For a stray cat, I’ve written a lot of letters. I’ve burned them, but they keep rising from ash. They’re full of beautiful insults I will never say to you. I say them to myself instead. I recently learned that when you burn alive, it’s not the flames that kill you. Not the roiling heat sloughing off your skin, boiling your eyes, or the immolation of the tongue as it bubbles into grease—no. It’s the suffocation. Scalding gas enters your lungs. Heat tightens your skin, shrinks your windpipe, and you die by your own body. And in this baptism by fire of all the letters I’ve meant to send you, I suffocated myself.
You were the one that called me a stray cat, actually. And I found that so strange, because you kept leaving food out for me. There was that red dot jittering on the wall, too. I’d smack at it, and it’d vanish. You always told me you didn’t have a laser pointer. I didn’t really believe that.
And when I followed you home, meowing, you opened the door to a dog on your sofa.
I sat on your couch adjacent from this Belgian Malinois, eyeing him, wondering why the fuck I was watching Bojack Horseman with a dog you owned. He’s old as shit. What do you have in common with him anyway? And you’re a cat too, right? What do cats and dogs even talk about? “Babe, could you grab me a beer?” spoken with strings of slobber and hot fish breath. And his slick oil-coated fur that, if you pet, this powdery film greases your hands and you can never wash it off no matter how hard you scrub. It finds its way beneath your nails. You smell like dog for weeks. I found myself thanking you for inviting others so it wasn’t just the three of us at that party. Other dogs showed up, and one had a cat too. But all the dogs didn’t talk. Or maybe I couldn’t hear them.
What’s terrible is you made me realize I like cats. That’s what kept me writing letters all those nights.
I definitely will burn at the stake if I say I only love cats. But I love dogs, too. The right ones, at least, like Finn. The ones that cuddle beside you, scratch at the door, wag their tail, wait for the clasp of a leash, prance down the sidewalk, lift a leg, piss, and go back in to cuddle some more. Finn does smell pretty bad, I will admit. Like Fritos or spoiled yogurt. But my cat family all loved dogs like normal cats do, and my dog family all loved cats like normal dogs do. Maybe I was the freak.
As Bojack talked about his cat friend’s overdose, you told me my fears were yours too. You didn’t even know if you wanted to be a dog owner these days. Relief washing my hackles down, I said, “Tell me about it.”
Sick of watching a talking horse, we burned a bonfire with old lumber from an abandoned house. You told me not to breathe in, and I wondered which dog had the bright idea to burn logs with lead fucking paint on it. The suffocation fire crackled—reeking of chemicals, pinching my nose with acid and vinegar—and you sat beside me. Out of everyone there, you picked a mangy stray with half-blind eyes to huddle up with. You picked me. You showed me your bookcase, and I splintered my claws into your bedpost. We talked about our dream life in a mountainside cottage with goats and a garden and a wood-burning stove. You blinked, lids lowering, eyelashes sweeping your cheekbones. I blinked back, tail flicking. I wrote a letter to the fire we curled beside, and you whispered poetry in crackling film reels.
Then, your dog sat beside you. He draped a fireman’s jacket over your shoulders. The heavy taupe kevlar striped with reflective bands covered your lithe cat frame entirely. “Don’t want you to get cold,” he said. I watched you lean into his shoulder, and I was reminded I was a stray, and you were not.
It never was a turn of fate that left me in the cold. It was the fear of my own skin, constricting in on me. I stood from my chair. “I’ll have to get home.” I cleaned ashes off my fur, licking invisible wounds. Phantom limb sensations of past connections haunted my motions. At that moment, I was certain you were laughing all night at the silly cat batting away at a wall–- at a red dot coming from a handheld light in your human hand. I wasn’t going to let my body betray me again. I wouldn’t suffocate here. Not for you.
“You don’t want to sleep here?” you asked. I threw the letter into the fire. “It’s alright. I’ll see you next Monday.”