Strays

The cat appeared on Elena's fire escape at midnight, during the third hour of her crying jag over Thomas. Its golden eyes watched through the rain-streaked glass, unmoving, as if it had seen this kind of breakdown before and found it wanting.

She hadn't meant to stay in their apartment after he left. The lease was under both names, but he'd taken the bull by the horns—his phrase, always his phrases—and moved out first, leaving her with their wedding china and a mortgage-sized rent she couldn't afford. That was Thomas's way: decisive to the point of cruelty, then bewildered when you bled.

The water in her glass had gone warm and flat. She'd poured it four hours ago, somewhere between "it's not you, it's us" and "I need space to find myself." The glass sat beside his old coffee mug, the one with the chipped rim that he refused to throw away. Domestic archaeological evidence of a life that no longer existed.

A clap of thunder made her jump. The cat didn't flinch.

"You too," Elena whispered. "You too think I'm being dramatic."

She thought about the way Thomas had looked at her last night—the bull-headed certainty in his eyes, the way he'd said "El, you're drowning" like it was an observation, not an offer of rescue. He'd been right. She had been drowning in him, in their shared routines, in the slow erosion of the person she'd been before she became Thomas's wife.

The cat pressed its face against the glass. Its whiskers twitched.

Elena stood, knees popping, and opened the window. Rain sprayed her face, cold and shocking. The cat slipped inside, wet and shaking, and began to clean itself with infuriating calm.

"Yeah," she said to the room, to the empty mug, to the ghost of her marriage. "Okay."

She poured the stale water into the sink, ran the tap until it ran cold. Tomorrow she'd call the landlord about breaking the lease. Tomorrow she'd box up the china. Tomorrow she'd start again.

Tonight, she scratched the cat behind its ears and listened to the rain, feeling somehow less alone than she had in years.