Warmth

Rain pattered like a lullaby on the cabin's windows. Clara had woken up to grab a glass of water. She stumbled in the dark, leaving the lights off to stay sleepy.

Coming into the living room, she dropped her cup, glass cutting her bare feet. A girl that looked identical to her sat on the couch. I'm half-asleep, she thought as she navigated broken shards. To her horror, even after she flipped the lights on, her doppelgänger didn't disappear. Clara scanned the clone up and down in a panic, searching for some sort of difference. The girl had red, shoulder-length hair, a freckled, hooked nose, and heart-shaped lips. Her hazel eyes were searching Clara's, with the same shocked expression.

The only difference was that the dream Clara, she decided she would call her, was stroking Cinder in her lap. Her own Cinder had passed a week prior.

"Who are you?" Dream Clara finally snapped, breaking the trance.

"I'm you...or, no, I mean you're me...Ugh, this cannot be real. Wake up, wake up!" she pinched her pale arms.

Dream Clara carefully stood up with Cinder in her arms, and the girls analyzed each other again, a sort of stand-off.

"Okay, it doesn't matter anymore," she said, her eyes trained on Cinder's blue eyes. "Can I... Can I just hold him? Then you'll see that I'm really another you," she said softly.

Dream Clara hesitated, but then the chubby white cat was plopped joyfully into her arms. Clara gazed at Cinder and scratched behind his gray ears, stroking clumps of his winter coat onto her sweater. Cinder purred, and he vibrated against her chest. Warmth.

Clara sobbed, hoisting Cinder onto her shoulder, to hear the purr reverberate deeper into her ears. When she opened her eyes, she noticed her calendar in the room read Monday.

"I have to tell you something," she said desperately, cradling Cinder like a baby. "It's just a little before he..." she looked at her other face, her forehead wrinkling, eyes widening, and breathing shallow. She saw how much hurt lay in her even before it happened, from just imagining him being hurt.

"I'm sorry, but I have to tell you. If he throws up today, that means he's still going to die...so if he gets sick tonight, you can't wait, you have to call right then."

"What? He's fine. He throws up sometimes when he eats too fast, but that's normal," Dream Clara explained, shaking her head dismissively. She reached for Cinder.

"You have to listen to me. He died this Friday. I was thinking the same thing you were. I-I wish I had called earlier. Maybe they could have saved him," she paused, tears rolling down her face and catching on Cinder's silver whiskers.

He looked up at her with his big azure eyes and extended his paw into her hand like he did when they first met-as if he had been saying pick me, pick me. His sharp claws lightly kneaded her palms.

Silence filled the room, until Dream Clara sighed, shuffling her feet. "Okay. I believe you. I would do anything for him."

Nodding, she slowly gave Cinder back to her doppelgänger, even though she ached to have him close to her empty heart.

That night, the two girls lay in bed, watching their favorite movies together when Cinder became sick, retching on the carpet. Dream Clara ran to yell at him and yank him onto the hardwood floor, and she stopped her. "Don't."

They gave the cat his favorite treats of salmon and tuna before laying down with him between their feet. Neither of them slept much, tossing and turning.

The vet didn't think it was an emergency yet because, well, it wasn't like she could tell them she knew what happens in the future. This frustrated her to no end. To the vet, Cinder was showing some displays of distress, but nothing like he did in the rapid time frame of a couple days later.

Cinder suddenly had lost the voracious appetite he held all his life. Knocking lasagna out of people's arms, snacking on mice obnoxiously loud, and stealing bites of fish. He failed to keep his food down in the morning but still tried to eat just a few bites of dinner. He grew sleepier and didn't bother to beg for morsels of chicken, and his back right leg became a bit awkward to get up with. Clara watched all these things, refusing to believe Cinder was at the end.

As the week progressed, he stopped eating. The last thing he ate was two salmon-tuna treats and catnip. Clara grew more worried as he limped and slept through her eating lunch. She expected his ears and pink nose to perk at the scent of her food. When she had her Zoom call, he didn't even try to walk on the keyboard. He barely stirred from his sleep and stayed in the same spot all day. Clara opened the curtain for him to look at the forest one last time, rain painting the evening sky periwinkle.

But that hadn't happened yet. They still had a chance. They had to try. While the cat was sleeping with his head tucked into his sooty gray paws, they gently shifted him into his kennel. He looked out at them, mewling in protest. He curled up, drooling stomach acid onto his sheepskin rug, his head resting on his paws reluctantly.

At the vet, things happened really fast. A blur. The two girls sat with their heads bowed in their hands, for what seemed like hours. They ran all sorts of tests to find out his kidneys were failing. Cinder was exhausted and he was anxious from the long trials he endured to diagnose him. Then the vet approached them, and she heard the same poignant suggestion of putting him down. That it would be a long recovery if he could even make it to the start of healing. He was sick and old and beginning to dehydrate. He was losing weight, and he couldn't regulate his body temperature. They could put him on fluids, but they couldn't promise he'd make it if they tried to treat Cinder.

Clara buried her face into her hands, not wanting it to be real. Cinder extended his paw one last time to hold her hand before she followed them to put him to sleep.

Clara awoke with a gasp in bed. Her cat's rug lay draped over her legs. She thought of how in this reality, the vet she could get a hold of for an emergency visit was able to come to her house. She had an hour to tell Cinder goodbye and read him a poem. Instead of forcing him into the kennel, she carried him into the shelter to be put down in her arms, and she accepted that there wasn't anything else she could have done.

It was early morning, and Clara drew the curtains to let in the light. Her backyard's ferns had overgrown, and little robins hopped around fallen leaves, digging worms. On her nightstand was a paper bag with Cinder's ashes in it. She drilled a shelf above the window, placing his food bowl, treats, a vial of white fur, and an urn into the open. She could almost feel the room grow warmer with a purr.