I am losing the pregnancy when the kittens arrive. On top of our house, there is a large rectangular window that opens out onto the flat roof. I like to crawl through the window and sit with one leg on the roof and one leg in the main room of the one-bedroom attic that I live in. The attic is part of the reason I ended the pregnancy. How would I raise a baby in here?

Also, Joe and I are young. We aren’t even thirty. Also, we are not together. We got tipsy at a bar one weekend near the end of March, and I forgot to take my birth control. Joe came inside me and fell asleep in my bed. In the morning, hungover, he crawled back downstairs, where his room is. The sperm met the egg and they shook hands. Science started. When my period didn’t come, I assumed it was a fluke, some irregularity due to stress or my diet. But then I became obsessed, waking up in the middle of the night with a cramp and the hope of some spotting, some blood, anything. I made a telehealth appointment with my doctor and took the call in my car, on my lunch break. When the doctor asked how long it had been since my last period, I told her about eight weeks, with fear in my throat. She prescribed me medicine. “It should work,” she said. 

The pills came in the mail. I held the first four in my hand, then stuck them into my cheeks and ran my tongue over them, letting the taste of chalk linger until I coughed. Finally, I washed them down with water from the sink, cupped in my hand. The pills stopped the science from continuing.

I’m a high school algebra teacher, so looking at crises in a logical way is helpful. In a non-logical way, since the positive pregnancy test, I’ve had a pit in my stomach that I’m hoping will dislodge along with everything else. I didn’t tell my friends because I thought they’d think I was irresponsible. I didn’t tell my mom, for the same reason. I did tell my sisters. They can think whatever they want because they’re stuck with me, for the most part. My older sister said I should wait until I have tenure before I have a kid, and when I told her that would take at least three more years, she didn’t reply. My younger sister was in Napa with her boyfriend’s family and her cell phone was out of service. When she got back into service she said she’d send me a bottle of condolence wine. The wine was sweet and bubbly, celebratory in a way that felt wrong. 

The day I took the second round of pills, a Saturday, I sat in bed and stared at the wall, then watched videos on my phone until I fell asleep. I woke up in the early evening and had bled through my underwear onto the white sheets. Since they were white, I could bleach them. I crept down the stairs with the sheets bunched in my arms and stuffed them into the washing machine in our garage. Joe had left clean clothes in the dryer, which were cold now. I guessed that he’d gone out and forgotten them there. I gathered them up and breathed in the scent of linen, then walked into his room and dropped the pile on top of his unmade bed. I grabbed a pair of his boxers off the pile because I felt bloated, and didn’t want to ruin my own underwear. I knew if I had asked he would have given them to me, gladly, but I didn’t want to ask. I lined the boxers with pads and went back to sleep on my sheetless mattress.

On Sunday I sat in bed with cramps, not crying, staring at the wall with a heating pad on my stomach. Today I’m still bleeding, still cramping, but able to sit up. It’s summer. I just finished my first year teaching and I’m twenty thousand dollars in debt and I live in a cheap room in an attic in my college friend Aiden’s parents’ house. And now I am on the roof and there are four kittens and a mother cat on the corner opposite me, watching me watch them.

Out behind the cats is my neighborhood: two-story square houses stacked close together, lining up a steep hill. They are a multitude of colors: beiges, pinks, greens, blues. Our house is yellow. It’s a nice yellow, like melted butter. I’m the only one who comes up to the roof ever since Aiden got too drunk one night and almost fell off onto the rocky street below. It’s quiet out, except for the distant sound of revving engines and honking horns on the main street at the very bottom of the hill. The cats are not making a sound.

They look hungry, or I guess that must be what the shiny look in their eyes means. I put on sweatpants, walk quickly downstairs to the corner store, and buy some cat food. Back at home, I pour the kibble into five clear plastic tupperware containers and lay them out on the roof, one for each cat. I close the window and squat below the sill to watch. With trepidation, they step forward. A yellow-blonde one runs to the tupperware. He gobbles up the pellets with big gulps. I wonder if he’s the bravest or just the hungriest.

