Don't Kiss Me: Stories(15)

Your two strays whelped litters of their own, you noticed how kittens in both had bits of gray the way Milton had bits of gray, you wanted to feel something about it but you couldn’t drum nothing up. Now you had fifteen. You didn’t see the point of naming them. You had the thought maybe they should name you. Wisp, Haunt, Treatfingers.

You couldn’t keep up with the litter box, and one wasn’t enough, or two or three, so you sprinkled litter over the linoleum in the downstairs bathroom, you sprinkled till there were dunes, and you felt satisfied at the solution. You left the back door open day and night, you put flypaper up and it worked okay, you saw that another stray had come to stay, and then another, but them cans of Fancy Feast weren’t all that much to begin with, so you started buying in bulk. At night you slept faceup in your bed. You could see the fan blades going round and round, you could see the headlights sweeping into your room as a car passed and then sweeping right out again. Something about these cars passing compelled you to do something. Life was out there. Do what? Your stomach was a hot stone. Your heart raced. But you did nothing, what could you do? You had decided if it was the man driving by it was best he didn’t see you watching for him. You watched the fan, the cats moaned, you fell asleep, you woke up. You fell asleep.

One day the phone rang. The Indonesian man? No. A neighbor. The cats gathered in the yard at night and made a racket, it was too much, did you understand? You placed the phone in its cradle. The gall of your neighbor, not being the Indonesian man. Your cats wove in and out of your legs. You felt braided, your insides most of all, tightly wound and fastened snug. You dumped can after can of Fancy Feast, some of it splat on their heads. You ran a finger through a blob of tuna ’n veggies between a white one’s ears, licked your finger clean. You did that until the white one’s head was blobfree, you opened a new can and picked at it with a fork until you were full.

And then one day a woman came to your door while you were grooming your forearms. The woman looked official, her pelvis threatened to burst out her khakis, she had a badge of some kind, a man in sunglasses waited for her on the driveway. Is it the Indonesian man? you asked. The woman stared into your house with her mouth open. Your cats wove and wove. The man, you repeated. Has something happened to the man? Your eyes stung, your cats moaned, it sounded like one long No. The man in the driveway jogged over and looked in. They were from Animal Control, you saw that now. You looked down at your feet, where a turd had appeared, curled over your big toe. The Indonesian man had once told you a story about how, fishing as a boy, he’d reeled in a diaper, how his father had made him pose for a picture with his catch. You remembered how the Indonesian man had pushed your hand when you’d reached for his elbow.

The man in the sunglasses gagged, wondered in a whiny voice why lonely cat ladies were his problem. You wanted to hug him for saying so, for thinking it was loneliness made you what you was. Lonely was normal. Come in but mind the dunes, you told your visitors.





RV PEOPLE


We’re in the RV. Someone coughs like a baby’s rattle. One of us left the last time we stopped for gas. We were in the aisles of the convenience store looking for sausages, air fresheners, some kind of prophylactic. We are the type to look for things. Then one of us was gone, we saw him walking slowly toward the highway, and some of us watched while he turned against the flow of traffic, and some of us watched when he got into another car, and some of us watched the glint on the windows of that car, light flashing on the windows like some kind of magic trick, and we turned back to our aisles, we turned back to the rest of us, and we paid for the gas and lifted some candies and passed them around us when we were back in the RV. A few of us looked around and asked after the one that left, for them it was like poof, he was gone, did he have ash blond hair, did he prefer to drive in the afternoons? No one answered and we were back on the road anyway.

Later one of us mentions the heat, we’re in the desert now, we don’t remember how or why we headed in that direction, we breathe the dry heat in and try to remember to let it back out. A few of us work tying knots in a rope, tying a cat’s paw, then a clove hitch, then a half blood. Tying, untying. Someone ties a noose and we look away for a while, we can feel her eyes on us but we don’t look, she needs to learn. We hit a bump and stop, back up, hit the bump again. Someone in the front says, Had to make sure it was dead, and we sit while some of us are out there cutting it up, discarding what we don’t want, making neat cuts we can all agree on. When we get going again the meat is stowed in the cooler, we are running low on ice and we worry about the keep, some of us worrying the blood on our fingers, using our mouths before it can dry, but it’s hard to get under the nails just right.

We drive all the night, keeping each other company. We say things about the abundance of stars, so much light, but we don’t really care for stars, there are other things to notice, like woodgrain, like a sheet on the line, like the tender parts of the naked among us, like the smell of anything after it’s cut into. Some of us shuffle cards, deal them out, we make piles of cards, they are worn like dollars now, a two of clubs gives out, crumbles in our laps, we push the bits onto the floor, some of us collect the bits later on.

At an all-night diner we pick up more of us, some of us are convincing enough to get a waitress to leave her pad and apron behind, some of us are lonely enough to take a woman and her baby. The woman cries all night long, even when we make soothing noises, even when we hand her our treasures: two river stones, silver foil, a braid of hair. We take her baby from her, we pass it forward, we rock it in our arms.