Strays

Ryan Fiordimondo

I am not sure what possessed her to abduct me when she did. She had visited me countless times on that same street corner, occasionally gifting me scratches on the head or strokes down the back, cooing and chirping before disappearing down the street. Maybe she was feeling particularly lonely, or maybe I looked particularly helpless. Whatever her reasons, she bent and scooped and swaddled me in the bottom of her hoodie, and I was off.

I could have broken free, no doubt about it. In truth I nearly did. I dislike being held, always have. However, amidst my quickened heartbeat and extended claws, I allowed myself to be taken. I was cold, and her warmth rendered me lifeless.

The screech of a gated door ripped me out of my delusions and, by the time she placed me on the maroon carpeted floor of her apartment, I was reeling. Strange, perfectly angular white walls stretched above and confined me. Sinister shadows danced and swirled wildly around the room. Something was burning; it emitted a foul synthetic odor that resembled an unholy mix of pine and peppermint.

Dread bubbled up inside me until it was impossible to remain still. I darted into the unknown, desperately searching for a safe place to collect my thoughts. As I dashed into the kitchen, which shared the same space as the living room, the carpet floor transformed into tile, causing me to slip and slide and flail in desperate attempts to regain control. I collided headfirst into a large white monolith which seemed to growl at me and, in my anxious stupor, I returned the favor with a confused, generally directed hiss of my own before continuing around the corner. Tile reverted to carpet and I found myself in a narrow hallway with three doors, two of which were closed. I ran for the available doorway, burrowed myself beneath a bed, and hid amongst forgotten articles of clothing and stray pieces of popcorn.

She attempted to lure me back out with chirps and coos and other stereotypical catcalls. I remained in the shadows, pressed as far back against the wall as possible. Eventually she fell onto the mattress, her shape imprinted above me, and remained still. Nothing was audible but the low hum of some device displacing the air and the heavy thump of my heart.

Daylight bled in between the blinds, projecting thin strips of orange and yellow onto the wall. I had not slept, but somehow I’d missed her departure. The room was still. For several moments I remained motionless, eyes widened and tail flicking, listening to the clicks and clacks coming from some kind of instrument mounted to the wall. She had left the whirring device running; it oscillated from across the room and blew air towards me every now and then. The Rolling Things passed by outside, their signature honks and rumbles shuttled down the streets and through the walls. Eventually, after concluding that there were in fact no immediate dangers present, I emerged from beneath the bed.

The room was small even for me. Aside from a single window positioned opposite the bed and the aforementioned clicking apparatus, the white walls were barren. Cardboard boxes littered the floor, and, upon closer inspection, one had actually been filled with cat litter. I presumed this box as my own and relieved myself, having not done so since before my kidnapping. It occurred to me, as I squatted over sand and soda and whatever else goes into the stuff, that I’d never used one of these before, that I’d never even seen a litter box until now. Despite this, I’d somehow known what to do with it. It was almost unconscious, as if I’d been wired to respond to all boxes of litter in this way. Even stranger, the box lent me a sense of calm that, given my shanghaied circumstance, should not have been possible. This mystery haunts me to this day, and has been the catalyst of many introspective meltdowns, into which I will not delve too deeply.

Just as the teleological implications of my urination were beginning to become known, a horrible, high-pitched chime struck from the clicking object on the wall. A strange mechanical thing repeatedly jutted out from and went back inside it. It sounded like an unnatural, bastardized bird call; it coo-cooed in rigid intervals far too precise to be of organic origin. I leapt into the air, terrified, and sprinted out of the room.

I ran down the hall, my footsteps slowing as I progressed further from the bedroom. Both of the hallway doors remained closed. I heard the growling from the kitchen, deep and monotonous, and promptly jogged back to the room I’d vacated. The bedroom had returned to its original state of clicking stillness.

Once I built up enough courage, I carried out multiple excursions to the extremities of the apartment, returning to the bedroom occasionally to calm my nerves. With each trip I explored a bit further. I located the source of the growl: a large white lifeless thing that smelled of ham and potatoes and tomatoes and milk. It was cold, perhaps even colder on the inside, and emitted a perpetual buzz that more closely resembled a purr than a growl. This put me at ease. I located two bowls in the kitchen, one filled with water and the other with dry, pebbly food. The food was strange and chalky and tasted vaguely of fish, particularly tuna. I devoured it.

Food has a curious, almost psychoactive effect on me. When I eat, my surroundings seem to fade away, my self fades away, in favor of the texture and taste and smell of whatever I’ve scored. It doesn’t even need to be particularly good. Everything that is not directly related to eating is in that moment compartmentalized and stowed away to be retrieved another time. This infatuation with food, paired with my utter lack of sufficient nutrition, explains why I barely registered, let alone reacted to, the sound of steadily approaching footsteps or the screech of the gated door. I was OK, safe and sound in my sensuous escape, far outside the confines of her apartment.