The rest come slowly after him, maybe waiting to make sure the blonde cat doesn’t die after eating the food. The mother cat stays back. While her kids are eating, she has eyes on the window where I am watching them. The kittens play while she eats. When she finishes eating, the whole family leaves. They hop onto a neighbor’s roof and climb down into a backyard, until they’re out of sight. Maybe they’re going to get more food from some other poor, sympathetic sucker. I crawl back onto my roof and grab the tupperware.

I sit for a while with the empty containers, crumbs in the corners of their clear plastic bottoms. When I was young, my sisters and I got home from school and found a raccoon sleeping in our driveway. We called our mom, who was at work, and she said to call the SPCA. I looked up their number in the phone book and read it out to my older sister. Animal Control took the raccoon away in a white van. We wondered if it had rabies. Why else would a raccoon sleep in the daylight, where it could be found if not to say “I’m sick”?

Now I look up the SPCA’s number on my phone.

The person who answers the phone directs me to links and a chart with kitten sizes to help me determine their ages before we decide on “next steps.” I wonder what the next steps look like for five feral cats on a roof. The cats come back at dusk, at dinner time; I am happy to see them. I still have cramps and it feels like one of the little cats is inside my uterus, clawing in and out of my skin. I put out their food and hold my phone up to the window, with the kitten chart open. They are about six to eight weeks, I decide. The mom watches the window again until it’s her turn to eat. She’s a good mom, I think.

I hear the front door downstairs open and I creep down from the attic. There’s a door at the bottom of the stairs and I peer through the crack and see Joe. He’s fiddling with his keys and looks up when he hears the attic stairs door open. He smiles big and his cheeks push his wire-framed glasses up.

“Hey!” he says. He’s so earnest sometimes. I smile.

“Shh,” I whisper, so he won’t scare the cats. Then I laugh at myself, because there’s probably no way the cats can hear me down here anyway. Joe looks confused. We haven’t really spoken much since I told him I was pregnant; I considered not telling him but my younger sister convinced me I should (“He’s your roommate, how are you supposed to hide it?”). When I told Joe, he cried, which made me want to cry. But I didn’t. He said sorry and I said no need to apologize. It was a raw moment, perhaps even more so than the sex. He wanted to take care of me afterwards, and I reacted by avoiding him. I care about Joe, but we aren’t dating, and he has a software engineering job and an open mic that he hosts once a week. He’s busy.

“Come upstairs, but quietly!” I say. He raises his eyebrows and looks serious. “It’s not a sex thing,” I add, and he raises his eyebrows even further, lookings like he wants to turn around and walk back out the front door. But instead he puts his coat down on the back of the couch and we tiptoe up the stairs. I wave him over to the window, where the cats have mostly finished eating and are wrestling on the roof.

“Awww,” he says. “Where did they come from?”

“I’m not sure. They just showed up.”

“Did you feed them?”

I nod.

“Now they’ll never leave,” he says, and laughs and nudges me in the side. I wince and he notices.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” he says. He places a warm hand on my back. “How are you feeling? Did you do the…abortion?”

“Yeah, last night. I did it,” I say. His hand feels nice, still on my back, and I lean into it. “I feel okay. I just have cramps and bleeding, and stuff.” I don’t tell him about taking his underwear. 

He nods and looks out toward the cats.

“They’re here to make you feel better,” he says.

I laugh. My stomach twinges again. The pit at the bottom hasn’t dislodged itself. I try to ignore it all. 

“They won’t let me go near them,” I say. “They run away.”

“Still,” Joe says. “Too bad we can’t take them inside.”

He’s allergic. I shrug. “They’re probably kind of dirty,” I say. I grew up in a house in the woods in Humboldt, on a plot of land with chickens and goats. My mom has recently quit her job and is trying to turn the backyard into a mini-dairy farm, milking goats, and trying to bring the milk to refrigerators all up and down the state. The cats in our backyard growing up caught mice and slept outside. They cleaned themselves, but they were still kind of gross in my eyes. I assume these San Francisco cats eat worse, eat trash, when they’re not eating the dry food I’ve bought them.

