BIG KITTY
Appeared in Blank Spaces Magazine, June 2022
Kate was killing me at Scrabble when I spotted a guy holding a sheet of paper to the lamp post across the street. I split the blinds open wider. “That’s the guy I heard talking with the neighbours yesterday. He lost his cat.”
She shuffled her tiles—eyes on the double letter score. “Poor kitty. It’s too hot out there.”
It was forty degrees, yet the guy wore jeans. He had shaggy, blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses, and a faded Tool t-shirt—looked like someone I could be friends with. He taped his paper crooked, patted his pockets until he found his scissors, then dropped his packing tape.
I laughed as the tape unfurled down the lamp post. “I like this guy.”
Kate played her tiles. “Coward. Go talk to him.”
“What?”
She had spelled coward on the board. “You complain about how hard it is to make friends here.”
It’s hard to make new friends in your forties, but even harder in Vancouver, where the social people avoid each other, and only an antisocial people would talk to strangers.
I marked Kate’s score and peeped through the blinds again. “I’m not going outside today; it’s so hot, the trees are bribing the dogs.”
Kate laughed.
The guy looked toward our window and squinted when he saw me. I let the blinds snap back and pretended not to see him in my periphery as I shuffled my seven vowels.
After he snipped his tape, he crossed the street in our direction. Then our front gate creaked open, and the doorbell rang.
“Shit,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“The guy who lost his cat… he’ll go away.”
“Answer it... He lost his cat.”
I walked to the door. “Fine. I’m starting to feel bad for the guy. Maybe his girlfriend made him put up the posters.”
“Maybe it’s his fault the cat got out,” Kate said.
I opened the door and smelled the smoke from nearby forest fires.
The guy’s face was pink. “Sorry to bother you.” He fumbled his stack of pages and handed me a sheet with his shaky hand. “We have a lost cat situation.”
I felt the heat invading our space. “Hopefully it found some shade. It’s so hot out, I hear the trees are bribing the dogs.”
He didn’t laugh. He slid his glasses up his sweaty nose and squinted at the hazy, cloudless sky.
“Supposed to rain tomorrow.”
“Your cat might crawl home then. We’ll keep an eye out for it.”
“Thank you.”
I shut the door and went back to the table.
Kate asked, “Did you make a friend?”
I spelled it out loud as I played my tile: no.
“Well, maybe you can help him look for it,” Kate said, as she ended our game with a triple-word score for bloom.
•
In the morning, I spilled coffee on the missing cat poster on our table.
Lost Cat. Black and fluffy, with yellow eyes. Responds to “Big Kitty”, “BK”, or kissy noises.
In the photo, Big Kitty was furry, well-fed, and had crud in its eyes. It didn’t look cut out for life on the streets, not in the hazy dog days of the hottest recorded summer.
I called to Kate upstairs, “I’m going to take a walk around the block and make kissy noises.”
“What?”
“Look for the cat.”
“You’re a good neighbour.”
It took me a while to smear on sunblock and find my hat. By the time I opened the door, the guy was already back at the lamp post, peeling off his missing cat poster under a yellow sky.
“Nevermind,” I said. “He’s taking down the posters.”
Kate said, “Yay, the cat came home.”
Or it died, I thought as I closed the door and turned on the air conditioning.