The Thing with Cats

On the third of May in the year 1979, Gayle Elaine Sanford realized Monkey hadn’t come home for breakfast. It was the first time in twenty years he’d been late.

The old cat was an orange tabby, a fat one with four white paws and a stumpy tail he’d lost as a kitten. It’d been caught in a patch of barbed wire that some old man had left along her fence when she’d first bought the trailer at the end of Wayshire Road. She’d been busy cleaning out the trash the previous owner left behind and heard a yowl so sharp she’d thought a banshee’d just been shot in the knees. She’d dropped her broom on the porch and hiked up her skirt, not too keen on getting it dusty in the grassless yard, and ran to where she’d thought she’d heard the cries of distress. It hadn’t taken her long to find the source—the runty kitten was stuck by its tail in the spool of barbed wire, hissing and screeching as it swung its paws at a hawk dancing around the perimeter like it was considering how to get a killshot without catching a claw.

Elaine had gasped, then rushed towards the bird waving her arms like a madwoman. “Go on—get! Get out of here! Pesky thing!”

The hawk had seen her waving and decided it would try for a meal elsewhere. With a brisk flap of its wings, it was gone, but the kitten continued to squirm.

Elaine had bunched her skirt around her knees and slowly knelt beside it, cooing to the poor little thing as its eyes started to close. “Don’t you worry, sweetie. I’ll getcha outta here. Just be patient.”

The kitten had tried to pull away as she reached towards it, terrified that she was just a bigger and badder predator looking for a snack. She’d gotten her fingers to the place its tail was caught and touched the wound; the kitten had bared its teeth and hissed.

“Sorry hon. I’ll be fast, but you gotta work with me,” she’d said. Then she’d got it done.

Getting the kitten’s tail unstuck hadn’t been the hardest part. Fixing the damage done after the fact had proven the real challenge. She would’ve taken the cat to the vet if there was one, but the town where she lived had only just gotten an actual grocery store; animal care services hadn’t gotten that high on the priority list quite yet. She’d fished out her Yellow Pages, scanned the directory for the nearest vet’s office, and found it was forty-five minutes north. Back then she didn’t have a car or a man with a car, so her new kitty was fresh out of luck.

“Well”—she’d turned towards the little orange fluffball and put her hands on her hips—“Guess we’re doin’ this the old-fashioned way. Don’t you bite me now!”

But he had bitten her. Twice. Hard enough that he’d drawn blood. And it was in that shared blood she’d decided he was gonna be hers for the rest of her life.

Eventually, she was able to take him to the vet. Her attempts at homecare had proven to be life-saving but not quite tail-saving, and it was decided that it was in the kitten’s best interest to have most of its tail amputated. He’d adjusted to the change quite well. All his previous antics were made just a little more challenging, but he’d adapted to his new normal as well as any living thing does when it’s do or die (of boredom). She’d thought about switching his name to Ape or Gorilla since ‘Monkey’ didn’t have the same ring to it, but she’d already gotten attached to it, and so had he.

Life at her trailer home was much less lonely with Monkey around. She’d tried to marry the man that amputated his tail, but it ended up being the case that he was already married. His wife just hadn’t moved out west from where they'd been living yet. Next she’d tried to marry the man whose truck she’d hitched rides in to go see the married vet, but he’d been a vet himself—of the World War II variety—and the first time they’d shared a bed he’d unintentionally tried to strangle her in his sleep. Monkey’d heard it all go down and, in her defense, had clawed the poor man’s face to shreds. Neither he nor Elaine could bear to see each other again after that.

Monkey had ended up being a decent man of the house in the meanwhile. Tailless and slim as an adolescent, he’d slink around the better part of her small desert town and beguile her neighbors, acting like he was a domesticated bobcat. No one could ever figure out who his mother or father had been since he was really the only cat they’d ever seen around their parts. A couple of Elaine’s older lady neighbors had their cats, but they were as sneaky as mice at midnight and didn’t care to be seen, so they never were. But Monkey was a fan of people, and all her neighbors loved him.

He’d spend afternoons out on her porch, basking in the sun with squinted eyes and his head held high like a king enjoying the riches of his throne. Evenings were when he’d go hunting in the local yards for bugs and gophers. Successful hunts were marked with a disemboweled offering left on the towel right outside her front door. Sometimes, their heads were a separate offering, something she’d learned after finding a decapitated gopher inside the trailer by her new television. She’d scolded him for that, and afterwards, Monkey kept the rest of his heads outside where they belonged.

Elaine worked at the local diner waiting tables and washing dishes—nine hours Monday to Friday; four hours on Saturdays. She’d tried to get the owner to give her work on Sundays but he’d refused, insisting that she use the Lord’s Day to serve the Lord.

