Riddle of the Hairless Cat

The vitamin supplements rattled in Maya's purse as she let herself into Tom's apartment — a sound like artificial promises. Seven months of whatever this was, and she still kept an overnight bag in her car like a guilty secret.

She found him in the bathroom, tweezers in hand, plucking a stray hair from his ear. The vulnerability of it stopped her cold. Tom was forty-six, devastating in that way corporate lawyers often were, but here he was, waging war against his own mortality one gray hair at a time.

"You're early," he said, not turning from the mirror.

"Client cancelled. Someone sold them expired vitamins. God, the irony."

Maya's job was marketing supplements she didn't believe in to people who didn't need them. She was thirty-eight, and already she felt like a fraud in her own life.

On the counter, Tom's phone lit up with a text: *Can't wait for tonight. - E*

Maya felt something cold crystallize in her chest. "Who's E?"

Tom's shoulders went rigid. Finally, he turned. "My wife. Elena. We're — I told you, I'm separated."

"Separated people don't text 'can't wait for tonight.'"

"It's complicated. We're in counseling. She's — she's sick, Maya."

The sphinx cat padded into the bathroom then — wrinkled, ancient-looking, strangely beautiful in its nakedness. Tom had rescued it, or so he'd said. The creature wound around Maya's ankles, purring like a small engine.

"Your hairless cat," Maya said, laughing bitterly. "God, the symbolism. You strip everything away, don't you? What are you really selling me, Tom?"

"It's not like that."

"But it is. I'm just another vitamin you're taking to feel better about something rotting inside you."

She left without her overnight bag. Later, she'd realize she'd never even learned his last name. The sphinx cat watched from the windowsill as she walked to her car, and in its wrinkled face, Maya saw her own foolishness staring back.