Why haven’t we included fiction? Well exactly. So when we received some short stories from Sharlene Teo we thought it would be great opportunity to bring together writers and illustrators, making ourselves the literary equivalent of matchmaker dot com. In time for heartbreak day we have a sorry tale of a girl and her cats, ten of them. Something more light-hearted about Amelia Earhart to come.
Words: Sharlene Teo
Illustration: Anna Wadham
The day you left, ten cats appeared on my doorstep out of nowhere and would not budge. They sat by my muddy shoes regarding me dolefully, as if offering some sort of respite, some sort of mockery, some sort of consolation. I had no choice but to let them into my cramped one-bedroom flat for tea. The living room was the bedroom was the dining room. We sat around a shoe-rack, which I’d turned into a makeshift table, these ten cats and I. I tried to make conversation. But being cats and not humans, they were honest. They didn’t say anything.
We had tea and weak cookies until the sun folded itself on to dark strips on the wall. The shadows made me think of hand puppets. I knew, then, as an hour segued into the next that you had well and truly left me, and, by extension, I had well and truly left you. Oh, I wasn’t going anywhere. But there it was, I could almost see it silhouetted in cat’s ears, the outline of patient paws- this growing, gnawing, intractable distance. Thin as blocked light, but strong as a planet.
I knew you would leave but I knew it gradually, the way we learn language. The language of absence is filled in punctuation-first; the commas, the ellipses, the loping brackets. A full stop the first time we could regard each other seriously, and I wasn’t myself, I was a separate entity, unremarkable and noncommittal, could have been anyone else.
The cats stayed in my house but politely shitted on the potted plants. I only had three potted plants, on the balcony outside, but how they thrived. They grew and arched until they were full, strong trees, all-but blocking out the light. My flat became a greenhouse, a forest, and a haven for the cats that bred like rabbits and judged me with their casual grace and indolent flawlessness.
You went out to dinner, just across the street. Peering through the branches I could see you putting your coat on a chair, pulling a chair out for a girl. You were having dinner with two girls, maybe friends, maybe one day, one of them or one by one, a lover. There was nothing dramatic, for today- just three people, sitting down to dinner. Drawing out the menus, inaudibly deciding between chicken or lamb, a soup or a salad.
Me, I petted the seventh cat that had been born three days ago, a slip of a thing. I held it in my palm like a Palm Pilot and I had my dinner. Cat nip, because that was all we had around here, as we gathered around the 8 o clock soap opera. The grandmother cat, the first to have appeared after you left (the sound of your shoes dispersing like marbles) was especially fond of a certain actor. She purred appreciatively when he appeared. I found it very random because he was a supporting actor; in fact, he was the postman having an affair with the bitter matriarch. I thought about affairs and I couldn’t imagine having another- perhaps hyperbolically, perhaps realistically. I mean, maybe I could spend my whole life in this cream-walled apartment with my multiplying cats, the scarce sunlight, and little consolation. Perhaps I’d always sit here on my grandmother’s knitted quilt, hankering after a cure or else a stupid ideal.
Across the road, three strangers had dinner. None of them knew me. This is falsely true or truly false. Maybe one day in a space age somewhere they will invent a button you can press to so casually turn truth into fiction, or history into excess; spare paper you can fold and cut off. The thing is, I’m no wiser than a wheezing cat, a frivolous kitten. I know nothing; I’m so immature. My heart does not mend. It merely transfers from hurt to hurt and from love to great love. I need this to subsist upon, because my days are getting thick with hairballs and silence.
Yet if you set back the clock to the minute you’d just gone, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve tried to pickle that moment, but it is obstinately inedible. I suppose I would just stand there, in my mind racing after you, stumbling on my words and shoes, trying to unpick what I’ve stitched over forever.
It’s like a ball of yarn, rolling inexorably out of touch. I have dreams of leaving, but I’m right here when I wake up.
Similar Posts:
- Good Shoes – No Hope, No Future – Album Review
- Love Life Hate Palm Oil
- After ExtInked: An interview
- Good Shoes-Hope and Future Mini Festival
- Rock Monsieur: An Interview with Nelson