THE  27Th  EDITIOn

I saved a cat today. Please don’t let that sole act put me on your good side. A single piteous action is often a brilliant distraction from the sinister. My intention, which is the most important part of any piety, was not to do so. In fact, the creature quite ruined the rhythm of my day. 

I found the cat during a walk.

       The frost-laden sidewalk crunches under the weight of my steel-toed boots. The barren branches explain the leaf-covered ground — a myriad of autumnal guts spilled atop the grass of the park. 

        No one’s here. The early morning darkness turns the innocence of the play structure into a harrowing, prophetic, castle. 

        There is no birdsong, no whisper of the river. There is no rustling of the trees or scurrying of chipmunks. There is only me within the frosted world. 

        The salt-trucks aren’t grumbling around town yet because they haven’t woken either. I have, for some reason. 

        The edge of the park dips down into a river. I can barely hear the frothing waters just below the frozen surface. The stream deeply gurgles, almost as if trying to reach out with a dying hand. 

        The sun begins to claw its way over the horizon; orange rays pierce through the myriad of dead branches, loosening the frozen surface of the river. It cracks, the sound like a lock’s tumblers falling into place. 

         It’s cold. But it feels good to be cold, so I walk closer to the river. The bank crumbles beneath my feet as I descend. I trample bushes and shrubs.

         I am wearing thick, baggy pants and my work boots. I shouldn’t really feel a whole lot from the water. I don’t know why I’m doing this if I won’t feel much of anything. 

         Part of me says I should just go back to work. Forget this walk and all the thought with it - return to the pointless, automated, grind.

         I wash windows. 

         I spend most of my days hanging stories above the sidewalk, wiping the grand glass in a circular motion. The process is cathartic, to say the least. Most days the window stays clean. Some days, on hot days, a fine white film overtakes the portions I cleaned just prior. It’s as if a ghost breathes a hot breath upon the glass. I continue wiping the glass in circular motions in hopes that the ghost runs out of breath. 

        That doesn’t sound great, either.

         I plunge my boot through the ice-skinned water, the crack like the snapping of bone. 

        There’s a moment of pause – a dry eye of the storm just before the arctic torrents embrace my leg. 

        My cold jeans, which clung to me like a frigid skin, absorb every drop the river forces into them. The warmth leaves my legs as the water wicks it away - like some phantom draining my spirit. 

         It hurts. 

        Oh thank god. I’m so tired of the nothing. The ambling, meandering, nothing that fills my days has dispersed for some short time. In the perfection of my life lives a civilization of want.

         I embrace this something for a while. My legs go numb, I shiver, I feel fractured through my heavy clothes. I watch the sun claw higher in the sky, its orange blaze directly at odds with the frigid pricks dancing on my spine. 

         I look down, through the ice, and see him. The bottom of the river has swallowed him, whirling him around in the metronomic current. He looks like a ball of yellow resistance amidst a glacial tundra. He drifts back and forth, no sign of life to my eyes. A corpse, a floater, a pile of atoms once prescribed to be alive. 

I forgot about the cold. Despite everything there is still something within me. It isn’t the ambling nothingness. I embrace this moment; stand a tall mirror on the side of my soul to take an eternal impression of how meaning looks when furnishing my mind. 

          Something in the back of my mind claws forward, scraping the back of my skull as if I swallowed steel wool. I hear it rattle inside me. 

          I know this thing, it is should.

          I thought I lost this ability. Conscience. Hello again, my fateful foe. The judgements, the moral conundrums, the ignorance comes bubbling up within me like a well of primordial questions. 

          It’s telling me that I should save this cat. It doesn’t say that, but I get what it means. Somehow the voice inside my head screams without shouting, judges without gazing, ignores without deafness. 

          I, out of curiosity, propitiate the voice. Like following a tumbleweed through the desert out of sheer boredom.

          My hand crashes through the ice. I claw around the bottom of the river, trying to find purchase on the dying ball as it drifts back and forth. How light, how young, must he be to be picked up by even the faintest of currents. Like an azure moth dancing around a flame. I retrieve the sopping ball of fur, cup him to my chest, and check for breath or a pulse. Nothing.

          I press down onto his still chest, giving whatever shoddy compressions I can. His body is barely larger than my hand. His limbs flop to and fro, the water from his sopping fur veins down my arm. 

         Water geysers from his mouth. A garbled meow rises from his tiny chest after a few seconds. A high-pitched meow far louder than I thought possible from such a frail thing. A runt.

          I think of myself, the shortest and the frailest, the most broken and unforgivable.

         We’re both made from cursed clay — problems sculpted into us without consent.

          I unzip my jacket and bring him close to my chest. He nuzzles up to me, the cavity between my arm, chest, and jacket like a home to him. 