Eventually, around 1962, she’d found herself in church like he’d always wanted. Monkey did, too. The preacher had tried kicking him out twice before washing his hands of the matter.

Monkey would walk around the outskirts of the sanctuary, meandering through the pews in search of pats or prey. The Lord provided handsomely for him on that front—he never left a sermon without multitudes of one or the other. Occasionally, he’d get tired of his wandering and find wherever Elaine had chosen to sit. It was always somewhere in the back, usually the last or second-to-last row. Sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, sometimes right in the middle (but only if the ends weren’t an option, which was strictly the case on Christmas and Easter.) Most times Monkey would pick a spot by her feet and curl up on the floor and nap. Other times he’d hop right up on the pew itself, startling a periodic newcomer and bewildering that one old regular on the other side of church who couldn’t fathom letting any of God’s creatures into His house beside the human ones.

It’d made Elaine embarrassed at first. She’d tried to keep him on the floor since it was hopeless to try and keep him outside, but she eventually relented. There were a few Sundays she was glad she did. Talk about fatherless daughters and the woman at the well always hit her where it hurt, and she’d run her fingers through Monkey’s fur to help keep the tears at bay. Every time, it did.

It was in 1965 that Monkey had literally saved her life.

The story was different depending on who was asked, but the gist seemed to be that she’d fallen unconscious after suffering from a seizure—the first she’d ever gotten in her life. Elaine could never recall much of what had happened leading up to the collapse and very little of what happened after. All she knew was that the man who’d found her said he did so because a slim orange cat with a stubby tail was yowling at the front door like he was on fire, and it perplexed him so much he’d found himself compelled to go and see what was happening. Apparently, the cat had been so excited to get inside that the man figured he must have lived there, and knocked on the door expecting to hear someone answer. When no one did, he tried the handle, announcing himself as he slowly stepped inside. Monkey hadn’t waited for such courtesies and marched over to the kitchen where Elaine was lying on the floor. He’d given her body a quick sniff, then kept marching to where his food was kept. His dinner had been an hour late. It’d been the one and only meal he didn’t get on time, not until that day in 1979.

The oddity of his absence was so startling Elaine immediately believed something was very wrong. For the first time in many years, she picked up the phone and dialed Jerry’s Diner, the place she’d been working ever since she turned twenty-three. She didn’t bother giving the girl on the other end some fake illness report; she told her the truth. The girl was relatively new in town and didn’t quite understand the significance of Monkey’s absence or why it warranted a callout on such a busy Thursday, but Elaine told her the boss would understand and hung up.

She threw on the roughest pair of trousers she could find and a gaudy sweater with bold print, then went to the kitchen and grabbed a can of Monkey’s favorite food and the bell toy she’d gotten him for Christmas. She slipped on a pair of flats that’d be easy to clean, then ran out the door.

“Monkey…Monkey!” she called for him as loudly as she could. She started in the yard, which over the years had acquired several patches of flowers she’d tried to get growing without much success. She searched through scraggly stalks of sunflowers for signs of the chunky kitty, but he wasn’t in any of his usual resting places. By noon she’d scoured the whole yard and checked under the houses of each of her closest neighbors. Her pants and shoes were covered in dirt; her hair was undone from crawling. Evening came with no success. Monkey had missed dinner, too.

Elaine sat on her sofa with the curtains drawn and windows open, sobbing. The stars began to twinkle across the darkening sky, and the sound of crickets resounded through the fast-approaching night. Desperately, she tried to stifle her tears so that she might hear him coming home; a meow or a purr, a frustrated yowl at having gone a day without any food. She knew he’d be alright without supper—he certainly had enough girth to last a couple suppers—but the knowledge of that did nothing to soothe the ache in her heart.

Suddenly, there was a scratching sound at the door.

Elaine gasped. She wiped the tears from her eyes and ran to it with a flashlight. “Monkey?!” she exclaimed, flicking on the switch and pointing it directly towards the sound.

An opossum was searching for a snack from the open can of food she’d left on a shelf near the door. Upon hearing her voice it turned tail and ran, skittering across the yard and into the dark like she was out to skin it.

Elaine sighed, dropping her head in defeat. She lowered her arm and was about to flip the light off when she noticed something unusual tucked into a crack in the railing on her porch. Slowly, she crept towards it, then brought the light to shine on it. Horrified, she gasped and covered her mouth. Her heart beat wildly in her chest. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. There, stuck in a small crevice, was a tuft of Monkey’s fur—a large tuft of fur. Larger than any she’d seen come off a living cat. Trying her best to keep her composure, Elaine fanned the light around the nearby area, hoping against hope that maybe there would be other signs of Monkey.