“Are you gonna try to give them to a shelter?” Joe asks. The thought makes me frown. I don’t love the cats, but I don’t really want them to go away.

𓃠

The next morning they return. They sniff around on the roof. I fill up their bowls and place them outside. Our little ritual. They disappear after they eat. I call the SPCA.

The girl who answers the phone is the same one from yesterday, but she doesn’t remember me. They have a lot of cases like mine right now, she says. It’s summer: kitten season.

“I think we could fix them and release them if they’re that old,” she says. “Do you have a car?”

I tell her I do. I’m feeling better today, the pinpricks in my stomach still there, but with a lighter touch. 

The shelter employee, who says her name is Sasha, tells me I can come pick up one or two cages to trap the cats in. After I trap a cat, I’ll bring it to the SPCA to be fixed. They’ll fix the cat for free, which Sasha makes sound like a great deal. Free fixings! I’ll pick the cat up after surgery and keep it overnight in my house to recover, and then release it back into the wild of the neighborhood, hiding in yards and avoiding the cars on Ocean Avenue.

“Participating in the TNR program is a great way to help your neighbors and your neighborhood cats,” Sasha says. “You’re doing a good thing.” She has a kind, genuine, voice, and I imagine her looking like my mom. 

I stare out at the empty roof. Thick gray clouds are rolling in on the horizon. There was a stray cat that came to our house when I was in high school. It hadn’t been fixed and would yowl and yowl at night. In heat. It was painful to hear. One day the cat stopped coming. I guess it was adopted, or eaten. There were coyote sightings every so often; they ate one of our chickens. If I help get this cat family fixed, I think, then I won’t be subjecting my neighborhood to screaming cats in heat. I can also stop the mom cat and her children from having more babies that have no homes and starting the cycle all over again. 

I ask Sasha what TNR means. I’ve never heard of it before.

“Oh, it’s just Trap-Neuter-Return. Pretty straightforward!” She laughs.

𓃠

It’s mid-June and Cat One’s appointment to be fixed has arrived. I don’t know which cat will be One; whichever cat falls for the wet food in the trap, I guess. I haven’t named them. I sent my sisters pictures in our group chat and my older sister texted back that if I name them, I’ll get too attached. My younger sister texted back ideas for names.

Mom Cat has been missing, though I would have liked to trap her first. She started showing up less and less after I began feeding her kids. I keep my eyes peeled for her, wondering why she would leave her babies, wondering how I’m going to get her fixed if she doesn’t come around anymore.
I set the trap, which is a prehistoric looking thing, a rusty metal cage with a step-plate that shuts the trapdoor down. The cats walk toward it and stop, sniff. A little black cat with green eyes, who I’ve guessed is a girl, runs in. The smell of wet chicken calls to her. She normally never gets food first. The trap slams shut. It echoes off the roof into the quiet morning. The other cats are off the roof in a flash. Their sibling thrashes in the cage, caught. She jumps, she scratches, she knocks her head against the wall. I am shocked and, honestly, a little scared. But I spring into action, having imagined this, and watched YouTube videos about it. I lunge through the window and throw a beach towel over the cage. I take the cage inside and place it on the ground. My heart is pounding. I feel a sting on my palm and realize I’ve cut myself on the corner of the metal cage. The little cat stops thrashing and is now meowing quietly. The smell of saucy chicken rises from the cage. She doesn’t eat the food.

I drive Cat One to the shelter to drop her off, then I go home and wait around all day until I have to pick her up again. My stomach feels hollow and my head is starting to hurt, but I don’t do anything to help it. I feel more relieved when I go to pick Cat One up, where Sasha, who I talked to on the phone, confirms that the cat is a female and commends me for my hard work in trapping. I am almost embarrassed of how proud I feel of myself, at how I stand up a little straighter, as if she is a teacher and I’m getting a great grade on a project. But I let myself feel the pride.

