Eleven Minutes on the Fire Escape

October twenty-second. The cat appeared between the second and third sip of my coffee. That is the most precise accounting I can give. One moment the fire escape outside the break room window was empty, just the usual grid of metal and October sky, and then there was a tabby cat on it, sitting with his tail tucked around his feet, looking at nothing in particular.

Simone saw it first, or maybe we saw it at the same time and she just reacted faster. Either way she was at the window before I'd registered what I was looking at. I am not going to say that grown adults pressed their faces toward break room glass over a stray cat, but I am also not going to say that didn't happen. He was extremely small and extremely self-possessed and he sat there for eleven minutes by the clock on the microwave, completely indifferent to the fact that he had derailed whatever we were supposed to be doing.

both of us, fully undone

I took a photograph, not of the cat, actually, but of Simone at the window, which felt more like the real subject. Then I took one of the cat, or tried to, through the glass. The glass won. He looked like a rumor. I've been thinking about Carol's letter sitting on the counter at home, which sounds like a non sequitur but isn't, quite, something about the way the cat just showed up without asking and then left the same way. You're not meant to hold onto it. You just look for the eleven minutes you're given.

He was gone when we went back after our shift. The fire escape was just a fire escape again. Simone said: 'I hope he has somewhere warm.' I think that's the whole of it.