flashquake Fiction

CAT'S GONE ASTRAY
by Sara Joan Berniker

Cat disappeared and the snow is falling — piling up on the back porch, sifting in through the hole in the roof, turning everything into a donut. Tables and chairs and fridge covered in powdered sugar, but they'd be too hard to eat, would break teeth into splintered shards. Standing out back, sugarsnow up to his ankles, shins, thighs, waist, he calls for the cat: "Tommy, Tommy, Tommy! Come home!"

She finds that listening to his voice — over and over again as he screams for his baby — is a kind of torture. It's like listening to an animal in pain, or a newborn abandoned in a dumpster. Mournful and alone, he stands in the snow for one hour, two hours, three hours, four.

Melted snow and tears mingle on his cheeks when he finally comes inside. His four-day shadow makes his face seem heavier, stranger than usual. No point in shaving if the cat's gone astray, he seems to think. No point in changing clothes either, she guesses. He's still wearing his uniform, the navy blue fabric stained with four days worth of meals. She wonders if he'll be reprimanded for such sloppiness, wonders if he's really going into work at all. Thinks that he might spend all day — while she's breaking her back in four-inch heels, earning good cash on her back in twenty-minute increments — driving up and down the neighborhood alleyways, calling for Tommy out his squad car window, eschewing burglaries and rapes and the lizard eyes of his superiors in favor of a small, fat cat who's gone missing in the middle of January.

"At least he had Christmas," she says, remembering how happy he'd been to give Tommy a baggie of catnip that had looked like the Ziploc bags of dope he'd sometimes bring home after a bust. He'd given her a present too, but hadn't looked as pleased.

"At least they both had Christmas," she says, smiling at herself in the mirror while she puts on cranberry-colored lipstick. Not a real smile, not a chance, but the one that she practices in order to draw her men in. On the corner, they like to see her smile. It makes them feel like she's really into it, like their bodies mean something to her, like they turn her on. Fake smiles, fake boobs, fake love for thirty bucks a pop.

His cop money's good, better than hers if he pulls in overtime, but he's not gonna be at the 5-1 for long. Not the way he's going. Even when he stands outside in the snow, staring at the humped shapes of raccoons on the garage roof, she can see the track marks on the insides of his arms. Not with her eyes, but with something that can look deeper, something that makes her feel as if she is him and he is her. She wonders if he feels the same way when he's cruising the alleys looking for the cat, wonders if he feels like that when he drives up Jarvis looking for her. She's changed her corner three times this winter already, hoping to stay a few steps ahead of him.

Not like he doesn't know, of course he knows, but there's no need to splatter his face with the truth. Why bother reminding him that his girl's a whore, that his cat's probably dead — flattened by a milktruck, chewed up by a snowblower, maybe stolen by those fat raccoons that sit on the garage roofs, rubbing their little hands together and muttering at the wind. At night she dreams that the cat's been spirited away by the raccoons — not dead, not hurt, but living with them in a park, or in the basement of one of the abandoned houses on Palmerston, two blocks over. Like a feral child in a B-movie past, that's how she likes to think of Tommy, his cat, his baby.

She wants to tell him her fantasy, wants to soothe him if she can, but the raccoon story won't work in the same way for him. His mind is too linear, and he's too intent on seeing that cat again.

He'll be fired for sure, missing work like he's been doing, and then it'll be her pulling the double shifts — taking rough trade because she's got no other choice, competing with the drag kings and crack whores; wishing she was with the raccoons, wishing she was like the women she sometimes sees leaving the King Edward Hotel in the moments before the bellhop shoos her away. Women tall and lovely like something out of a poem, women in fur coats and four-inch spikes, their hair a mass of over-processed ringlets, skin so brown it has to come from a bottle. They share a similar occupation — her and those women — but still, they're miles away from eachother. She gets the back alley blowjobs and the men who hide their wedding rings in the glovebox of their minivans; the women in the mink coats get to listen to Jazz at the Senator, get to pretend that they're better than they really are. She thinks that it all boils down to the same thing, really, but it's cold comfort. Cold comfort in her mind, and cold comfort in this house where the heat has been shut off, where the back door stays propped open permanently, letting in drifts of powdered sugar snow, because he refuses to believe that the cat is dead, refuses to believe that all hope is lost.

"Tommy's dead," she says, shouts really, out to him where he stands, humped like the raccoons, on the back porch. "Tommy's probably frozen to death, starved to death, been beat to death."

Like you'll be if you don't watch your back, she thinks but doesn't say. He doesn't answer, not even when she sweeps the snow back out on to the porch and shuts the door.

Copyright 2003 by Sara Joan Berniker

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