Once I finished my meal and subsequently plunged myself back into reality, I saw her. She hummed to herself as she locked the gate. I froze with face coated in kibble crumbs. My legs bent, primed to propel me to the bedroom. She had not yet seen me. She shed a hat, freeing curly brown hair to rest on her shoulders, and collapsed on the couch. She exhaled deeply and remained motionless.

Silence.

Stillness.

Heat whooshed in from the overhead vents.

This was my chance.

I stalked forward, compressing my body so low to the ground that my stomach was nearly dragging. One of her paws, grotesque and hairless, hung from the couch just barely above the ground. Perfect. I sprung on her, sinking tooth and claw into the back of her paw. She yelped, sprang up and, for a brief moment, just glared at me, her eyebrows furrowed and accusatory, as if she’d forgotten all about the kidnapping, as if I was the one at fault. I stood my ground. My tail puffed up and swung behind me, daring her to retaliate. She did not, however, and instead whimpered and sucked her wound. A drop of water fell from her eyes, possibly serving a defensive purpose specific to her breed. I sat upright and straightened my back to achieve maximum smugness.

She stomped to the kitchen and, to my surprise, opened the top compartment of the white, purring monolith. She groped around inside itーit crinkled and hissed and manifested some kind of fog which wafted in the air for a moment before dissipating. Even from where I stood I could feel its coldness. She produced a bag of ice and pressed it onto her paw. She sniffed.

Her face was peppered with dots, some of which were red and scabbing, while others were dark. The darker dots consolidated under her almond-brown eyes, lending her an intense, almost predatory gaze. The redder dots were randomly distributed around her face; a few gathered on her chin and beside her mouth while others, varying in size and redness, punctuated her forehead. Her lips were winter-chapped and thin; they remained stoically parallel as she stuck some kind of medical strip onto her injury. She was small, relatively, but did not move gentlyーshe slammed drawers and slapped objects onto tables with a fierce carelessness that intimidated me despite the moderate distance between us. Once she concluded whatever business she had with the cabinets and the ice, she walked towards me. I braced myself for combat. She bent over, lowering herself so that we were nearly face-to-face, and extended a single fleshy finger onto my nose. It smelled vaguely of soap. She repeated a sound that was not exactly a growl or hiss but nonetheless communicated anger, or dissatisfaction, or both. I considered swatting at her. Before I could make a move, she straightened up, spun around, and walked down the hall. I heard the door close behind her.

I remained in the living room as the moon rose. I felt completely and unquestionably alone. The special Rolling Things, the faster ones accompanied by red and blue flashes and hideous wails, occasionally cast their strobing lights through the curtains. Things rustled outside. By that time, on a typical night, I’d have been hiding in gutters or raiding trash bags, hunting and gathering before eventually retiring to an abandoned patch of lawn only I knew about. Instead, I sat and stared at the front door, hoping I could force it open using sheer will.

She returned to the kitchen once more, placing a cup of something in an artificially lit box. The cup spun round and round inside the box for a few moments before coming to a stop. It beeped obnoxiously. She removed the cup from the box and stirred it with a stick, revealing that food had somehow been conjured within the cup, presumably with the aid of the box. It smelled not quite of chicken, but rather of a suggestion of chicken, as if this box-cup incantation could only produce imitation food. Regardless of whatever blasphemy was required to generate such unnatural chicken-ish food, I licked my lips.

At first she paid me no mind, opting instead to gaze into an illuminated rectangle which seemed to react to her touch. However, she eventually noticed me and my undoubtedly intense, hungry stare. She looked at me and I at her. The rectangle projected multicolored light onto her cheek. She extended her stick, which turned out to be quite a pointy stick indeedーit featured four sharp prongs used to stab bits of food too stubborn to scoop. I licked it. It tasted how it smelled: imitation chicken. Delicious. I pressed my head onto her paw and allowed her to stroke down my back. I never retracted my claws.

Once I was certain she was asleep, I snuck into the bedroom. I watched herーthe way she breathed, how her head rested on her hand, delicately, with a streetlight’s yellowness illuminating her forehead. I hopped on the bed and relaxed at her feet. Rolling Things sped by outside. The bedroom’s clicking and whirring lulled me into a pleasant, intoxicating slumber.

Within the next few days, I found myself falling into routine. She left every morning, sometimes before dawn, leaving me alone to anticipate the clicking object’s inevitable cacophonic chiming. The thing seemed to go off at the same general times each day: it would chime and coo and uncannily thrust about in the morning, in the afternoon before she returned, and in the evening just before I was fed. Strangely, after a few days of this chime-and-food pairing, I began to eagerly anticipate its alarm. Even stranger, I salivated at its sound, sometimes even the thought of its sound, regardless of the time of day.