There were.

Multiple chunks of fur lay scattered all around her front yard. Not in a manner that left a solid trail, rather in a manner that, to her increasing dread, seemed to suggest he’d gotten into some kind of fight—a nasty fight. There was no blood. There was no body. But the signs were all there.

Elaine fell to her knees with her hands clasped, crying out loud to the God she’d been trying to meet on Sundays, pleading with him to bring her baby home. Hours later, she went inside. Her shift was scheduled for the morning, so she readied herself as best as she could before laying down. When she finally went to bed, her sleep was restless, and her dreams were full of nightmares.

Monkey didn’t come back the next day. Elaine spent what was left of her evening after work searching for him without success. Saturday morning was just as unfruitful. Monkey had missed his third breakfast, and she did, too.

When evening came around without any new signs of him, Elaine collapsed at the foot of her bed and wept. She buried her face into the duvet and screamed—weeping, cursing, begging—for her precious cat.

“I don’t know how to fix this, Lord,” she sobbed. “I don’t know how to find him. I can’t find him. He’s all I’ve got. He’s all you gave me. Please, please don’t take him from me. Not like this. Please not like this!”

Elaine was disheveled and unkempt by the time she’d finished praying. Her tears left her so exhausted that she crawled into bed with mascara running down her face. That night she had a dream. She didn’t get dreams very often. If she did, they weren’t very interesting. But that night she had a dream so vivid she’d go on to record it in her journal, the first official entry she’d made in seven years.

It was nighttime, and she stood in front of her house. Along the western horizon were some mountains, the ones with a Spanish name she could never pronounce. The stars were bright and plentiful. Nocturnal insects were chirping peacefully from their invisible perches. Monkey was sitting happily on her porch.

“Wait, Monkey?” she asked, surprised. She knew he wasn’t there, and yet there he was! She called out to him again, warily, so shocked she doubted whether or not it was actually him, but there was no mistaking it. Somehow, the moon shone as brightly as the sun, and she could see him as clearly as if it was day.

He sat on the porch, fat and fluffy, squinting his eyes into the moonlight like it was any other day. For a moment his whiskers twitched, and he smelled the air like something tasty had caught his interest. Then he opened his eyes and meowed, long and low, in a trill that was only his.

Elaine knew without any shadow of a doubt it was him. She took a couple of steps closer, carefully approaching him with an outstretched hand. He recognized her and lifted his head into the cusp of her palm, eagerly accepting the offered head pats. The texture of his fur was unlike anything she’d ever felt; lighter and softer, like he was a thinning fabric whose thread was being unwound.

Yet something about the scene made her pause. It felt like a dream. It was a dream. Briefly, she wondered if he was a ghost.

Suddenly, a rushing wind blew in from every direction. It converged into a strange, manlike figure with a phantasmic head and stars in place of eyes. Its form was vague and undefined—silhouetted by the moon; constrained by billows of wind. Elaine had never seen anything like it and was afraid. But it felt safe in a way nothing else in her dreams ever had, so she didn’t run away. The ghostlike figure reached forward and placed its hand atop her own. Elaine was surprised to find it warm, like an Arizonan summer. Gently, it joined her in stroking Monkey’s head. The cat seemed to notice the added pressure and purred, even more happy to have extra attention.

Confused, Elaine withdrew her hand. As she did, the figure cradled Monkey in its arms, holding him against the place its heart might be. Immediately, the cat fell asleep, but to Elaine, it looked like he’d died.

With a frantic cry, she tried to pull him free from the phantom’s grasp, but her arms passed through them both. She gasped, stunned, then screamed, crying as she tried to wrestle the sleeping tabby from the phantom’s arms.

Not yet, it whispered in a voice she’d never heard before, then placed one of its hands atop her own. Again, the warmth returned, and in it an unspoken assurance. With Monkey still in its arms, the figure turned and quickly ascended, transforming into a cloud as it raced towards the mountains before disappearing in a puff of smoke.

Elaine opened her eyes. It was Sunday morning. For a moment, she couldn’t move. Then, she went to check the porch. Monkey still wasn’t there.

She went back inside. She found her best dress and put it on. She paired it with her best jewels and her best pair of shoes. Once her makeup was done and her hair made-up, she went to the kitchen and grabbed a fresh can of wet food. She popped the lid and poured Monkey’s usual serving into his usual bowl, then brought it to the porch and set it alongside the chair they usually shared. She sat in that chair with her Bible in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and she spent breakfast outdoors with that bowl of wet food beside her every day until the day Monkey finally came back home.