At home, I scroll on my phone while Cat One sits in the cage on the floor. She gives me an empty, sleepy stare when I lift the cover over her cage. She doesn’t touch her food, so it sits in a plastic bowl and makes my room smell like a pet store. I scroll on my phone and see that if I lived in any other state, the pills I took last week would be nearly impossible to get. Getting more impossible every day. I put my face in my pillow and feel my throat burn. Tears don’t come. But Cat One meows, quietly.

I decide to give her a break from being in the room with me and head to the kitchen to make macaroni and cheese from a box, the only food I have, since I can’t remember when I last went grocery shopping. Joe is on the couch watching a sitcom. I grab a fork and eat some mac and cheese directly from the pot, still on top of the stove. Then I take it by the handle and walk into the living room.

“We can watch something else if you want, this isn’t that important to me,” he says. It’s a sitcom about some thirty-somethings in New York, or maybe LA, living in a house together; I know he watches it every week. I sit next to him on the couch with my dinner.

“You’re the only person I know who actually keeps up with new episodes as they come out,” I say, and he looks down.

“I just want to know what will happen next!” he says, and we laugh.

We sit and finish the episode and I feel a bit of peace wash over me. The mac and cheese is good. Salty and gooey and warm, like a tasty hug. I finish most of it and offer Joe the rest, passing him the pot.

“How are you feeling?” Joe asks quietly, forking the leftover mac and cheese. I look away and feel queasy, as if the couch has suddenly started rocking.

“I’m fine,” I say. He frowns. I guess he wants a deeper answer. Upstairs, through the thin ceiling, we hear a quiet meow.

Joe’s eyes widen. “Oh, did you catch the cat today?” he asks. “Was that today?”

“I caught her,” I say. “It was a her. Thanks for being okay with it.”

“All good.” He smiles, and sniffles. “I’ve been taking my allergy medicine because I remembered you said it was this week. If you need my help catching the next cat, you can let me know.” 

“I don’t wanna bug you with that,” I say. “You’re allergic and everything.”

“Really, I’d be happy to help,” Joe replies. “And look at me! I’m fine.”

He takes another bite of the pasta and grins. I smile with my mouth closed.

“Thanks, but it’s okay.”

“Talia, did I do something wrong? I feel really bad about the…” He whispers even though no one else is home: “The abortion.” He puts the pot down on the table and bites his thumbnail, still holding the fork.

I shake my head. My throat feels dry. I swallow.

“You didn’t do anything Joe,” I say. Except get me pregnant, I think. 

“I wanted to help, I just didn’t know what to do, or if you wanted me to do anything.”

I stand up. “You’re okay, really,” I say. In a sudden attempt to stifle my emotions, I kiss him. Then I stand back. Joe’s head is tilted, holding the fork limp in his hand. We’ve never kissed in the living room, keeping our romance confined to his room or mine. I step back again.

“Talia – ”

“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” I say. I run upstairs, slamming the attic stairs door behind me.

𓃠

The next day I wake up around noon. Cat One meowed throughout the night, waking me up each time, making me think something was wrong. I squat down on my knees and lift the towel covering her cage. She watches me, her eyes following me as I move my face around. I carry her in the trap down the stairs. Aiden, who lives in the room downstairs across from Joe, is working from home, on a conference call. Behind the closed door to his room, I hear him tell a joke about sales. He pauses for laughter from the people on the other side of the call.

I open the side door that leads to the alleyway squished between our house and the one next door. Cat One is meowing loudly now. She can smell that she is back outside, somewhere familiar. She is thrashing against the metal walls, walking around as much as she can in the rectangular trap.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whisper. I set the cage on the cement, open up the trap door, and she flies from it and doesn’t look back. I watch for a moment and then pick up the trap and wash it down with a hose in the backyard. The sky is bland and blue overhead. It makes me want to go back to bed. When I arrive upstairs, Cat One’s siblings are waiting on the roof for their breakfast. She is not there.

I feed them and then lay down diagonally on my bed and pick up my phone, which is dying; I forgot to plug it in last night. Joe has left me a few text messages. Texts that say things like, Can we talk? And, Please, can we talk? I sigh and press my phone to my chest, feeling stupid for kissing him. I text my older sister and tell her what happened.

