What the Cat Remembers

The cat sits on the counter, watching with that particular judgment only cats possess. David's cat, technically, though David left three months ago and the animal stayed behind, as if choosing sides in a divorce he never bothered to finalize.

Margaret stands at the sink, running cold water over her wrists. The pipes rattle—a sound David always promised to fix, like everything else. She fills a glass, drinks, fills it again. Water has become her latest obsession. She tracks her intake in a notebook now, as if hydration could be the thing that finally makes her feel whole.

She turns to the stove, where spinach wilts in the pan. Too much spinach, really. She keeps buying it, imagining herself someone who eats greens, someone who takes care of herself. The spinach collapses into dark ribbons, steaming quietly, and she thinks about how quickly things surrender to heat.

"He used to cook, you know," she tells the cat. The cat licks its paw, indifferent.

David's departure hadn't been dramatic. No shouting, no broken dishes. Just a duffel bag and a muttered explanation about needing to "find himself" at forty-two. As if himself were something that could be misplaced, like car keys or a favorite pen.

The spinach is done. She scrapes it into a bowl, adds salt, stands at the counter because the table feels too large for one. The cat jumps down, rubs against her ankle, purring.

She eats mechanically. The spinach tastes like everything else these days: adequate, necessary, faintly disappointing. She runs more water in the sink, watching it swirl down the drain, carrying away the day's residue.

The cat stares at her with yellow eyes, patient and knowing, and Margaret wonders what, exactly, it remembers about David. Whether it misses him. Whether it noticed he was gone before she did. Whether animals can sense when love has already begun to curdle, long before the humans admit it.

She washes her bowl. The water is cold against her skin. Tomorrow, she tells herself, tomorrow she'll stop buying spinach she doesn't want, tracking water she doesn't need, talking to a cat who doesn't care.

Tomorrow she'll start living.

The cat yawns, showing sharp teeth, and Margaret realizes she's said all this before.