by  Eduard Duray

She was like a shivering limp rag when the neighbor kid held her out to me. 

“You knock too loud,”  I told him.  “How many times do I have to tell you not to knock too loud?  It gives me headaches.  I don’t like headaches.” 

The kid held his ground, wincing as he pushed the white fur toward me just another inch. 

“My mom says living beings need companions,”  he said. 

“I don’t like company,”  I said. 

“She sneezes around cats,”  he said,  “or maybe she’d keep this one.” 

“Who’d keep a dead cat?”  I asked. 

“It ain’t dead yet,”  he said. 

“It will be if you don’t feed it,”  I said, and I closed the door. 

I turned away and was about two steps across the hardwood floor when I started talking to myself, telling myself I didn’t like kids and I didn’t like cats.  My back hurt from sitting in front of the computer all day and my eyes were fuzzy from staring at the screen. 

“I need some peace and quiet,”  I said. 

The kid was still there when I re-opened the door.  His lips were pressed tight together and his eyes were squinted closed.  He looked like he was praying hard. 

“I don’t trust your mother,”  I said as I took the cat from him. 

I hate living next door to Wiccans. 

“No,”  I said. 

It was the twenty-eighth time that I had told her the same word. 

“This is my desk,” I told her.  “It is like sacred ground.  Only I use my desk.  This is where I do my writing.  This is where I create my articles.  Only I may touch my desk.” 

She meowed. 

Then, from the rolling file cabinet I had placed near the desk and topped with a green folded towel, she leaped onto my desk again and began rolling her back over my keyboard.  Long strands of white hair floated up and away as she shed more than her body weight.  Gibberish appeared in the middle of my article tentatively titled “Ten Ways to Know if Your Spouse is Possessed.” 

“I don’t like cats on my keyboard,”  I said. 

She rolled some more. 

I picked her up and dumped her on the floor. 

A female Turkish Angora, the vet had said.  She’d need a lot of shots and maybe it would be a good idea to get her fixed. 

“It’ll cost a bit,”  he admitted.   

“Yeah,”  I’d said. 

“Turkish Angora’s have to be the center of attention,”  he added,    “but they’re wonderfully sensitive, warm, and loving.” 

“Do those robot kitty litter things I saw on TV really work?”  I’d asked.  “I don’t want to be raking sand looking for shit all day.  I’ve got articles to crank out.” 

That’s pretty much how it had gone at the vet. 

She was pissed at being dumped and starting pawing and sniffing at a magazine I had left open on the floor. 

“Look,”  I told the white hairy one,  “here’s the deal.  You can run around the house as long as you use the litter box.  No more dumping on my magazines.  But you can’t get up here on my desk.  Have you got that Kitty Sasquatch?” 

She launched straight up and was scratching her backside on my keyboard again in under three seconds. 

“What is with you?”  I asked.  “Can’t you understand English?  Let me say it to you in cat- Meow, Meow, Meow, and Meow.  That means stay offa my desk.  That’s kitty Italian, okay?  Stay offa my desk.” 

I scooped her off the keyboard and dumped her back on the floor.  Her tail flipped back and forth like a hairy white metronome counting off the beats.   

She was deaf in one ear- I couldn’t remember which.  The vet had told me that a “statistically significant” number of Turkish Angoras had one green eye and one blue eye and that they were deaf in one ear that matched one of those colors.  I didn’t pay much attention to which one was which at the time.  I thought he was bullshitting me until the white fluff looked up and yowled a feline curse at me for bringing her to the clinic.  It was true.  One of her eyes was green and one was blue. 

It was the witch’s fault.  I hadn’t finished an article since the day since the white ball of fur had arrived. No articles meant no money. 

“You see, Booty,”  I said,  “if you can stay down on the floor, then maybe I can write, and then maybe I can print the article out and mail it to a magazine and then maybe- with a capital maybe- a desperate editor will buy the article and mail me a check before he or she actually reads it.  You get where I’m going with this?  There’s rent to pay, Your Sleekness, and we’ll both be out digging for old tuna cans in the trash if I can’t sell another article.” 

She turned and strode imperiously from the room, her tail flicking attitude the way a live wire throws off sparks. 

I wiped another white hair from the keyboard.  I’d vacuumed the apartment twice already that day, sucking up enough fur to make an Angora sweater.  Scientifically speaking, she should be bald. 