When she would return, which was usually shortly after the second chime, she was always tired. She’d collapse onto the couch and let out a long, exaggerated sigh, as if she’d been carrying something very heavy for very long. She would lie and breathe and do little else, occasionally rising to consult the magical Spinning Box for food.

There was an unshakeable tenseness about her; the way she moved was anxious and uneven, as if she were being pushed and pulled in conflicting directions. She was jumpyーI would elicit a small gasp from her if I entered a room too hastily or jumped on her bed without warning. She seemed to feel just as out of place in the apartment as I did. It was home to neither of us, we just happened to be there, floating, occupying space. Boxes still scattered the floor full of all sorts of things: oddly shaped glass, pots, pans, strange square cardboard prints with wax disks inside, plants, silvery sticks, et cetera. She sometimes tripped over the clutter, but never moved it.

At night, I would join her in the dimly lit bedroom. She would sit cross-legged on her bed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, scratching on paper with weird colored sticks. The images she produced were mostly incomprehensible, all geometric and abstract, with colors bleeding outside their borders and melding into each other. Many of these scratchings would be crumpled and thrown, sometimes directly at me, while a select few were displayed, crooked and haphazard, on the wall. Of the works displayed, I could only make sense of one. It featured a minimalist headshot of a woman. It was devoid of color except for large kaleidoscopic blobs that covered a majority of the woman’s face. Only her right eye, nose, and part of her mouth were visible; her curly hair pointed straight up towards a completely black, depthless oblong that seemed to be drawing her in.

When we settled down to sleep, which was often very late, I would sit next to her and she would pet me. In those silent moments, as she scratched my ears and whispered to me in an alien language, I felt genuinely fond of her. I would lie across her chest and feel her heartbeat. Water would sometimes drip from her eyes. 

One day, I awoke from a midday nap to discover the boxes had disappeared. The clicking object remained on the wall, but beside it hung printed images and plants and string lights which glowed warmer than the fluorescent bulbs I’d become accustomed to. The blinds had also been removed and replaced with purple curtains.

I heard her shuffling in the kitchen. I took some time gathering the strength necessary to move (it had been a good sleep) but eventually I hopped down from the bed and hobbled to her. She stood on a stepladder, wearing the sweatpants she’d slept in, consolidating the last of the clutter, placing pots and pans and other unidentifiable knick-knacks into cabinets. A knock came from the door. She let out a little squeak and ran to unlock the gate. Another cat, who appeared to be of the same hairless breed as my captor, rustled inside.

The new girl was tall; she had blonde hair and smelled of a Siamese. They sat around a long sheet of paper, the source of the rustling, and sipped sharp smelling liquid out of the newly unpacked glasses. I kept my distance. The Siamese slid a wax disk from its sleeve and placed it on a device that spun and crackled and emitted a nonsensical dissonance that the girls were somehow able to anticipate and mimic in tandem.

The singing became louder and more frequent as day turned to night and glasses transformed from full to empty and back to full again. The girls dipped twigs into assorted viscous goops and smeared color onto the paper, forming indescribable shapes and shadows. My kidnapper burst with energy; she and the Siamese engaged in rapturous conversation accented by wailing respiratory upsets and fumbling half-embraces, all inexplicably timed to the sounds of the wax disk.

As I sat and watched from the kitchen, my stomach growled. Some time had passed since the evening chime, yet when I investigated my food bowl, I found only my drooling reflection staring back at me. I attempted to make a scene, yelling and complaining over their singing, but they barely acknowledged me. They seemed transfixed by their twigs and their goop. As I approached them, I realized why. They had formed an image on the paper somehow; their smearing and dabbing and goop-dipping all came together in a glorious depiction of me, myself, dressed as a member of royalty. My likeness was unmistakableーthey had even captured the birthmark which whitened the fur above my mouth. In the image, I was enveloped in a yellow glow, as if my majesty eclipsed the sun itself, wearing an oversized red velvet coat with matching scarf. A tiny crown adorned the top of my head. My expression was stern and empowered. I looked absolutely regal.

A honk came from the street, causing the girls to jump up and scamper outside. Their footsteps and laughter echoed down the street. The gated front door remained ajar.

I sat in the doorway and looked into the night, feeling the outdoors’ breeze blow in between my whiskers. The air was warm, warmer than before, and smelled of bacon and half-eaten chicken wings. Blacktop streets, lined with trash bags, extended indefinitely in all directions. The sidewalk bathed in familiar midnight-yellow streetlight. Trees swayed. A rat scurried into a storm drain.

I turned and walked to the bedroom to await her return.