My Neighbor The Cat

My Neighbor The Cat is a short story about a stray cat and the impact she had on the lives of two people, who were also trying to make it out of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic hardship alive and with their sanity.

While leaning my head against the back of the sofa one day, a stray cat walked into my living room and meowed at me. I was unpleasantly surprised, knowing they tend to wonder into peoples kitchens and I really didn’t like cats. It was careless of me.  I usually keep the doors closed.

My name is Jo-Anne, and on that day, I really believed I was at my limit. It probably saved the cat from being chased away. She sat on the floor seducing me with her eyes and meowed some more.

 I just sat there and sighed, “What do you want?”

 “Meow,” she answered.

 I sighed again, “Well you’re not a black cat.”

“Meow,” she replied, with her slow blinking eyes.

“Ok, so you’re not bad luck. I still don’t like cats. What do you want? Are you hungry?”

“Meow,”        

She followed me into the kitchen as if she knew that’s where the food was, her tail tall and confident.

“You already know my kitchen, don’t you?”

Maybe she understood that another meow would incriminate her and get her banned for life so she didn’t.

I found an old plastic container and warmed a little milk in the microwave. She followed me to the front porch, and like a well-mannered kitty she sat, sweeping the floor with her tail. Watching and waiting while I put the container on the floor.

“Meow,” she said.

I’m guessing it meant thank you.

“You’re welcome. Don’t come back,” I replied, but an idiot feeds the cat so she would return, and she came back the next day.

Same seduction, “Meow,” and slow blinking eyes.

“No, I don’t like cats. Go away!”

“Meow, meow…”

“We’re just too different…, Where’d you come from? You’re not a wild cat. You have good manners. Did someone throw you away?”

I gave in again, warmed some more milk and gave it to her.

She was small, a young cat but not a kitten when I first saw her. She always came back and always alone.

I thought about the solution, “Maybe if I keep feeding her she won’t steal from my kitchen like other strays, so I fed her. Instead of milk she graduated to some of my lunch or dinner like chicken with rice or her favorite, fish.

I told her the ground rules related to adoption, the first one, don’t steal from my kitchen. The second was use the sandbox, the third, no dead rat trophies in the house. The irony is I hate rats even more than I hated cats.

After we came to an understanding, she treated my house like she was already living there, maybe she was.

She investigated every single room and piece of furniture and found a favorite of each where she would spend time sleeping during the daytime. During the night she got busy. Lizards would come in regularly and try to catch the insects buzzing around the lights in the house. After a cat moved in, they went into permanent hiding, and it solved one problem, no lizard droppings on the walls.

At breakfast time she would follow me to the kitchen and sit in front of the fridge when I opened the door, looking around as if she was searching for what she wanted for breakfast. Then she waited for breakfast while it was being prepared, she watched me run from one corner to the next trying to get food ready.

I was intrigued by this cat’s behavior. It was as if there was another person in the house. So I told a friend about it.

She asked me if I believed in reincarnation.

I don’t but my friend started talking about my father who died eleven years earlier and said she believed it was him, coming home to make sure we were alright.

I shrugged it off as nonsense. It was a female cat anyway, but as time went by, I started thinking about what she said with more respect.

Everything that happened convinced me this cat was sent to us to make sure we were alright, and what started out as a mutual understanding blossomed into something far more valuable, a beautiful friendship.

The COVID-19 pandemic made life monotonous and miserable, and yet life itself seemed so fickle. Being locked inside your house with neighbors dying around you from a deadly virus is a rude awakening about life. The outbreak got so bad we could only go out for supplies in alphabetical order by our last names. The company I worked for didn’t survive, and I lost my job. That’s when reality really set in.

The news was awful to watch, and my mother Alice and I agreed not to watch any of it. It was too stressful. So we spent most of the time locked inside the house eating and boring ourselves to death. We would go to bed early and wake up at 2 in the morning with even less to do, ending up back in the kitchen when we realize you’re not hungry while you’re asleep.

Mom was stressed. She had medical conditions which made her vulnerable, afraid to even visit her own private doctor. Mom was paranoid about catching the virus from another patient there in his office. I had my own elevated anxiety, having to go into hospital for physical therapy once a week, and navigate the invisible enemy of COVID-19 in a hospital full of patients with it.

 By the time we got to the tail end of the first outbreak, we were too burned out to care about anything. We were miserable, broke and antisocial. Then came the variants and they spread like wild fire.

Everybody was miserable and arguing more, fighting more. Road rage was common and sometimes violent, so we mostly stayed home again. We were eating, sleeping and avoiding the news.

I can’t count how many funerals we’ve attended during the past three years, most of them online, I buried some close friends. Mom buried a lot more than me. It seemed too impossible for life to go back to the way it was, in a sense it wouldn’t, and so we held on to what we had left, each other.

