I adopted a second cat last week. No, not Stray Cat, whose wildness is something I realized I have no heart to tame, but this guy: a seven-month tumble of cream and orange with olive eyes and a purr like sweet radio static, so that, in the night, I can always tell when he’s approaching to tap his teaspoon-sized paws against my forehead. His hind legs stop their orange exactly at the kneecaps, so he looks like he wandered into a paint basin, looked up at the birds for a minute, then scrambled out. There’s a smear of rust, too, under his chin, from when the universe chucked him lovingly there before pulling him out of his mama.
He was mine barely twenty-four hours before I went out to dinner with some friends, my heart a dry ache hoping the fresh orange body in my house was faring all right without me. I flashed pics of Oliver across the table, feeling like one of those moms. One of my friends tilted her head back and laughed and breezily threw out those three familiar words: crazy cat lady.
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