The Morning Sun on Her Fur

It’s been three days since the cat appeared in his alley. Ollie watches her. She appears to be sleeping, but her ears are angled toward him. Ollie has seen other cats: skinny, scared, hissing cats in other allies, and the cat next door to where he used to live, perched on the wall between the backyards, the tip of her striped tail twitching. Thinking of his backyard, he remembers the children’s high voices, their clear-bell laughter, he feels their chubby arms hugging him. He closes his eyes and sighs loudly.

Spuds studies the dog through half-closed eyes, sensing gentleness, sorrow. Ollie moves suddenly to scratch and Spuds’ eyes fly open. Ollie slows his movements and rests his chin on his forelegs.

Over the next days, the animals watch each other as they come and go from the alley, keeping a respectful distance, keeping an eye on each other. One night, as Spuds makes a wide arc around Ollie and leaves the alley for her nightly hunt, Ollie follows her at a safe distance, hoping she’ll lead him to food.

When Spuds stops to sniff the air, Ollie stops. When she resumes walking, he does too. Spuds turns down a side street and Ollie follows, smelling food. He trots now, closing the distance between him and the scent source, between him and Spuds.

Spuds stops at a door from which the scent of food wafts. Too late she sees two dogs coming toward her. She runs, but one dog is upon her, pouncing and landing on her back. Spuds yowls, maneuvers sideways, and claws at the dog, snagging his lip. He howls and rears back as the other dog advances. Spuds backs up, puffing up, her eyes wide. Off to the side she sees a blur: Ollie, at full run toward the dogs. He charges into them, the force of his weight knocking down one dog and throwing the other off balance. Spuds dashes away. As she runs, she looks back and sees Ollie chasing the dogs the other direction.

Ollie slows his chase and watches the dogs run farther away. He trots back to where Spuds had been attacked, but she is not there, so he retraces his steps to the alley.  

As Ollie turns off the street he sees Spuds in their alley, a dead mouse dangling from her mouth. She walks cautiously toward Ollie, gauging his body language. Ollie sits down. Spuds drops the mouse several feet away and retreats. Ollie walks to the mouse, sniffs her offering, wags his tail once, and eats.

When Ollie is done eating, Spuds walks toward Ollie cautiously, her tail high. She raises her face and blinks at him once, twice. Ollie drops his ears. Spuds takes another step toward him and stretches. Ollie reaches his neck forward, and licks her ear. Spuds shakes off the dog spit.     

Ollie looks toward the pallets and thinks: sleep, but reconsiders. He’s still hungry. He walks out of the alley, and Spuds follows a few steps behind him. Ollie leads them through a maze of streets to a restaurant dumpster. He sits beneath it and looks repeatedly, pointedly, between the dumpster and Spuds.

Spuds calculates the distance to the rim of the dumpster, crouches, and fluidly leaps up, perches on the rim for a second, and jumps in. She emerges with the remnants of a chicken thigh between her teeth and deposits it at Ollie’s feet, which he eats happily. Spuds jumps back into the dumpster for her dinner and then washes her face, swiping repeatedly at the corners of her mouth and drawing her paw slowly along the length of her whiskers. Ollie sighs, anxious to leave.

En route home they pause to drink water pooled beneath a downspout and turn into their alley. As truck rumbles by, Ollie goes behind the pallets to his bed of cardboard, circles three times, and lies down. With his head resting on his paws he looks at Spuds. Spuds saunters toward him and gingerly lies against crook of Ollie’s hind leg. She feels its warmth, and with that comes the memories of her kittens, the old man, the fireside. Purring, she licks Ollie’s leg, flaring her nostrils at the foul taste, and then closes her eyes and drifts toward safe sleep.

•

Ollie and Spuds settle into a routine, surviving together more easily than either had alone. They hunt in tandem often, but each has his own routine. Sometimes Ollie wanders alone to the corner where the man sped away. He looks into the distance toward where he thinks his children are. He remembers their scent, the feel of their hands petting him, the lilting voice of the woman calling to him. When he returns to the alley, he sees Spuds dozing in a shaft of sunlight and feels a sliver of a sense of belonging.

On a full-moon night, as Spuds lies against Ollie’s warmth she thinks of the coziness of sleeping with her kittens. She rises slowly, careful not to waken Ollie, and leaves their alley. She walks to the building where had she left her kittens. Crouching beneath a bush, she casts her mind inside. She senses white empty space; it feels as if they are not there. She focuses her mind on seeing where they are, but her mind conjures nothing. She remembers them as little kitten and tries to imagine how they look now—their legs longer, their orange and ginger stripes defined, their tails no longer stubby and pointed. With this image in mind, she casts her mind out again, searching. In her mind’s eye she sees a forked road. She peers down each fork. One leads to a cluster of houses and trees and fences, the other to open countryside.

As she walks back to the alley, she lets her mind rest in the ease these images give her.

Ollie is just getting up when she arrives—he’s doing his daily down-dog and yawning routine. From under a wrinkled brow he looks at Spuds: where have you been?

Spuds looks at Ollie while picturing her kittens and feeling her longing to see them again. Ollie’s brow smooths and he looks at her kindly. He understands.

To be continued

(c) 2023 Carolyn Cott