THE CAT by Roni Keller When they came to take the body away from the old womans

apartment who didnt live there anymore, only the wailing cat keening silent in frozen grief behind the clawed up sofa, the paramedics found the body sprawled out face down on the living room carpet. It wasnt the fall that killed her, they said. Elderly people often die like that. Crossing from bathroom to kitchen, they die mid-step, the soul lifting out, angels grabbing their afterlife elbows and drawing them up into the light, the safest place they have ever been since before they were born. This allows the body, old and wracked with pain, to drop with a thud to the floor. She didnt want to leave the cat behind like that, but there it was, she had no choice. The cat terrified by the great thud, cowered a moment then darted to her side, nuzzled the still warm body, then catlike gleaned the truth. In its cat-mind, all moments ran before it, backwards. Her last words, her bony hand stroking its head, curling up with her under too many wool blankets against the snowfall of death that clung to the heavy clouds of too much cigarette smoke that wreathed the apartment. The hand again, now putting down a small porcelain dish with a fresh mound of cat food, filling the water bowl and placing it just so. All the way back past long nights on the sofa with her watching

television or talking on the telephone to her friends and relatives, nieces and nephews who lived as far as the other side of the world with the inside of his mind enjoying dull comfort against the inevitable unknown. To catnip toys and real tuna around the first of the month just after the check came. Backwards to the cold dark of the feral alley wreathed in now familiar shadows of gloom, the wicked laughter of the gang boys, gunshots and helicopters, the hard gravel of the rotting asphalt, the feeble comfort of the sharp weeds where his cat mother had deposited him for safe keeping. Her human hands, reaching down to find him, and how hed dug his sharp little claws or what would be the claws of a man cat into her then fleshy skin, not knowing then that he had just been found and that the whole meaning of his life had just been given, only to be later taken away. The three clocks in the apartment all stopped within forty three minutes after she died, and he retreated to the cold silence of the wall behind the sofa, shoved up against the white plaster with no idea of what came next. The paramedics and the landlord didnt find him, didnt register the cat box in the bathroom or the empty plate and bowl on the floor in the kitchen. They took away the body and left the cat. Never mind, he didnt want to eat. What he wanted was

the clouds of smoke, and to climb them up to heaven so he could find her, but there was no one there to smoke them, to light up her camels, scratch behind his ears and click on the television. Still he dreamed it the evenings of just him and her, and the warm buzz of the TV. Other people continued to move in their apartments. He knew there was nowhere to look for her. In his half dreams, his broken heart danced with her there in the half-light. The conductor led the orchestra in a broken waltz pieced together from soap opera themes with all the lyrics in Persian. All the fish in the world leapt out of the oceans into her arms. And all the birds in the world swarmed into the apartment through the one small open window that didnt exist and smothered him with cruel but compassionate wings until he lost his breath but found her again, walking through a squirrel infested meadow where they could both run free and laugh about the rodents. A few days later her friends came. At first he resisted but later surrendered to the metal cage, and a new life where he tried to learn to forget, surrendering to the strength of his still young enough body, and the beating of his heart and its feral will to live.