put it that way.”
“Our nighttime opera will be gone.”
“They’ve been screaming back there since I was this big.”
“So you’ll miss it, then.”
The landlady laughed, slowly, thoughtfully, silently, the way she did. “I just might.”
*
Impossible not to name the critters, if only to keep them apart. Here in the basement were Stan and Rodney and Edith and Gladys, names Lou had gleaned from the cemetery across the street, where the cats courted. Also in the basement: Ariel, Simba, Pocahontas, and Nemo, named by Dwayne Junior, the landlady’s grandson, who was too old to watch cartoons but did, compulsively, up in the landlady’s apartment. He was another condition of the basement. The landlady wanted him to get out, broaden his vocabulary beyond the talking box in his room. He took an interest in the cats. He was the kind of kid who latched onto things. Not people so much—just things. He didn’t make eye contact. Lou decided she could get used to it. The cats didn’t make eye contact either.
Dwayne Junior was big for his age, which added to the mystery of his tics. Nearly diabetic, the landlady confessed, at a loss for getting vegetables in. Starchy staples were what he loved, and salty crunchy things in noisy bags. “I don’t buy chips, Lou,” said the landlady. “I don’t know how they get in his hands. I don’t think I want to know how they get in his hands.”
It took a few days to fill all of the traps, and the most gullible—or desperate—cats had to cool their heels in the basement and wait for the crafty ones to get caught. In the meantime, Lou and Dwayne Junior went down a couple times a day to dish out food and clean up poop in the traps.
“I have an idea,” Dwayne Junior said on the second day of cat storage. “We should have two sets of food and water bowls for each cage. We can get everything ready over here first. Like a kit.”
He laid out a sample kit very carefully: right angles, newspaper collated, plastic water bowl, paper dish of kibble.
“Dwayne Junior, that looks like a cafeteria tray.”
“Not really. Cafeteria trays are made of plastic. And people don’t eat cat food. And we drink out of cups, not bowls. And we use knives and forks. And the cats don’t use napkins. A cafeteria tray would have napkins.”
Dwayne Junior didn’t take big leaps, she noted. It was a metaphor-free zone, this basement, among the dormant bassinets and bicycles, the recycle bins, the doomed mice, the dingy windows, the dusty steam pipes, the tenants’ curious children peeking in on their way to the laundry room, tagging behind bedraggled moms. The kids didn’t step into the cat room. They had been warned.
Lou helped Dwayne Junior set up cat cafeteria trays and tried to follow his design. Still, he corrected her: “The water is too close to the food.” She obeyed him. She was not sure if obeying was the right thing to do. She wanted a manual for this kid.
She folded the first sheet halfway back. Pocahontas tucked herself into the covered part, the dark and enclosed. Lou stuck large combs through the halfway mark, to trap the cat in the back. She pulled out the soiled newspaper. Some cats would shred the paper to cover their smelly inevitabilities. Some, like Pocahontas, just shat neatly in the corner of the cage and let the smell waft on up, as if to say: Look what you made me do.
Lou put new paper in, closed the cage, removed the combs, folded the sheet back over the clean end of the cage. Pocahontas migrated, and Lou reinserted the combs, then opened the other end of the cage and readied it for Dwayne Junior to insert the tray. He placed it carefully. She secured the hatch. Dwayne Junior removed the combs and replaced the sheet. “Shhh,” he said to Lou, though he didn’t have to. This was the best part: listening to the crunch of kibble.
“Can I do the next one? I know how to do it. I was watching you.”
“Are you sure?”
Of course he was sure.
What the hell. She nodded. “Just don’t stick your fingers in.” Lou had heard stories from the queue at the mobile clinic, the parade of cat ladies and their covered cages. One volunteer had been bitten on her thumb and lost half her arm to infection. A cat’s mouth was full of the unthinkable.
“I won’t,” he said. He was already kneeling on the floor in front of Gladys. Lou fought the urge to talk him through it. She had a feeling he didn’t like to be told what to do. He followed her steps exactly, as if he had a checklist: sheet, combs, door, newspaper, door, combs, sheet. Other end. Sheet, combs, door, food tray, door, combs, then he stopped before dropping the curtain. “I think Gladys is purring. Shhh. Listen.” He put his ear close to the cage.
“Careful, D. He might bite.”
“She. This is Gladys.”
“She might bite.”