Who cares? She texts back. You’ve been sleeping together for a while. Why does a kiss matter?

It just felt…inappropriate, I reply. My hands are sweating.

Do you like him? Maybe you like him, and you’re upset about it.

As I’m typing a response, my phone dies.

𓃠

It’s July, just after the fourth, during which I did nothing other than wonder if the fireworks were scaring the cats. I have an appointment for two cats to get fixed. I drink two cups of coffee, one cup for each cat. I set the traps. I watch the window. The cats jump onto the roof for their breakfast. Cat One steers clear of the traps. She stands back, pacing along the edge of the roof. The other cats don’t seem to realize that their sister has lost her uterus. I suppose they don’t talk about it among themselves. 

I have told Joe I am sorry, and confused, and need space, and he has given it to me. It’s been lonely, which I guess is what I wanted.

The cage doors snap down, one after the other. This time, I am swift at covering the traps and bringing the cats inside. I’ve caught the blonde cat and he pees all over the floor. He’s meowing, yowling, really. It sounds like a baby’s scream. His sibling, who is a dark brown, lanky tabby, is quiet.

That night, the cats are in my room again. At around two a.m., the blonde cat starts to cry. I didn’t know cats could cry in such a way until I hear him do it—some short meows and then long drawn-out ones. I know Joe and Aiden can probably hear him. I wonder if the whole neighborhood can, and I think, this is exactly what I was trying to prevent. The cat claws at the newspaper lining the bottom of the trap. He rips it up. His sibling, who I now know is a sister, whines next to him. It seems like she’s only making noise because he is. I shush the cats in a low voice. I play classical music. Nothing seems to make them feel better. I try to empathize. If I was trapped in a cage in a strange place, I would also be upset. But also I am not a cat, so I can’t truly imagine what they’re experiencing. I lay on my side on the hardwood floor in between their two cages. The only light comes from my bedside table lamp. It emits a faint yellow glow over the three of us. I fall asleep on the floor with the nightstand light on and wake up a few hours later. They’re looking straight ahead under the covered cages, all haunted dilated eyes and paws tucked in. It’s dawn. A good time to release them, I’ve read. 

Outside, the blonde cat races out of the cage as fast as his four feet will carry him. I wonder if the whole experience was really that bad, or if he’s just a dramatic cat. Scraps of newspaper that were stuck to his paws fall off in a trail behind him. He jumps up the fence and disappears into the yard next door. I bring his sister down next. I open her cage door and she is hesitant, smelling the air and taking one step at a time. To me, the morning is crisp, the sky above a soft pink and light purple. Stray stars and a waxing moon are fading with the slow light of the sun. I stand in between my house and my neighbor’s with the little cat still in the cage, until she touches cement, and dashes away. 

Later, I’m laying spread eagle on the floor, considering dinner, looking up at the bumpy ceiling. My phone vibrates. My sister is calling.

“Hi bitch,” she says when I pick up.

“Don’t call me a bitch,” I say.

“Sorry.”  Then she gets straight to the point. “Why have you been avoiding talking to Mom?” she asks.

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” I say. “I’ve been busy.”

“Busy doing what? Actually, no, it’s none of my business. But I’m the one who has to hear about it from her.”

“I’m sorry.”

She sighs. “You don’t have to be sorry,” she says. “Just talk to her, please, so she stops asking me about it.”

“Okay.”

“Is this because of the abortion? Because I don’t think Mom is anti-choice.”

“No! It’s not about that,” I say.

“Remember, she crocheted all those Pussy Hats when Trump was elected.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”

“Yeah and you know, she trusts modern medicine and all that.”

I feel a little bubble forming in my stomach and floating up my throat. It pops in my mouth and I say, “But what about the time she said with birth control so accessible, there shouldn’t be a need for…those?” 

My sister coughs. “No need for abortions? Well, that’s BS. When was that?” she asks.

“When we were kids, at a stop light outside the Planned Parenthood.”

