A question of loyalty
If there is such a thing as a cat person, that’s definitely what Jennifer was; she knew this despite having never actually had one. She liked cats and always had; that was the whole of it, and it might sound remarkably straightforward but the fact meant more to her than what is usual.
Jennifer’s life had given her plenty of reasons not to like cats, yet she did, still, never having stopped for a second.
She had wanted a kitten, always, for as long as she could remember, all throughout her earliest childhood, nagging her parents relentlessly whenever an opportunity seemed to present itself, but never did get one, because her older sister was allergic to furry animals. That alone could have easily caused resentment, of which she was aware, but she had never felt any, neither to cats nor to her sister. Resolve found in the idea of getting one for herself when she got older, she had each time carried on undeterred and eventually a substitute would present itself.
A hedgehog took up lodging under their back patio one summer and never left. Every year, one day in early spring, it would suddenly poke its head out from under the floorboards, and Jennifer came to view it as something of a semi-pet. Every other day, throughout the height of summer, as the afternoon heat was loosening its grip on the backyard’s inhabitants, she would put out a bowl of barn-fat milk on the grass and watch it closely as it drank it all up. She never knew if it was a boy or a girl, or how old it might be, and she never learned enough to find out, and she never dared to try and touch it or even come too close, not so much out of fear of its spines as out of fear of scaring it away. She did love it, if only from afar, and it gave her comfort in her kitten-less existence, until she late one summer found it dead, belly up in a pile of early fallen leaves, being eaten on by three of the neighbourhood’s free-roaming cats, which, she realized, given that they aren’t scavengers, probably meant that they had killed it first. Having scared them away with a high-pitched shriek, she fell down crying by her mutilated friend before finding the resolve to give it a burial, with a wooden cross and everything. She never spoke of what had happened or what she had seen, and her parents never asked her, despite the cross’s ineluctable presence; she figured they had probably gathered what happened from the piecemeal information, but sometimes they would say things to make her wonder what they actually thought.
Next had been the cat of some friends of her mother, who lived a short bike ride away. They let her visit whenever she wanted and Ruben, the cat, was always happy to see her. He would sense her coming and greet her at the door in what could almost be described as more of a doglike fashion, until he one day got hit by a timber truck on the service road behind their house. Had he died, she would have dug him a grave and made him a cross as well, but she couldn’t even have that. He had broken his back and both of his front legs, but nothing worse than she could nurse him back to health, only to find that he had turned psychotic; her forearms would forever bear the scars to prove of his newfound physical strength and her own stubbornness to try and heal him of also his troubles.
Having finally moved out on her own, she thought on all this as she tried to decide which cat she would rescue from the shelter.
