Second Place winner of the "Black Cats are Good Luck" contest 2024
By Abigail Russo
It was, inarguably, a ridiculous time to get a pet. My now-husband, Adam, was drowning in bureaucratic hell at work. I had quit my job weeks earlier, unable to tolerate a boss who would text me at 11pm about my shortcomings, and had only just begun trying to hack it as an independent consultant. We lived in an apartment whose small size required skillfully squeezing around furniture to avoid bodily bruising.
Above all else, I wasn’t ready for living beings who needed me. Committing to the mutual dependence of a human relationship already stretched my limits, a fact my ex-boyfriend had brutally but aptly pointed out to me years earlier as we broke up by payphone, him in New York and me happily romping through the Swiss Alps. Though by this time I was firmly rooted in Boston, I was committed to my field of work that sent me abroad for months at a time, and traveled for pleasure whenever I could swing it. Adam and I had so far struck a comfortable balance, with my itch for adventure a fine complement to his appreciation for time alone.
But after a particularly terrible work day, Adam walked into our apartment and collapsed on the couch. Eyes still closed, he called out, “Can we just look at cats on the internet?”
We had done this casually in the past. But this time, I started scrolling through pictures of adoptable rescues and my eyes lit upon a gray tabby cat with one eye.
“Him. Oh my god, I love him.” The one-eyed cat had been found abandoned in an apartment along with a creamsicle-colored cat to whom he was bonded. We clicked on his profile next. Suddenly, an evening dopamine-inducing distraction became a serious thought. Could we get cats? Actually?
Adam put in an application the next morning and quickly scheduled a meet-and-greet with the rescue organization. I was amazed by the speed of his follow-up. He who had taken several months to commit to a bed frame purchase (during which time we slept on the floor) was immediately certain about adopting two wriggling mammals.
I was excited, but caught off guard by the sudden turn of events. I had always assumed that when the time came for me to get a pet, it would be a dog who would join me on hikes and runs, a companion by my side in the wider world. Sure, the cats seemed cute, but would I get bored? Would getting cats dig Adam and I deeper into a routine I wasn’t ready for?
The rescue organization brought the cats to our apartment, where they were slowly taken out of their travel crate and nestled between us on the couch. Both underfed, wide-eyed, and looking right at us. I was immediately taken by the cats—their tiny paws, their little noses—but even more so by Adam in their presence. His whole body relaxed as he cooed and petted them, and I immediately knew we had grown from a household of two to four. We mused over names and remembered a stroll down a Nantucket street years prior, laughing at the houses with pretentious names. Two in particular stood out: Popsquatchet and Willoughby. Thus, our cats became Pops and Will, or Poopsie and Boo Boo.
After the requisite few days of closet hiding and an accidental stumble into the dishwasher, the cats began to reveal themselves to us in bits and pieces. We watched gleefully as Pops raced around our living room and pounced on his toys, as though he were the first ever cat to play with adorable ferocity. We thought Will didn’t like to be held, but one day I managed to hoist his squirmy body onto my shoulder and he immediately stilled, marking his rebirth as a devoted shoulder cat.
Still, I maintained a cool facade. I was a cat owner, not a cat person. We would love Pops and Will and care for them within the reasonable bounds of pet care, whatever it was I thought that meant.
One afternoon I chatted with my brother-in-law on the phone and recounted what Adam and I had done that day: gym, groceries, and then a midday lazy summer nap with the cats.
“Wow, such an old married couple!” he joked, and my inner hackles went right up. No, that’s not me! I wanted to shout. Adam and I were engaged by then, and I was already leery of the constricting, gendered expectations of a traditional marriage. I hated the thought of compounding that with the stereotypes of a cat lady: home-bound, staid, the human embodiment of mothballs. (If only I’d had some JD-Vance-induced rage to help me embrace the label with gusto.)