          I’m shivering. I forgot I was shivering. Should is telling me to get out of the river, out of the cold. Not for my sake, but for the cat’s. Never for my sake.

          In a stalemate with should, I listen to the voice. I do not want to, but to do anything else would return to that nothingness. 

          I tell my legs to move but do not feel them move. I see them extend and retract, lift me from the water. I feel as if I’m watching my own body as a play, the ropes of my muscles like a fly system. I directed the play, but I do not act in it. Something else sits in front of my mind, interpreting what I think and spitting it out into the world. A demon that sits behind my eyes, it knows both where I am and how fast I go there.

 

I am at the vet. Beside Ball and I is a Macaw and Pitbull. Their owners are chatting about the peculiarities of their pets. A funny story about the Macaw’s ability to copy her husband’s snoring; a funny anecdote about the Pitbull’s tendency to whine whenever his owner isn’t in the room. 

         The waiting room is covered in paw-print wallpaper. Lime green accents are interesting while not challenging. I think of all the advancements around us: the automated garbage collectors, the metronomic drivers, the automatic window-washer that threatens the reality of my job. I think of the recipe of society slowly being swapped from organic to metal. 

         Ball stopped shivering a while ago. Now he’s calm, purring quietly in the fold of my arm under my jacket. I wonder if I look crazy to the Macaw and Pitbull owner. A shivering, shaggy, man with an unkempt beard ambling into the warmth of a veterinarian. No, they can put two and two together. They see my shivering and hear the meows from under my jacket, maybe. Should I show them? 

         Ah, there you are, the should that I gave birth to. A prescriptive found within the halls of self-inscribed awkwardness. 

        The Doc calls us back. 

       “From the bottom of a river, eh?”

        Yes. 

       “Most people would just call animal control. You, though, dove into the freezing waters? Must love cats.”

        Didn’t really think about it. 

       “Well, he’s fine. Healthy weight, good appetite. Got a hell of a meow, too.” 

        Ball lets loose his high-pitched roar.  

        The vet’s fingernails match the waiting room’s wallpaper. Paw-prints with lime green accents. “Can you hold him while I administer a few vaccines?”

        Will it hurt him?

       “A little pinch.”

        Okay.

         I distract Ball with a few treats from a plastic container on the Vet’s desk. He hardly notices the needle enter his leg, only a slight shiver. A trooper. 

         The Vet holds Ball above their head. “He really trusts you. I don’t see many cats respond this well to vaccines.” 

         Can one betray a cat? Why do I worry about betraying an animal? 

         They give me a hard plastic cat carrier for Ball. It’s a boring beige, like my apartment building. 

         Back in the waiting room, the receptionist gives me some instructions for Ball. A place to buy a litter box and litter to fill it, toys for him to be mentally engaged. I think of the algorithms that keep track of me, the toys it deploys in my neighborhood to keep me mentally engaged.  

         I take out my wallet to hand her my credit card. I stop mid-way through the motion after I remember we don’t really do things like that anymore. 

       “My Dad does the same thing all the time, don’t worry!” Her plaster smile makes me feel old. 

        Automated cars whip by me as I walk. I follow the sidewalk as it elbows around skyscrapers and curves down hills. We come to a stop sign and wait for the coming cars to halt. They continue to zip by — their electronic hum a background static for our short walk. Ball keeps meowing at me to let me out of his cage. Sharp green eyes contrast with his orange hue. 

         I wonder if the algorithm sees me like that. My paranoia peeks its head once again. I scratch at the walls of society, hoping a crack in its foundation will give, letting me fall into the ambling nothingness that calls to me. I wish my scratching on these walls didn’t sound like Ball’s whine. 

He meows again. I open his cage and let him roam free. 

Ball, I promise to never control you. If you want to be with me, you can do so of your own free will. I give you the power to wander back into the river.

         He roars.

         I know it’s cold, Ball.

         He sniffs around the sidewalk, inspecting his new surroundings. He then walks back into the beige cat carrier.

         I follow the cracked sidewalk to my apartment complex. 

         My apartment, a rectangular mountain of stucco corrugated with balconies and windows. Past their frost laden glass, no life dwells. Most of the apartments are uninhabited. A negative birth rate gives us plenty of room. That and the perfect automation we've set up makes sure that every waste of space is perfectly clean. I could literally move every single day of my life, one sterile apartment to the next like some neutered virus. Mechanical bits and bobs clean, cook, and move for me.

         I walk through the threshold to this home, into a chair with a journal atop the desk. I sit down to write this then plan to go to bed, falling asleep to the static channel as it ablutes me of consciousness. That's it. No more. Goodbye.