The Shape of a Home

Content warning: This story contains depictions of death, illness, and injury.

It could have been anyone’s. The poor thing was a mess after the car was through with it, not that I got a good look. I was never the sort that hungered for morbidity. 

*

“Was it her?” Julia’s holding onto a stack of posters. She’d printed them at school yesterday, and wanted to put them up around town. She said that people ought to know we were offering a fifty dollar reward for information on Fifi. 

“Probably wasn’t. Looked too young from what I could tell.” I spare the details. The broken body, the red slicking the gravel. The eyes that will never again see. 

Julia’s bottom lip stops trembling. 

“Mr Anderson has to stop driving like a maniac,” she says. “Or one day he’ll hit another cat, or a person. Or die.” 

Then good fucking riddance. But I know better than to say those words in front of my ten-year-old daughter. 

“I’ll be sure to tell him,” I call out, as Julia leaves the garden, the posters in one hand. With the other, she closes the gate behind her. 

*

Julia’s too kind — like her mother. But Sandra had experienced enough of this world to know when she was too kind, too good for someone.  

When she let me have custody of Julia, she said it was because I earned more. That with me, she could have a better future. But some nights, when my mind strays from the shore of safe and familiar thoughts, I wonder if that was a lie —  if Sandra was afraid to raise her, because Julia is my daughter, too. That she may become an echo of me as she grows up, and Sandra could not bear it. Not when she had worked so hard to be free.  

It’s the kind of thought that makes my bones shudder. 

*

Three years ago, Sandra took on Fifi as a foster. A void, she was. The cat could not be separated from shadow until she opened those yellow eyes. Twin suns in pools of black.

Julia was seven, then, and life in the city had proved to be an ill fit for her. The teachers had told me and Sandra that she was struggling with school. I could sense a deep restlessness coming from Julia, too; the distant look that settled on her features when she stared out the window, not quite able to focus on schoolwork.

Sandra brought me books and pamphlets on the benefits of raising a child away from the city. There were better schools, cleaner air, animals and wildlife abound for her to explore in her own time. 

I was reminded of my mother, then. She lived in the countryside, having taken to farming after my dad died and I moved out. I wondered if she reared her chickens and ducks in search of some kind of meaning, or companionship, but it was strange to think about. When I was a boy, she was adamant about never owning a pet, or touching the cats on the street. 

But Sandra and Julia did not know that, and when we moved in with my mother, they found her chickens and ducks delightful. Against a verdant backdrop, the birds were a respite from the greyness of the city, and the sense of hurry that kept its pulse alive. 

It was this idyllic new life that gave Sandra the time to volunteer at the local animal shelter. One Christmas, when the shelter could not take in any more rescues, she brought home a black cat. Julia named her Fifi. 

Fifi was an old, feral creature that weighed scarcely more than a kitten, with only skin and matted fur clinging onto her bones. She hissed and clawed and rattled against her cage; she bit anyone that got too close. The first weeks, especially, saw Sandra’s forearms covered in band-aids. She owed more than a few scars to that old cat, but she loved her anyway. You could have believed Fifi was her own child. 

I thought it was respectable, the act of nursing animals back to health despite their inability to understand you were trying to help them, or say thank you. But Fifi grew too accustomed to the family and the house. She would awaken to the smell of me frying bacon in the mornings, and she’d beg for a slice, stretching out her paw to tap on my ankles. She would play with Julia when she got home from school — her pupils large, black discs as she chased a ball of yarn. 

It seemed cruel, I told Sandra. It seemed cruel to let Fifi get attached to us, only to give her to someone else — someone who might not feed her bacon, or throw a ball of yarn for her to chase. I said I didn’t want her to foster another animal again. Maybe that selfish demand was one of the things that drove Sandra from me. 

But we kept Fifi, in the end. 

In the middle of our divorce paperwork, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was too late when we found out. The tumour had already spread its tendrils from her liver to her brain — it was too late for chemotherapy, or surgery. Or anything. The only thing we could do, the doctor said, was wait for time to claim her. 

Fifi was good to my mother. Maybe it was because she was old, too, and she could recognise a fellow senior when she saw one. She would sit at my mother’s feet for hours, even when they grew cold because her body was too weak to make its own heat. 

She was there, too, that December morning. My mother’s wrist had felt wintry to the touch as I searched it for a pulse. But Fifi did not leave her feet, dutifully shielding them from the cold, until at last I carried her away. And with it, the last warmth that my mother’s body would ever know. 

*

It was two months ago. Two months ago when Julia woke me up. 

“Dad, our fence — it’s, it’s half gone. It’s broken or something,” she told me, and at first I did not understand what she was saying. But the bleariness of sleep disappeared as I walked out to the front yard and saw that gaping hole in the protecting meshing. The tangles of wires, the mud and fur in the yard.  

“Looks like the work of a coyote,” the neighbours said when they saw the mess. Clumps of tufted brown hairs ringed the hole in the fence from where the animals must have squeezed through. “Probably after your chickens.” 

“But they’re fine. I counted them. They’re all still in the coop.”

“Then re-count them. You don’t have a dog to chase ‘em off, and a coyote wouldn’t leave an easy meal.”

“Dad, where’s Fifi?” Julia burst out of the house, then.  “She always asks for breakfast, but she’s been quiet this morning. I tried to find her, but I don’t see her anywhere. Not in the kitchen, or in any of the rooms, or…”

I turned and my gaze caught sight of the windows, left open. And when I looked back at the hole in the fence, I saw clumps of dark, black fur caught on the wires, too.

*

We saw the hole. We saw the fur. But we never saw her corpse. I am not a man of science but I know that before I see the cat’s body she is both alive and dead. I know that she must have escaped — she must have, somehow, and is now lost in the woods. And I drive through the woodland now hoping to see her sunbathing in a brilliant patch of light. 

I have to find her. If I can’t, I don’t know what I’ll tell Julia. Or Sandra. Or my mother, when she comes to me in my dreams. 

No, I will find her, and she will be alive. 

The sunset flies past me like birds on fire.

*

Every night, when I put Julia to bed, she asks me if Fifi will come back someday. She’s ten. It’s the kind of age where she wants to be her own person, but still looks to me to borrow reassurance, or conviction. 

“She’ll come back,” I’ll say. “She’ll find her way back, just like the homing pigeons you read about. Just takes a while, that’s all.” 

And a look of relief will cross her features, the kind of relief that lets her fall asleep.

And I will believe that cats are like pigeons, that they can travel the needle of some invisible compass to find their way home. 

And when I close my eyes to sleep, the darkness is shaped like a black cat.