“She won’t bite. She’s happy. Look. She likes it in this cage.” Lou knelt next to Dwayne Junior and put her ear to the cage. Gladys flopped onto her side on the clean newspaper, pushing her tangerine fur through the wire mesh.
“Hey, Miss Lou, you’re not supposed to put your fingers in the cage.”
She had done it without thinking. Gladys purred and pushed against Lou’s finger, relishing the scratch. She extended a paw in the air of her cage, stretching her pink toes apart. She was fat and happy and wrongly friendly.
“See, I told you. She likes it in there.”
This was a cat who had hidden behind gravestones at dinnertime, always out of human reach. “Maybe she’s more pregnant than I thought,” Lou said.
“You mean more kittens inside?”
“I mean further along. She might be fixing to give birth right there. I hope she can hold off.”
“I don’t. I could keep them in my room.”
“That would be up to your gran.”
“I could keep them all in a cage, in my room.”
“Cats don’t like to be in cages, Dwayne Junior, not usually. And it’s hard on them, being mothers. They don’t get to eat for themselves.”
“Like Ceres.”
“Like Ceres.” They had caught Ceres every night this week and let her go every night, after her fill of bait. Her teats dangled almost to the pavement, and her hip bones stuck out. Lou had no idea where she was hiding her kittens, only that they were killing her. They were probably fat, cute, and ungrateful. She wanted to get Ceres in for surgery, but a lactating queen would be refused.
“Can I clean the next one?” Dwayne Junior asked.
“You can do all of them, if you want.”
“Really?”
The landlady dropped by about halfway through the process. “Is Junior wearing out his welcome yet?”
“Not even. He’s great. Look. He’s got the system down.”
“Mmm.” The landlady leaned against the doorjamb with her hands in the pockets of her faded yellow smock. “It’s nice to see him actually doing something.”
“My mother would say we are crazy, doing this.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell her.”
“She’s not available to tell.”
The landlady blushed. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I think she’s better off.” Lou thought of the hospice nurse, the glass drip bottles of mercy. The look on Mother’s face when offered a can of Ensure, that sneer at the straw under her nose. Then the other look, the look when that glass bottle was suspended overhead and plugged into her arm. Mother’s jaw unclenched, and the fear left her eyes. Not food. Not what she needed.
“I got a baked ziti upstairs if you’re hungry. When you two are finished.”
*
The landlady’s apartment was laid out just like Lou’s but was stuffed to the gills with stuff. Two sofas in the front room, where Lou had only a chair; pictures hanging in a hodgepodge over the inert fireplace; refrigerator covered in souvenir magnets shaped like state maps and state birds. Everything was clean.
Dwayne Junior took his plate down the hall, and a Looney Tunes theme arose from his room. “He’s an interesting person,” Lou said.
“Thanks for noticing. Most people see him as my cross to bear.”
“He’s kind of fun if you just let him be.”
Lou accepted a paper plate of ziti and sat at the kitchen table. It was clear the landlady usually sat here alone. There was a stack of magazines next to her place mat, shouting important news of celebrity divorce, with a TV remote control parked on top. Next to the entertainment supplies was a salt and pepper set, in the shape of Bo Peep and a straggler sheep. Both figures faced Lou, who sat in the only kitchen chair.
The landlady went into the other room for a second chair. “It doesn’t have meat in it,” she shouted through the archway, “but that’s real cheese.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not vegetarian.”
“I thought all you animal people were vegetarians.”
“Not this animal person.”
The landlady sat across from her with a much smaller portion. The pasta was chewy, not overdone, and there were chunks of homegrown tomato. The cheese stretched from the plate to Lou’s mouth. She had trouble breaking the strand with her fork. “I need scissors,” she said through her bite of food. The landlady nodded, accepting the compliment. “Miles beyond my mother’s ziti.”
“You miss her cooking?”
“She didn’t enjoy doing it.”
“You have to enjoy it. Or it won’t taste any good. Me, I don’t enjoy dishes.” The landlady tapped her plastic fork against the rim of her paper plate.
“She didn’t enjoy much, I guess.”
“That’s sad. You miss her?”
“Not particularly. No.”
The landlady cocked her head.
Oh. Lou felt her face flush. “I never said that before. I can’t believe I said that. That’s a horrible thing to say. I’m sorry. No, of course I miss her. That’s a horrible thing to say, right?” Lou felt a sick giggle erupting from her belly. She swallowed it back down.
