Sunshine and a cat enter my bedroom silently, one by the window, one by the stairs. One feeds the world, the other is gently but insistently enquiring after his breakfast.

“Hey buddy,” I say when he hops up onto my chest and chirps in my face. “I dreamed you were enormous.”

pigeon

I’d be proud if I was a candy ass!

Biskit’s ex-friends — are they ex- or merely former? Or are they still friends? — still pad and lurk around the front yard and the back. Their pawprints delicately perforate fresh snow, tracing lines from the alley to the garage to the back steps, around the mini sidewalk to the front porch, on out to the street and other places to lurk.

Broken fang. Sometimes walked with a limp. Lean, hungry. At five years old, he’d been in some fights. When he first started hanging around our house, he was skittish. But hungry! And seemingly in need of some affection. Wandered up from somewhere deep within that secret network, its lines invisible to humans now, mid-summer, no substrate of snow.

Once arrived, he never left—unless you count the long night of the bulldog attack, when I sat worrying on the back steps until 3 am, when he finally reappeared from out of the gray dark of the alley, dignified, hurt, festooned with leaves and burrs. Chirped once as I held the door for him. Slowly climbed the stairs, climbed into my bed, and stayed there for the rest of that night and the entire next day, healing.

Decades earlier though, before I was a cat person — It was during the days and weeks after 9/11, when even people like me were thinking should we volunteer or sign up for something? Am I a luxury item, as one columnist put it at the time? So I can only assume I was expressing, inadvertently or not, some doubts about my manhood, or potency, or virility, or any of those other ineffable qualities corporations use to sell deodorant and war, when my then future- now ex- (thank god) wife said that to me: “Go ahead and be proud of what you are. It just so happens I’m a medium hard ass, and I’m proud of that. But I’d be proud of being a candy ass too, if I was a candy ass.”

Only the person who says things that make you think they really know you can manipulate you fully and deeply, can make it feel good and right to be thoroughly used. Only the only person you really trust can really hurt you. That’s why I don’t trust so often anymore. Skittish. Broken fang.

Yeah, yeah. You and me both. A network of interwoven cat-paw lines, trashcan to hedge to garage to back alley. La nuit, tous les chats sont gris.

Present day. Night, lit by my neighbor’s obscenely bright motion-sensor LEDs. Biskit’s former friends: Hey! How ya doin’ in there? Ya looking mighty round, yeah? Well fed? Gonna share with the rest of us? How come you don’t let none of the rest of us get up in there, Biskit?

They say it mockingly; obviously it’s not his real name (spare me from the ts eliot type shit though (lol)). Does he care? He licks his paw. I don’t know.

But in my dream, he was as big as a grizzly bear. I lay against his warm belly, his arm was loosely around my shoulder. He chuckled at something, at me, at us. We were well fed and drowsy. It was a good day. There was sunshine coming in the window. It was fine. It was all right.