Page 10

I barely remember the day. It’s like a vague remembrance of a morning that happened two years, four months, and thirteen days ago. I may have been crying about something, likely very nondramatic and totally reasonable, getting out of Wanda in the parking lot of my apartment.

I’ll be honest, I thought Eleanor was a possessed stuffed animal crawling, dirty and haggard out of the dumpster. It was a more reasonable thought than just a cat because no cat could possibly be so ugly. She is.

She’s ugly.

Like a scrunkly, scruffy old black hairball that's vaguely cat shaped with a limp and a protruding pointy fang. She always looks a second away from committing a crime, and I’m still not wholly convinced she isn’t possessed.

So, as the scene goes, I screamed. Threatened her with my clog when she made a low growly meow at me. Then I cried harder when she followed me all the way home. It was like a bad scary movie scene, me running in slow motion—because one shoe and hungover—with tears and snot running down my face. Looking back over my shoulder every other step, tripping over curbs and cracks in the pathway. Except it wasn’t an axe murderer after me, just a feline horror.

No one believes me when I say she sat outside my apartment door making that horrendous noise until I cracked and let her in.

I fed her tuna; she drank water out of my pink depression glass bowl. Then she curled her dumpster smelling ass on my white faux fur ottoman and went to sleep.

I’ve tried to coax her back out of the apartment door every morning since. No luck.

She basically owns the place now.

I hate her.

The bell on her pink-collar jingles as she jumps up on the couch next to me.

My heart is still racing, thinking the ancient demon was aspirating over her Fancy Feast a few minutes ago.

“I never agreed to run a feline nursing home, you know. This relationship is entirely against my will.” Eleanor mrows when I pick her up and tuck her head under my chin, holding her to my chest. I swing my feet up on the glass coffee table and sink down on the velvet couch. It was way too expensive, but the deep teal color next to my baby pink rug and accent pillows brings me a massive sense of peace.

Pretty, elegant.

Nothing like what I’m sure Dillon goes home to.

His house probably looks the same as it did two years ago. Beat to shit couch, no area rugs to be found because he’s sad and lame.

I bet there are toys that litter the space now.

Maybe even a horrible drawing right on his plain white walls. Can twenty-month-olds even draw?

It’s been a few months since I’ve seen Penelope. It’s the strangest thing. Every time Dillon shows up to a family dinner with the blond-haired baby, I come down with a bad case of heartburn. Every time.

My phone vibrates next to me, and I rub between Eleanor's ears. “Don’t look, Ellie. It’s probably just Warren still talking shit about you.”

She purrs, unbothered. I can hear cars outside in the parking lot. Mr. Jones is having another coughing fit in his apartment above me, and the AC is rattling, sort of like Eleanor when she breathes.

I try to pick an annoyance and focus on it, but it only lasts for so long before I snatch up my phone and look at the screen.

Not Warren.

“It’s Dillon,” I tell the cat, holding her with one arm and my phone with the other.

Does Not Exist: won’t make it today. Penny is sick and it’s my day with her.

I wasn’t going to come today anyway.

I toe my shoes off my feet, then put them back on the table, glaring at the little bubbles on the screen.

Does Not Exist: you told me twenty minutes ago that you were leaving as soon as you made sure your cat wasn’t going to croak over her lunch.

I lied.

She’s also not my cat. She’s a squatter.