“Maybe so, but I know what you mean. I feel that way about my own kid, for God’s sake.”
“Really? Dwayne’s mother?” The giggle was rising now into Lou’s shoulders. She could feel her lungs jumping without permission. She didn’t get it. Nothing was funny.
“Really. My own child. She was wild. She just came out that way, I think, or I made her that way. Did herself in with drugs. How many times I found that baby of hers in a cold, wet diaper. No, I don’t miss her. Junior’s better off. No, that’s not true. It’s me. I’m better off.”
The landlady looked Lou in the eye, and it was all over. She was laughing, too. Slowly, quietly, the way she did. Lou exhaled and let the laugh erupt. She took a swig of milk to rinse the words from her mouth. Her mouth was full of the unthinkable.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We are terrible,” Lou said.
“We are. We are terrible.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” Lou said.
“Don’t you dare,” said the landlady.
*
Back upstairs at Lou’s apartment, Julian was whining behind the door as she worked her key in the lock. He swished between her feet while she cracked open a can of fancy tuna. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, buddy. I got to talking.”
She left him to his dinner and settled sideways in the big chair to watch television, legs flopped over one fat armrest, back against the other. Julian came into the room licking his chops, then hunkered on her abdomen and purred. Lou thought of fat Gladys down in the basement, pushing her swollen gut against her cozy cage walls, getting ready to issue more needy beings. She thought of the way Julian used to hunker on Mother’s abdomen, same as he did now, in the hospital bed they had installed in Mother’s living room. Lou had to shoo the cat, over and over, off the skinny, sick belly in the bed. Until Mother shooed Lou away, too.
Go meet a man while you still have your figure.
Mother, I am not leaving you alone.
Why not? That’s what I’ll be doing to you.
Please, Mother. Don’t talk like that.
Nobody else will. Somebody’s got to.
Please, Mother.
Don’t be naïve, Lou.
Lou had missed her then. Standing by the sickbed, with the woman right there at arm’s length, Lou missed her. She wasn’t even sure what she missed. Mother was still breathing, still bearing the unbearable.
She remembered the way Mother used to hold Julian, her fluffy baby, in the bend of her elbow, and carry him around like that, folding shirts and dusting sills and opening doors with her other hand, full of tender intention, before those arms gave up.
To be held. To be held like a treasure. Mother-arms: muscled, bones not yet brittle, fat still bewailed in moments of vanity. Skin not yet turned to rice paper, mind not yet stuck in a bitter circle. Lou missed this. She missed it, then wondered if she was imagining or remembering it. Can you miss the nonexistent? The never-was?
Don’t be naïve.
Lou scratched Julian’s neck, under his collar, the way he liked, the way Mother used to. He thanked Lou by poking his claws through her shirt into her belly fat. “Be nice.” She did not shoo him off. She shook him by the scruff of the neck. His skin went taut over the bones of his pushed-in, pedigreed face, and his eyes looked surprised. His lips pulled back from his teeth in something like a smile. He went limp.
He let go.
*
Surgery day arrived, and Gladys was no different: still alone in her trap, purring, and beside herself with hunger. “No food today, sweeties,” Lou said. “It will all be over soon.”
Dwayne Junior rode along in the old, behemoth station wagon, fiddling with radio buttons until Lou put her hand on his to make him stop. In the back, not a word from the cats. Julian would be yowling bloody murder by now. Lou kept checking over her shoulder to make sure they were still there. Dwayne Junior, too, was quiet. He leaned his head on the window and watched the blocks go by.
Generators buzzed at the mobile clinic, parked outside a North Brooklyn shelter. Lou waited to fill out papers while Dwayne Junior brought cages from the car and stacked them at the curb. “Who’s your helper?” said the cat lady ahead of Lou on line. Lou recognized her. She had a hairy overcoat and homemade hat and the air of someone who doesn’t know when a conversation is over.
“My neighbor. He’s been great.”
“I have three kittens this time,” said the lady. “I think they might become friendlies with just a little work. You?”
“Just the ferals. No friendlies. A couple young’uns.” Lou tried to avoid the woman’s eye as she hastily turned in her clipboard.
