Ninth Inning of Alone

The cat appeared at 3 AM like a bad conscience, miaowing outside my fourth-floor walk-up. I'd been running from sleep for three nights straight, ever since Sarah left with the coffee maker and my ability to breathe properly.

I cracked the window. The cat — a scraggly tabby with one ear — leaped onto my fire escape like it owned the shattered dreams of this building. Twenty floors of desperate people, and this cat chose me.

"You too, huh?" I whispered.

The cat stared with ancient, knowing eyes. I retreated to the kitchen, warmed some spinach that had gone limp in the crisper, watching it steam into something resembling sustenance. My father would have called this rabbit food. He'd been dead sixteen years, his baseball glove buried with him, his voice still echoeing in my head whenever I tried to cook something green.

The cat scratched at the window. I let it in. It ate the spinach with the delicacy of a starving aristocrat, then jumped onto my mattress where Sarah's scent still lingered like a haunting.

I turned on the TV. A baseball game from 1998 — some regional sports channel broadcasting nostalgia like poison. The cat curled against my side, purring like a small engine rebuilding my heart from scratch.

"You're not Sarah," I told it.

The cat looked at the television where a player slid into home, safe by an inch.

Outside, dawn broke over the city like fresh violence. I had spinach in my fridge, a baseball game on mute, and a cat that had chosen me. I had almost everything, which is what you run toward when you finally stop running away.