Thousand-Year Cat

Among the high narrow rows of apartments in the Old Quarter there lived a cat. It was not the loveliest or most comfortable of neighborhoods: there the sky was a smoky shade of blue, and paint peeled from every door, and the streets were lined with rusty black rails and brown walls overgrown with moss and graffiti. She could have chosen any other place to live, had indeed traveled far and wide throughout her considerable lifetime. She was a calico cat, a lucky cat, welcomed everywhere she went. She had dwelled before in the forest, brimming with life; in the fields by the river under the stars, where farmers toiled by day and mice danced by night; in the grand opulent houses of the rich; in the bright noisy heart of the capital.

 But she stayed in the Quarter because there was a man who lived in a small room on the highest floor of the oldest building there, and she found him most peculiar.

* * *

He was different from the other humans. Every morning he woke before dawn, made a cup of coffee, and headed out to the balcony outside his room where she waited.

 "Come here, kitty," he would say, a small plate of tuna in one hand and his coffee in the other. And there they would stand together — he leaning against the railing, she nibbling at her plate — as the sun crept into the sky.

 He wasn't the only one who talked to her or offered her food. Humans were predictable creatures and generally not very interesting. Many liked the sound of their own voices and the trivial drama of their lives more than they liked to admit; others simply yearned for a sympathetic, or at the very least neutral, ear. There was nothing a person was unwilling to reveal to a mere cat. As a kitten she had found this all amusing, but after several generations of fleeting human lives she had grown bored and retreated at last to the forests of her birth, before emerging once more, centuries later, to witness with her own eyes the changes time had wrought upon the earth.

 The changes both delighted and dismayed her. The world had grown brighter, faster, larger; her own existence seemed now so small and inconsequential in comparison. She could wander for days now among a sea of bodies without a single soul paying her heed, and the mice danced no longer under the stars but through vast, filthy underground mazes like a castle keep.

 Still people spoke to her; still the occasional passerby offered her scraps. Some attempted to befriend her. Some, she even grew to like.

 But of them all, the man in the Quarter was the only one who listened, and understood.

* * *

One particularly cold winter, she had been taking an after-dinner stroll around the swiftly emptying business districts when the man caught her eye.

He was a tall man, but not so tall that he towered over the rest of the world. His pace was slow, yet every step was filled with purpose and determination. The set of his shoulders was relaxed, and the cut of his clothing quite expensive by what she understood of current human standards; she did not feel uneasy in his presence, but neither did she feel him easily ignored or dismissed.

Though no cars passed by on the streets, they stopped together at the corner, waiting for the traffic light. She watched his breath coming out in puffs of white; when he noticed her attention, he smiled and dipped his head.

Around his neck he had wrapped a fuzzy purple scarf that smelled of dimestore perfume.

That is a most atrocious object, she remarked, mostly to herself, and looked away without acknowledging his greeting. Her tail lashed back and forth in irritation. Were I human I should not be caught dead in such an article of adornment.