“I don’t remember that,” my sister says. “And honestly, I don’t know how you remember it. But she probably changed her mind, you know?” 

“Okay, I know. Thanks.”

“All right well, I’m gonna go,” my sister says. “Love you.”

“Love you,” I say. Because we always say that before we hang up.

𓃠

A week later, I catch the last kitten. He is the easiest, doesn’t pee on the floor, barely meows, and I am more confident because I’ve done it two times now. He’s quiet in his cage that night, after the surgery. I sleep most of the night in my bed, but then I wake up and worry that the little guy might be lonely, so I take a pillow and sleep on the hardwood floor next to his trap. In the morning, Joe sees me in the alleyway, opening the cat’s cage and setting him free. He’s standing over the sink with a mug of coffee, looking out of the window that faces the gray concrete wall of the house next door.

“You’re really good at that,” he says.

“At what?” I ask. “At letting animals out of a cage?” 

He smiles and shrugs a little. “You wouldn’t do it unless you really cared,” he says. “You really care about those little guys.”

I smile and pick up the rusty cage. At the base of the stairs, I say thanks, but I’m not sure if Joe hears me.

I’m taking an afternoon nap in my bed when my phone starts to vibrate. It’s my mom. I press a button on the side, screen the call and she calls again. I take a deep breath and pick up.

“Tal,” she says. “I haven’t heard from you!” 

“I know,” I say. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry, Mom. It’s been a busy summer.”

“I know. I heard you’re catching cats,” she says. 

“I am.” We’re quiet for a while, but I can hear her moving around on the other end of the phone. I picture her in the kitchen, maybe making a sandwich, or in the backyard, maybe pulling some weeds.

“Have you been avoiding me because of the–” She spells it: “A-B-O-R-T-shun?”

I feel my stomach drop and squeeze my eyes shut.

“Mom!” I say. “How do you even know about that?” My eyes start to prickle but nothing comes out.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “You know your sisters can’t keep secrets.” 

We’re quiet again and I don’t hear anything from her end, just static.

“I guess I was afraid you’d think I was irresponsible,” I say. She sighs.

“Oh, honey,” she says again. “I don’t think that. I don’t think you should feel that way.”

“But when we were little, I remember, you said people should just take their birth control. That abortions shouldn’t be necessary.” 

She’s quiet and then she clears her throat. “I might have said that,” she said. “And I’m sorry. That’s not what I think anymore. Talia, you’re a smart, sweet, caring adult. I trust you to do what’s best for you. I love you no matter what.”

I expect to be relieved, but instead I feel nauseous and sad. I wonder if I would have preferred for her to berate me, for her to tell me I did the wrong thing and should be ashamed. But she changes the subject and starts to talk about the goats and the garden, and I listen to her.

𓃠

All four of the kittens have their left ears clipped, like little badges they aren’t aware they’re wearing. I’ve told Sasha from the SPCA it’s been hard to catch the mom cat; she stopped coming around. Sasha said that’s okay, don’t be too hard on yourself, sometimes you just can’t. 

I watch the fixed cats playing and I imagine what I would do if I saw Mom Cat on the roof or on the street in the neighborhood. I would try to grab her with my bare hands. I would make an appointment at the shelter for her. I would stop a generation of little cats from being born into fast-car and coyote-ridden streets, and I would stop a generation of adult cats from going into a very loud heat, yowling for a month. I would be a Cat Hero. But more than that, I would finish what I set out to do when they showed up: I would fix them all.

I begin to feel an aching for who I was before they came. This summer was supposed to be fun. I wanted to travel, go up and down the state, and maybe try a solo camping trip. I wanted to go to bars and hang out with friends on weekends and read books. Instead, I watched cats and slept on the floor and felt my body change and change again. Instead, I’ve watched the fog roll in and out, embracing it when it’s laid over the house and missing it when it’s gone. I miss Joe, but I asked for space and he did what I asked. 