After I had backspaced the feline gibberish out of existence, the monitor still showed the same half finished sentence that it had an hour ago.  What had I been trying to say?  She howled from the other room and my shoulders tensed.  Every time that I tried to think she was either rubbing up against my leg, clawing my toes, meowing, jumping up in the sink or on the stove. 

Five minutes later, another cat howl came from somewhere at the other end of the apartment.  I blocked it out and rested my hands on the keyboard, ready to press down the first stroke when I wondered if she was cleaning her claws. 

“Stay away from that couch,”  I yelled.  “It’s not paid for yet.” 

Every living being needs a companion my ass. 

How was I supposed to think? 

To buy her off so that I could finish the first page, I had driven to the store and picked up cat treats.  I shook three of them into my hand, saw that they were the size of peas and the color of salmon and dropped them onto the floor in front of her.   

She had looked down at them and up at me, and then lay on the floor. 

“Those cost me five dollars and sixty nine cents,”  I had told her.  “Eat them.  They’ve got a picture of a happy cat on the front.  They taste good.  Not that I’ve tried them.” 

She began licking her paws. 

“Crap,”  I said.  “Come on, give them a try, will you?” 

She looked up at me and I knew that somehow she would eat them if I buttered them. 

“Butter’s bad for cats,”  I said, even though I really didn’t know if it was or not. 

She went back to licking her paws. 

“All right, all right,”  I said.  “I’ll butter them.” 

I didn’t need a companion.  I was in between girlfriends and I liked it that way.  It was bad enough that I had to squeeze my writing in between women- now I had to squeeze it in between non-stop cat maneuvers for attention.  Change the litter.  Fill her water bowl.  Feed her.  Pet her.  Pick her up when she wanted.  Put her down when she wanted.  Clean up hairball puke. 

When I didn’t do what she wanted, she meowed or howled or clawed my leg.   

I liked to write late at night, but late at night is when she freaked out and ripped around the apartment jumping on chairs and yanking at their threads with her claws.  Her eyes got big and round like she was on speed. 

I couldn’t concentrate when I was worrying about what she was doing to my furniture. 

All sorts of people live in my building, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Buddhists and the hypnotist one floor up and the witch two doors down with her creepy little kid.  When I first moved in it seemed like there were a lot of interesting people to write about.  With the new addition to my life, I couldn’t concentrate enough to write about anything in or out of the building. 

“I’m never taking another cat from a witch,”  I said. 

I put my fingers in the ready position again and prepared to type.  Something ceramic fell over in the living room and I heard it shatter. 

I wrapped my hands around the back of my head and pulled it down to the desk so that I could bang it against the wood. 

She started screeching about three feet behind me and my body torqued up the way it does when I hear forks scraping against aluminum pans.   

“I hate you,”  I said. 

Screech.  Yowl.  Screech.  Yowl. 

“What the hell do you want?”  I asked.  “What is it?” 

She scooted three feet, turned, looked at me and waited. 

“You’re like a dog, right?  I’m supposed to follow you?  You’re driving me nuts.” 

But I got up and went after her anyway.  She leaped up onto a kitchen chair and from there onto the table.  She looked at the window meowed, and then stared back at me. 

The window.  She wanted the window opened so that she could listen for birds. 

“Do I look like your servant?”  I asked. 

I hook my fingers under the window handle and pulled.  It stuck for a second, then jumped up and wide open.  She pressed her nose at the screen without saying thank you. 

“I can’t believe I’m a cat butler,”  I said. 

While she hunted birds in her mind, I sat back down at my desk and prepared to write.  I tapped my fingers and rearranged my back end on the chair. 

Nothing.   

Absolutely nothing came to mind. 

“I don’t have writer’s block,”  I said,  “I am writer’s block.” 

I looked around the room, looking for someone to blame.  It wasn’t the bookshelf, I was pretty sure of that.  The pole lamp in the corner looked shifty, but I guessed it wasn’t guilty.  The pile of half-opened magazines stacked against the side of my desk was worth thinking about, but I suddenly had a better idea. 

It was the cat.  I knew it was the cat.  She was always distracting me, always wanting something.  With her around, I just wasn’t able to concentrate. 

Maybe the witch would take her back. 

I picked up the phone and dialed her number so I wouldn’t have to go to see her in person.   It rang and rang, but no one answered so I hung up.   Ever since that day in the bookstore I had tried to avoid her. 

Maybe she was trying to get back at me. 

