A Spooky Season Story

My full-circle black cat history

I posted a rougher draft of this story on Threads last week, where it accumulated some 30,000 views—the largest audience this internet no-name has garnered anywhere. I can’t tell you how glad I am that it was for this story in particular. I take it as a testament to the marvel of that platform for storytellers, and if you want to read the truncated version where I was still working out kinks in the narrative for free (or just for a peek at the early stage of a writing process), you can certainly follow me there.

A portion of this revised version has been placed behind a paywall, in part because I may decide to include it in my memoir (currently at 50K words and counting!!), and in part because the audience I have here is varied, and for now, I want to reserve the sensitive content of my life for those prepared to treat it with invested dignity. That said, if you are a trusted friend sans a Substack budget, please drop me a DM for a private link. I never want this to be something that leaves out the people who have earned their place in my confidences. Darlings, you know who you are.

As for the story itself: please be warned that it contains themes and depictions of childhood trauma, including death and psychological abuse. Whether in horror fiction or in real life, I find the most frightening revelations often to be the ones you have co-existed with unwittingly for some time. The fear comes in knowing not that you are now trapped, but that you have already been trapped for so long, there’s not even the idea that you could ever get out.

But I did get out, and so along with the content warning, I give you the assurance: there is a good ending. I was not left alone in the dark, and I won’t leave you there either.

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I was nine, and my parents had just bought a house. After my short lifetime of living in temporary housing—at least one rental with lead paint, several mobile homes, a stint in motels, and a camper—this was to be the forever home: one that belonged to us, one we could keep. And that meant I could finally have a cat—a boon I had begged for, to no avail, for most of my life, ever since I read someone read me My Little Golden Book About Cats.

(Which I have just now, of an impulse, bought off a vintage Etsy shop. And yes, fellow proofreaders, they do have the “about” capitalized in the title even though according to standard style guides you’d read today, as a preposition, it shouldn’t be.)

Perhaps the house read my mind; perhaps the forces for good in the world have a conspiratorial streak. The second day after we moved in, as my five siblings and I cavorted across our broad new lawn in the early fall evening, the sunset magnified by the giant bronze oak anchoring the corner of the bucolic scene—my father hushed us.

We didn’t hear it, but he did. Mewing.

My father turned and climbed that tree. The lowest branch was far too huge and high for my spindly arms to grasp, and I was the oldest child. He levered himself up, and we all watched, breathless. Then he jumped down.

A tiny black kitten had lost itself in that leafy fire. He had rescued a plaintive coal from a burning building.

We scrambled around him in awe, delight. “Can we keep it?” I whisper-squealed. It had to be asked; nothing was a given with our benevolent dictator.

But my father was pleased. “Looks like God sent Stephanie her very own kitten.”

It came with the house! Just for us! Like I always wanted! I stared up into my father’s face. God was real, though I don’t remember him meeting my eyes.

For two years I mothered fuzzy darkness. In those first early days I got up and followed her around the house in the middle of the night to make sure she found her food, water, and litter—and didn’t get stuck anywhere she wasn’t supposed to be. (I didn’t think to watch out for that last bit during the day, however, which did lead to an incident with my mother searching the kitchen for what she thought must be a scrabbling rat only for the silverware drawer to release a black cat-in-the-box.)

Le Mew, named after the unfortunate object of Pepe Le Pew’s affections, preferred to spend many of her evenings out of doors after growing to full size. Now she developed her own loony ritual: at least once a month I was awoken by twanging claws at my window screen. A hawthorn tree overhung our garage roof, and my bedroom window overlooked the same. On moonful nights darkness came yeowling. I suppose when no one heard her at our door, she weathered the hawthorn spines to find me. Of course, much to my father’s annoyance, she wouldn’t weather them backwards. Three or five times he hauled the ladder to the roof for a midnight rescue. Then he stacked a great pile of firewood against the garage wall so my acrocat could flee her crime scene unassisted.

On stormy nights when she didn’t come home before everyone was in bed, I would creep down and crack open the front door (right next to my parents’ room) as silently as possible. A sodden black streak would dodge through every time. I would towel her off while she ate, shedding enough fur to knit a shroud. Then she would tuck in next to me on my bed, rumbling louder than thunder, to finish preening as I fell asleep, confident she was safe.

She was so perfectly self-assured.

That confidence is what left me to realize I hadn’t seen her for over a day two Novembers later.

She had a habit of playing chicken with passing cars. Sometimes we would see Le Mew cross our road to hunt in the fields of the Christmas tree farm next door, and she would wait until a car was nearly on top of her before making her move. At night, too. My mother always said she was nuts. She said it would end her.

My mother was the one who found her body, curled up, head crushed, tongue lolling out. She didn’t think I would want to see, but I did. I had to say goodbye.

We couldn’t bury her. We had a dog who would find wild animal corpses to roll in, even dig them up after my parents interred them. I despised him for it, but now I hated him. I helped my mother bag Le Mew in a Hefty sack, and we put her in the trash.

The trash.

I went out to the garage a few times that day to rest my fingertips on the cold metal can. I sobbed and told her I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t bury her. I couldn’t protect her, and I couldn’t keep her with me.

I wanted to call my dad at work to tell him. My mom looked uncertain, but she dialed the office and coaxed him to listen. Then she handed the phone to me.

He said nothing as I gulped a few short sentences. There was a little silence.

“I’m sorry, Stephanie.” That was it. He sounded distant. Vaguely sad.

I wanted more, but I didn’t know how to get it. “I wanted you to know. Well, that’s all,” I said. I handed the receiver back to my mother.

She mumbled to him a little longer. “She’s really sad.” Then she hung up.

I think I must have had a long cry then. I think she must have hugged me. But I don’t know if this supposition is merely what my heart longed for—what I tucked close in my imagination to console myself as I walked away, fighting not to cry more, because she would only tell me to stop—or what actually happened.

I slept to forget. But every waking moment, for days, I ached. My mother told my friends’ mothers, who must have told their children, about the loss when I attended our next homeschool choir rehearsal—I had told my mother I wanted to go for the distraction. One little friend bounced over with a smile and said, “I’m sorry about your cat.” The rest barely looked at me. It all made sense: none of us knew what to do.

But it was through our connection to that group that I did find some solace: one family’s cat had just had kittens, plus they had brought home a young stray found in a bin on the dad’s garbage collection route. It was not lost on me that as my heart had been trashed and taken away, so it was to be given in turn. We made two adoptions in short order: the stray, a beautiful orange-white Maine Coon I called Punkin, followed by a tiny spitfire calico I named Patch.

For a long time after, I would squint at their profiles in the dark to imagine Le Mew was still with me. That, for a part of a second, I could touch her again.

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My dad shot the orange cat after I went to college and didn’t tell me.