*
She and Dwayne Junior returned a few hours later for pickup. The chatty lady had found an audience in one of the techs, who had the exhausted smile of the habitually kind. Lou hoped to avoid further discussion, but another tech emerged from the vehicle and announced the results of her trapping: “You had six boys, four girls. One pregnant. Third trimester.”
The chatty lady clapped her hands. “You caught a pregnant one! That’s terrific!” She slapped Lou on the back. “Just in time!”
The tech didn’t congratulate, just ran over his instruction sheet. “They’re still a little jumpy from the drugs. I think you can let the boys go tonight if you want. Keep the girls another forty-eight hours, unless they get super restless. Except number—” He looked at the sheet.
“Number seven.”
“Gladys,” Lou said.
“Yeah. She’s had a rough day. She might need an extra day or so inside, if you can manage it.”
“Of course we can manage it,” Dwayne Junior said.
The tech locked eyes quizzically with Lou, and she nodded. “We can.”
Dwayne Junior didn’t say a word as they loaded the cages back into the station wagon. On the ride home, the cats mewed and banged their heads against the wire, waking up to their disfigurement: snipped ears to mark the occasion, glued incisions, important parts missing. Dwayne Junior, too, banged his head against the window. Lou stole glances, but traffic was difficult. The kid was in a state. “Want to find us something on the radio?” she said.
He shook his head.
“You sure? I liked that disco station you found before. Anything you want, though. Even sports. I don’t listen to sports, but if you want.”
He didn’t look at her. He looked out the window. “What happened to her kittens?” he asked.
“They were euthanized.” She could have lied, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her.
“You mean killed.”
“Yes, I mean killed.”
“I could have taken care of them,” he said.
“I know. You would have done good.”
“I thought you loved animals. Gran said you’re an animal lover.”
“I am. I feel like I am. It’s complicated.”
He went back to banging his head against the window, scratching his temple occasionally. Lou feared he would dig a bloody patch.
“Will you still be able to help me take care of them in the basement? Just for two more days?”
“Will I be able to, or do I want to?”
“Do you want to?”
“I have to think about it.”
“OK.”
From the back of the car came a thud and a whimper. One of the cats had tried, and failed, to stand up, still woozy from the anesthesia. Dwayne Junior didn’t even turn to look.
*
He decided not to help her with the post-op care. The landlady was disappointed but didn’t force him. Lou brought the boys to the graveyard that night, one by one, in their traps, and they scrambled from the cages into the shrubbery. She tended to the girls in silence, in the basement, alone, using the cafeteria-tray method Dwayne Junior had invented.
When the time came, she took the girls, all but one, and let them go, too. She bleached the cages in the basement sink and stacked them up against the wall. Dwayne Junior did not drop by. She went upstairs to bed.
Julian curled up on her belly, under the covers. She let him. She pet his head, slowly, and scratched under his collar, until she felt his purr go quiet. He was asleep.
She could not sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the same picture. It made her shoo Julian off and get up; it made her paw through the pantry for a can of milk; it made her put a coat over her pajamas and flip-flop down to the basement. A single, covered cage was adrift in the middle of the floor; inside it, Gladys, silent. Lou lifted back the sheet. Gladys hid in the rear of her trap. Her ear was scabbed where they had lopped off the tip. She was a different cat. She was not the cat who had lolled and rolled in the same cage, yearning for what was coming next, yearning to be yearned for. The cat did not move when Lou opened the hatch. She crouched and waited while Lou poured a small dish of milk. She waited for Lou to close the door. Then she stepped forward and drank.
A small gesture, and probably not enough. Lou stayed and sat and watched the cat drink. She did not go back upstairs to sleep. She knew the picture would come back; the picture would stick with her, the way sticky pictures do. It would sneak into a perfectly pleasant afternoon; it would undo all the good of her intentions, this thing she had imagined but never seen: a shiny sac in the palm of the tech at the mobile clinic, and a needle poking through the sac, through new orange fur, and wet skin, and ribs, into the throbbing light of the unwanted creature, into the throbbing light.
Anne Elliott is the author of The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, released by Ploughshares Solos in 2014. Her stories can be seen in Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Hobart, Bellevue Literary Review, Fugue, r.kv.r.y, and others. She lives in Portland, Maine, and is at work on a novel. “Strays” appeared in the anthology Among Animals 2: The Lives of Animals and Humans in Contemporary Short Fiction by Ashland Creek Press.