 Mom and I, we took care of one another. I did all the errands while she stayed home and mostly cooked. People in her age group were eventually mandated to stay at home anyway. When I got home she would tell me how bored she was when I was gone. I was terrified of going home too, afraid of catching the virus and bringing it home to her. We spent even more time away from each other at home because of it.

Then one day, out of the clear blue, as I sat in despair in the living room sofa, this ginger cat strolled in and meowed at me.

We called her Meow Meow.

Meow Meow knew how to play ball like a pro, and mom was entertained watching us play. I didn’t see her smile so much for a long time.

 I would kick the small, light squeeze ball I used for therapy around and watch Meow Meow chase it and kick it back to me with deadly precision, landing it right on the tip of my toe. She also played hide and seek and tag, this was even more fun and after a long time we were laughing and happy, and I was getting exercise again.

Mom started to go back outside in her garden, and Meow Meow would follow her to help her dig holes in the ground for her plants and flowers.

I relaxed one of the rules a bit when Meow Meow caught her first mouse inside the house.

She would wake us up every morning by coming to our bedsides and calling us, “Meow,”, and when we get out of bed she had her way of saying good morning.

I discovered it by accident, stooping to her level and actually saying good morning one day.

Meow Meow placed her front paws on our foreheads and meowed, like it was a kitty blessing. We expected to get this greeting every morning, and we did. I remember dad would touch his forehead to ours as a greeting sometimes without saying a word.

“Where’d you come from kitty? I hope I’m not stealing you away from someone who loves you. You’re a great friend.”

It’s like she wanted to talk, to speak my language but every time she opened her mouth to answer only a meow came out.

Eventually we found out where she came from, it was right next door, but that neighbor didn’t speak to us. We found out when the gardener came, and he asked the gardener, who was hard of hearing, to tell us to give him back his cat.

We didn’t fuss about it, only said goodbye to Meow Meow and brought her home.

Weeks went by, and the house seemed empty again, empty furniture, no ball rolling around on the floor, no tag or hide and seek, her absence was felt as much as her presence. We missed her.

When we woke up in the morning sometimes we would look to see if she would somehow appear at our bedsides and greet us with her kitty blessings, but she was gone. It was time to move on.

We threw the sandbox out and her feeding and water bowls too. We packed away her toys and balls and kept her in our memories. She made us smile for a while, but life went back to normal, our normal.

She did change things up a bit. We’d use the backyard more, cooking outdoors on the grill and eating breakfast in the garden or under the shed. We talked about being out there with her, watching her catch at butterflies and grasshoppers until we were ready to go inside. She would also pounce at some nightingales but for us that was a no no. Somehow it seemed like she was still there, only not.

It was a Sunday evening, and I was cooking dinner on the grill. I was out there for most of the day, but in the evening I heard mom calling.

“Jo-Anne, come in side, I want to show you something!” she shouted.

“Can it wait? I’m still cooking. I want to get back inside before it gets dark.”

“Ok take your time then,” that was my mother’s sarcasm, and it usually gets me curious.

 So, I darted inside after drawing the hot coals away from the meat. As soon as I opened the back door I was greeted by Meow Meow!

I really didn’t expect to see her again and covered my mouth before the expletive came out of it in moms hearing!

Meow Meow looked awful with a chord around her neck. She opened her mouth to meow but no sound came out of it. Her eyes looked tired and she was dirty.

I picked her up, “Meow Meow, I missed you. You came back! You look terrible but hi!”

Mom started laughing, “Do you like your surprise?” she asked.

“I do, but I’m curious. Do you think this was an escape, a release, or a rescuing? The cord looks like it’s been cut.”

“I guess we’ll never know will we?” she replied, and we laughed it off.

“I’m not chasing her away mom. She can stay as long as she wants.”

We gave Meow Meow every opportunity to go home. We kept the doors open during the day and locked her out at night. We stopped feeding her and gave her a little milk sometimes just in case she wasn’t going home at night. Every morning, as soon as we opened the front door, she walked inside the house.

It was winter, and the nights were cold so we stopped locking her out altogether, and even though she spent her days outdoors, she always came inside the house every night before we closed the door, sometimes with a mouse in her mouth.

Weeks went by. The gardener came again and we waited. There was nothing. In the evening I asked him if there were any messages for us on the Chinese telephone from next door.

“No messages in the queue,” he replied, and then he went home.

“She’ll have kittens. When she does, maybe we can make a peace offering to our friendly neighbor, he must be really sour about this,” mom said.

“We can try.”

We don’t know what kind of life Meow Meow was living before we met her, but we know now that she is living her best life, chasing butterflies in the garden, pouncing at grasshoppers in the grass, mousing in the back yard, playing ball and tag and hide and seek, giving morning kitty blessings, looking in the fridge for breakfast and most recently, turning on the bathroom faucet to drink water from the tap. Maybe dad really did come home.

THE END