Cats I Have Known

I’ve already taken about a hundred pictures of a cat that doesn’t even belong to me.

I’ve also bought him a new name tag and collar. I turn on nature shows on Netflix so he isn’t lonely while I’m out of the office, which today was a lot of the time. But he never seems lonely. He lounges in my chair, walks all over my papers and books, and sits looking out the window. Only once or twice has he yowled, wanting something.

Hercules is a fine cat.

Long ago, I had a cat named Kitty. She was also a fine cat.

One day, Kitty went missing. We searched everywhere for her and went to the pound, as they called it then, every day. The pound was a tight little building hidden away in an industrial area where the lost creatures were kept in tiny metal cages. Because it was so distressing, my husband went there without me.

Every day the news was grim until one day he announced that he’d found Kitty. There were no cell phones then, so he made the drive home to tell me and then went back to get her the next day.

“She looks a little different,” he said, adding that it was probably the result of being loose on the street for weeks.

I studied her face which I knew really well from having had her on my lap the entire time I was pregnant and from this photograph of my putting sunglasses on her sweet face.

I knew it wasn’t Kitty. But I went along with it.

We both did. And then she bit me. And then we called her something else, not Kitty, because clearly, she wasn’t that cat. But I don’t remember the new name. Not that it matters. She is long gone and Herc is here.