The Cat Had Somewhere to Be (He Just Chose Here)

September fourth. We were in the middle of the standard post-climb wind-down, the part where you stand in the hallway and let your hands stop being hands again, when Simone said, very quietly, 'don't move.'

There was a tabby cat on the ledge outside the window. Sitting. Just sitting, the way only cats can sit, with its tail folded around its feet like it had been doing this particular sitting for decades and planned to continue indefinitely. It was looking directly at us. It was not concerned.

We both stopped talking. I put my fingers on the glass, which accomplished nothing. Simone got her phone out. The cat did not blink. At some point Simone got the timer set up on the bench behind us so we could both be in frame, which felt like the right thing to do, documentation of the fact that two reasonably functional adults were completely derailed by a stray for the better part of fifteen minutes. The cat's expression throughout: faintly superior.

Both of us. Fully useless. The cat did not care.

Eventually it stood up, stretched in that full-body way that looks like a slow-motion argument, and walked off the ledge out of sight. We both watched the empty ledge for a moment. Then Simone said, 'we should get going,' and we did, but I wrote this down before I forgot the specifics of his face.