I know I need to do something instead of sitting inside all day, so I check the mail. I go in bare feet and sweatpants, and a tank top with two thin straps. The fog is sloping down the hill overhead, which makes me feel a little better. I won’t have any guilt if I spend the rest of the day inside. I unlock the mailbox, a metal rectangle on the wall at the base of our house. I am flipping through ads and coupons, a letter from the bank for Aiden’s parents, when something catches the corner of my eye. I look up.
There she is in all her black and orange, tortoiseshell glory: Mom Cat. She’s striding down the concrete on the opposite side of the street. Her tail is up high and her pale belly is swinging back and forth. Her nose is pointed toward the gray sky. Her ears are fully intact.

What babies? I imagine she thinks. What litter of kittens?

I slip the mail back through the metal flap and tiptoe on my bare feet toward the street. Mom Cat continues walking, unaware that anyone has noticed her. Still on my toes I look both ways and cross the empty road, dodging an empty crumpled can and wishing I had put some footwear on before leaving the house. I step from the road to the cement. A lone eucalyptus tree is planted in the slanted sidewalk and I peek around its trunk to watch her. When she is halfway down the hill, I dash after her and get ready to pounce. She has stopped to smell an oily paper bag on the ground.

Mom Cat stops smelling to look up, and her wide yellow eyes dilate to black. I lunge; she runs. I’m not as fast as any cat. I’m barefoot and afraid of the glass and the trash and the broken cement on the ground, but I run because I believe this is my only chance to complete a mission I never wanted in the first place. She is quick. Her belly swishes back and forth and her four bare paws are much faster than my two. We run by pastel-colored houses, dimmed from layers of dust and grime. We reach the bottom of the hill and she turns right and keeps running on the sidewalk until we’re one block, two blocks, three blocks away from my house. I finally brace myself and jump to grab her; I trip and fall. She springs to the side, claws up a broken wooden fence, and stands on top of it. My knees start to sting under my sweatpants and I can feel sweat and moisture from the fog beading on my forehead. The cat and I look at each other.

She jumps off the fence into the backyard, and is gone. A sense of failure is bubbling in my stomach like boiling oil. I want to yell at the cat, at the mother cat, for being careless. For continuing to care less. For abandoning her babies. She isn’t a Good Mom, like I originally thought. And she is gone now, and I am a barefoot adult woman kneeling on cracked concrete.

“Talia?”

Footsteps behind me. I don’t turn around. As if this moment could get any worse, it turns out that someone I know has witnessed it? 

Joe comes up in front of me. He’s holding a paper bag of groceries in his arms, from the Whole Foods down the street. “Tal, what happened?” he asks.

I could die of embarrassment, I think. I think it would be possible. I must look as strange as I feel and his eyebrows, knitted together, make me think I might look worse. I start to cry. It happens and I’m heaving. Tears slip down my cheeks and I’m trying to explain myself. 

“The cat–Their mom, I was trying to get her, to get her fixed,” I sob. “I was trying to do what I’m supposed to do.”

Joe nods like he knows what I’m talking about. He puts down the paper bag of groceries on the filthy sidewalk. He wraps me up in his long arms and I press my face against his fleece polo. I feel his wire-framed glasses rest on top of my head and he says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You did everything you could. It shouldn’t all be on you,” he says. “Let’s go home. It’s going to be okay.”

I sniffle, snot gathering at the back of my throat. I start to cough as more tears come out. I really want to believe him. Joe rubs my back and we let go of each other. I take a deep, shaky breath and he lets out a small gasp.

“Oh, look Talia,” he says and I turn around. The four little cats are running up the sidewalk, toward our house.

𓃠

“TNR” by Melissa Emily Dittrich and the artwork titled TNR by Naya Chang appeared in Issue 43 of Berkeley Fiction Review.

Melissa Dittrich is a writer and educator from Santa Cruz, CA, currently living in Brooklyn. She is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate at Sarah Lawrence College and can be found online @melissedittrich. 

Naya Chang is a multimedia artist, designer, and public humanities enthusiast, as well as the only member of her high school friend group to cruelly abandon California and attend college on the east coast. Naya is pursuing an AB in History at Brown and a BFA in Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and she can be spotted at every free food event on both campuses.