The Reason

The Reason

By D. Nestor

It was quiet in the room where he slept, but on the floor, near the room’s only window, dust danced in the bits of light that snuck in past the curtain. His heavy head jumped off the pillow at the sound of chirping birds bleeding from his phone’s speaker. He remembered himself and closed his eyes again. They shut desperately but slowly, and he sighed before opening them again, and sighing again. He might have made a wish, or said a prayer, or just thought of something he really wanted in that moment of light, dark and light again. At 4:45am on the last Tuesday of a an eternal March, he did feel like a beggar. 

In an attempt to get on with his morning, and his life, he rolled over onto his right side to find Hayley the cat staring at him. Her yellow eyes against his body held him as if they were hands. Black and barley moving like wet paint, she just sat and stared.

His son, who no longer lives in the apartment, gave the cat that name, Hayley. He never knew and never asked why. Before the cat appeared in their lives, that name meant nothing to them as far as he was concerned. His wife, who no longer lives in the apartment either, had gotten the cat for their son on his seventeenth birthday. She drove up to a No-Kill shelter in Long Island by herself, and returned home with an anxious black kitten. She told the family that when she was at the shelter, she had to take Hayley because Hayley was the only cat alone in a cage; all the others were in pairs.

At that time, he was preoccupied with things— he can’t remember exactly what, now, but he remembers…there were things—so much so that he barley noticed the cat. When his family mentioned how big she had gotten in a matter of months, he was too embarrassed to admit that he didn’t even remember when she was little. All he had noticed was the purple box of sand and cat shit in his bathroom and that sometimes unnaturally yellow eyes would float around his apartment at night. Usually appearing on nighttime trips to the bathroom, or during restless nights on the couch.

At the moment, there was too much need in the black cat’s eyes and he didn’t know what it wanted from him so he turned to lay on his back. As he stared at the infinite nothingness of the white ceiling, the cat meowed. 

Hélé in Saint Lucian Creole means to yell. His wife used to laugh at how funny it was that their son who didn’t even understand the creole, named the cat after its most annoying trait; it yelled. He assumed this trait was the reason why when she left, she left the cat behind as well. Every time it yelled, he grew irritated. It just had too much in it. To him, the meow combined with that unnaturally yellow stare, felt deeply personal yet inconsiderate. His wife claimed to have left Hayley for the kids, but their son left shortly after her, and their daughter, who was away in some college upstate, rarely ever came home.

Now that the cat had yelled, and showed no signs of stopping, he dragged his fifty-six year old body out of bed. This only excited the cat who as she trailed his heels on his walk to the bathroom. Its insistent meows irritated him almost as much as the sound of the chirping birds on his phone.

He closed the bathroom door but still heard it yelling. Although he was always alone, the bathroom was where he felt his loneliest. His strict routine made it easy not to have to think, but there were always thoughts that are just so easy to fall into. When he was done with everything that needed to be done, he didn’t stare in the mirror at himself, asking question he already knew the answer to. Instead he looked out, or rather at, the bathroom window. The cloudy blue light coating the obscured glass held his gaze while his mind went elsewhere. For a moment it held everything that hurt; real, imagined, or both. It held the absences, which were always, by nature, heavy. He didn’t know if this perceived heaviness was because he was weaker alone, like a single tree in a field, or if the memory or idea of someone was heavier when you had to carry it alone. For this reason, he could never tell the difference between missing something you never had, and missing something you lost. The emptiness was what was real.

He was immensely snug in the orbit of the blue window, and therefore did not hear, on the other side of the bathroom door, when Hayley stopped meowing. He did however, hear the door click open, and startled when he saw her small black head staring up at him.

After the moment, she meowed again and completed her barge into the bathroom. The weight of the blue light and its emptiness slowly left him as her meows flooded the four blue walls of the bathroom like choir voices in a church. She brushed her head against his knee and purred.

He found the cat’s intrusion to be too funny to get upset over but he wasn’t in a laughing way. With the heaviness back inside him, he turned off the light and left the bathroom. He stared down at the cat in disbelief as it half followed, half herded him into the kitchen. When they got there, which was only in a matter of steps, he turned on the electric kettle his kids had gifted him for his previous birthday, and prepared Hayley’s food. There was the can, the brown chunks, the white bowl, the smell, and the yelling.

With the cat occupied, and his tea and morning cereal prepared, Francis’s morning fury descaled from a 10 to an 8. The sound of the cat eating instead of screaming almost pleased him. Although he would never admit Hayley was the reason he got out of bed, the reason he walked out of the bathroom, or the reason he ate breakfast, part of him understood. Part of Francis was glad that when his wife left, she left the cat too.