But beneath my knee-jerk internal protest, I knew those caricatures I feared belied my lived experience with Pops and Will. Nothing made me laugh harder than Will using only his front legs to scale the side of the couch, and my body would immediately unspool as soon as Pops climbed into my lap and settled in with deep purring. With each international trip I took, the longing for home became more acute, inextricably tied to the prospect of being greeted at the door by my kitties. The more they showed us their burgeoning desires and quirks, the more we found ourselves reorienting our daily routines to bring out the best in each of them. The cats didn’t keep me from the world; instead, they made our home into a multidimensional world of its own.
The arrival of COVID-19 further cemented the cats as the center of our family’s gravity. Whereas Adam and I used to go to the gym together, I began doing squats with Will slouched over my shoulder. Where there was once an office, Pops came to occupy any available space between my laptop and my stomach. Adam constructed complex obstacle courses from their many Chewy boxes in our new condo, and I took them out for nighttime romps in our stairwell. The love for and from our cats was a low-level current powering our household life, shining light into its corners.
And then, in a space of months that felt interminable and also improbably fast, both cats got sick in ways that were overt and subtle, confusing and then suddenly blindingly clear. We came home from the vet with a terminal diagnosis for Pops and instructions for his comfort care, and within a month were doing the same for Will, our minds utterly stunned. The fact that this horror was descending as I moved into my third trimester of pregnancy with our first child only added to the feeling of unreality.
We received Pops’ diagnosis hours before I was set to fly to Maryland, and I canceled my flight immediately. It didn’t matter that I was supposed to join the rest of my organization's leadership team for several days, and that in-person time with colleagues was essential as I angled for a promotion. Nor that I would be missing the follow-up weekend I had scheduled to spend with a close friend I hadn’t seen in years and likely wouldn’t see for several more. There was no question. My body refused to leave any member of our household, each in their own kind of pain, even for a few days.
The flood of post-diagnostic emotions included a distinct feeling of overwhelm. Keeping Pops comfortable would require multiple medications multiple times per day and our full-time attention. And yet, it didn’t require discussion: we would do whatever we could to help him hold onto the distinct joys that made up his daily life, and by extension our daily life with him. I dimly registered how different I was from the person I was six years ago, the one who thought that my decision-making for my cats would conform to some arbitrary standards of reason. Pops, and then Will, needed me, and that was it.
The house filled up quickly in their final weeks, with assorted medicines and adjustments for Pops and Will and with gear for the baby. At times, the “stuff” of it all threatened to suffocate me. Knowing that Pops would try to hide from his next round of meds filled me with dread. But every article I read on pet illness while gulping back tears reminded me that our cats had no conception of the future, only the present. This belly rub, this fishy treat, this tantalizing bird outside the window. I fused my conception of time with theirs, and to my surprise, kept my anxiety about the inevitable end largely at bay. The world through their eyes was unsullied, and they gave me the gift of taking each moment in time for exactly what it was.
When it came time to say goodbye, we held each of them on their favorite oversized swivel chair, forehead to forehead, stroking their backs. We told them over and over as they closed their eyes: you are so loved.
Now their absence hangs heavily in the air, a choking smog. In the moments when I remember that Will will never again snuzzle his face into my neck, that Pops will never again tuck us into bed, I lean my forehead against the wall to keep the dizziness at bay. The memory of them cuddling in their fluffy cat bed, fit together like the yin and yang of a peace sign, feels tauntingly close.
With mere days until we cross into the wild unknowns of parenthood, I grieve the fact that our daughter will never meet the cats who stretched my heart to new proportions. But loving them has shown me that I do, to my considerable surprise, want to be needed, even when it turns my world sideways.
Sideways suits me.
Abigail Russo is a creative writer based in Boston. Her writing has been published in Quail Bell Magazine, The Times of Israel, and as a Top 10 Finalist in the WOW! Summer 2023 Flash Fiction Contest. She is currently querying her debut YA novel. By day she works in international development, and has worked extensively across Asia, Africa, and the United States. When she’s not writing, she can be found enjoying the mountains, reading with a large bowl of popcorn, and attempting to remove cat hair from her clothes.
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