Why couldn’t she have kept the cat so it could sit on her shoulder the way witch’s familiars did in the movies?  What witches should have were black pointed caps, flying broomsticks, and long, hooked noses with hair- sprouting warts near the tip.   

The woman down the hall was nothing like that.  I wouldn’t have known what she was except that I saw her one day in the bookstore, sorting the various books on witchcraft, shaking her head over a spell-book or two, and tsk-tsking as she traced the artwork on a box of cards  titled “The Tantric Tarot.”  Two young men with baggy black clothes adorned by silver zippers stood behind her like livery attendants and moved with her when she stepped forward to run her delicate fingertips over the spine of a book the color of dried blood. 

“It’s all bullshit,”  I had stepped forward and told her.  “I ought to know.  I write about it for a living.” 

I’d seen her coming and going into her apartment and didn’t want to miss a chance to catch her attention now that I’d run into her outside of the complex.  She seemed to be single.  She had a son, but he seemed quiet enough. 

One of the boys- the one with a Mohawk- either blew his nose or hissed, but she held her hand up toward him like a crossing guard stopping traffic.  He stepped back and stared at his feet like he wasn’t sure they were really his. 

“Do you make a good living at it?”  she asked me. 

“Not hardly,”  I had said.  “But I’m working on a novel.  When it’s done, who knows?  Stephen King had to start somewhere.” 

“Don’t know who you’re talking to,”  spat the other boy.  He was completely bald and his black leather clothes made his skin look like the color of wet toilet paper. 

“She’s my neighbor Anna Teal from down the hall,”  I said. 

The bald boy was about to say something else when she held up her hand again.  Her fan club had the look of angry Goths, but when she motioned them into silence, they kept quiet.  That should have told me something.  

She moved closer, a luminescence in her dark eyes and her lips parted, pulling back slightly when she stopped in front of me.  The room seemed to dim around us at the edges of my vision like I was at the beginning of a migraine.  She brushed away black hair streaked with white from her right ear and leaned closer as though listening to my thoughts. 

“You don’t believe?”  she whispered. 

I didn’t know what to say.  I had approached her because she was attractive, but I was beginning to think that it had been a bad idea.   

She repeated the question. 

“Believe what?”  I asked. 

“In what you write,”  she said. 

“No,”  I said. 

“But you should,”  she said. 

“In Tarot cards, reading auras, and magic?”  I asked. 

“At least,”  she said. 

She wore tight black jeans with a wide belt covered with silver buckles.  Ornate silver rings circled each of her fingers and on her thumbs she had copper bands.  Underneath her black leather vest she wore a thin, tight sweater. 

“Real men don’t believe,”  I said.   

Her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed and I took a half step backwards. 

“A shame,”  she said, when she had regained her composure.  “I’m always interested in people who share my interests.” 

“So what about them?”  I said, nodding at the boys in black. 

“Companions,”  she said.  “Every living being needs companions.” 

From behind her in the blurry mist of my fading vision, I heard one of the Goths snicker. 

I felt her palms press against my chest.  She looked right at me and I noticed that one of her eyes was light and that the other  was dark.  They  grew larger and soon they were all that I could see. She whispered something to me in a voice as liquid as tears, and though I strained to catch what she was saying, her words were like music that I should have known but coudn’t remember. 

It was near midnight and I lay flat on my back in bed, the pillow double-rolled beneath my head and the blankets pulled up to my chin.  It was a warm night, but I kept the bedroom windows closed because lately I could hear the trees outside my room talking to each other in rustles and groans.  The apartment was still and the humid air clung to my face like moist clay.  Somewhere in another room, the cat was padding across the floor on its little fog feet, its eyes searching the dark for spirits. 

I could not sleep because I knew that eventually it would come into my room, hop silently up and onto my bed, and then begin walking up my body, kneading it paws against the blanket as though trying to soften my skin.   

In the three weeks since the witch’s cursed child had brought me my new companion, I had written nothing except a paragraph here, a stray line there, and when I read them back later they made no sense.  I found that I had typed sentences without subjects, strings of verbs masquerading as quotes, and endless pages of periods and commas. 

Stay away from my room,  I thought. 

I knew that I had to stay awake or she would sneak into my bedroom  and begin moving up my body, crawling toward my mouth so that she could steal the breath from my lungs while I slept. 

She yowled urgently and I knew that she wanted something, but I wasn’t sure what it was.  I called out for her to repeat it.   

Seconds flickered by on the digital clock. 

I pulled the covers up higher and pressed them over my lips.   

She wasn’t hungry.  No, it wasn’t that.  It wasn’t her litter box- I’d cleaned that before going to bed.  She didn’t like to be brushed at night, so it wasn’t that either.  Tension twisted my muscles until they hurt.  I could have pretended that I was already asleep, but what if she didn’t believe me? 

I closed my eyes and the night moved on.  Sleep finally covered my mind and I dreamed something disturbing. 

The daylight hours seemed less and less like the time to be awake.  I began sleeping later and later and, at first, I would wake at ten in the morning, and then at two in the afternoon, then five, and soon I was eating breakfast after the sun went down.  I would dress quickly to make it to the corner store and buy treats and catnip, little bell toys, and things that dangled and shimmered because she liked to watch them dance and glitter. 

She liked the window facing the street open at night, and the apartment lights turned out.  I would pull up a metal chair and sit there with her, looking out into the night, not seeing everything that she saw. 

Children were dark flashes down the sidewalk, the whir of their skateboards like electric knives cutting through meat. 

Winged things fluttered by, screeching shadows stuck in thin branches that caught them like garrotes. 

One night a car coughed and came to a stop in the street as we watched. When a thin man got out of the car, I saw her arch back and hiss.  He turned away from the car and looked directly up at us, as though he could see us through the dark window.  He cupped his mouth and called something out, but all that I could hear was Anna Teal’s voice saying,  “Every living being needs a companion.”   

I turned to the cat, her intention quite clear to me, and I told her,  “If  he comes to our door, I’ll kill him.” 

A cloud allowed moonlight to settle on her face as she turned, and her eyes seemed to suck in the rays.  One eye glowed a soft, haunted green, and the other shone like oil floating on water. 

She was still asleep when I woke the next afternoon.  My head was clouded and painful, and when I put my palm against my forehead it felt hot and sticky. 

The curtains were closed in the kitchen, but orange-yellow light pressed against them from the outside dusk.  I opened the cabinet over the sink and felt around inside with stiff fingers.  I found the open bottle and pulled it out.  The label said that there were ninety ibuprofens inside, but that was a lie, since I had taken twelve every day for the last week. 

I leaned against the stove and threw back a handful of tablets into my mouth and followed that by gulping warm water while I held my head tilted back beneath the faucet. 

When I stood up, I felt a deep pressure pressed hard against the inside of my head, like something trying to escape by breaking through my skull.  I brought my hands up toward the pain but stopped when I saw how red and swollen and hot they were. I wondered why I could feel my pulse throbbing beneath my fingernails.  I noticed dark scabs crusted over puncture wounds on my knuckles. 

“I should put something on that,”  I said. 

The phone rang like a fire alarm in the other room, but I pretended I didn’t hear it and leaned forward to lick the back of my hands. 

An hour had passed and the apartment was dark.  I was sitting by the stove when she finally padded past me and hopped up and onto my lap.  She purred and rubbed her head against my chest. 

“I’m tired,”  I told her. 

She reverse arched and stretched her back. 

“It smells a little in here, don’t you think?”  I asked.  “Maybe the pilot light went out.  It’s like a gas smell.” 

I realized that it might have been my clothes.   

It had been a few days since I had changed.  The only time that I left the apartment by then was the occasional walk to the store on the corner.  The owner didn’t look up at me any more when he cashed me out.  It seemed like a long time since I had talked to another person, but I was okay with that.  It was just the two of us now.  Anna Teal had been right- every living being needed a companion. 

The doorbell rang , sounding like a giant green and black beetle scurrying across an aluminum sheet. 

I leaned my head back and felt the enameled metal of the stove front. 

Again the doorbell. 

“Should I answer it?”  I asked. 

She hopped from my lap and padded toward the door. 

I followed, stopping twice to cover my ears to keep the cacophony  from liquefying my brain cells.  Someone was leaning against the buzzer.   

When I was directly in front of the door, the hideous noise stopped as though whoever was on the other side knew that I had arrived. 

I closed my eyes to a slit, afraid that the hallway light would blind me.  I glanced down at her to be certain that she wanted me to open it.  She inclined her head to one side, and I turned the knob. 

It was the witch’s child. 

“I got to talk to my mother,”  he said. 

“She’s not here,”  I said. 

“I got to talk to her,”  he said. 

I looked down at her to see what I should do.   

As she padded into the hallway, I finally realized who was the companion.