Rebecca Tiger

I’ve had many pets but only one true love: The Noodle. The Noodle came to me via a cat rescue that set up their caged strays in Petco at Union Square in Manhattan. The other cats were hissing but The Noodle put his paw through the bars, flirted on his back, eager to play. A year old, he was already a big boy with that wide tomcat face. He reminded me of a Dickens character; he was my David Copperfield who was going to end his misadventures with me in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. I didn’t know much about cats. My brother was horribly allergic to them. When I was five, I declared at the dinner table that when I grew up, I planned to “live in New York City with a cat.” My parents were perplexed: I had never been outside of Maryland and the only place I could have encountered a cat was in the books I devoured. 

All of this changed when a friend from graduate school who lived a few blocks away from me in Brooklyn said she was going away and asked me to watch her cat. Chauncey moved in with me for two months. He had the softest fur, the color of a creamsicle and was polite and mellow. I had gotten so used to his silent companionship that I decided to get my own pet after he went home. 

“We’ve got a shitty kitty!” the rescue woman yelled as I let her in my apartment. It was coming out of both ends, so his cage was a smelly mess. But there he was, perky, curious; he ran right to the bowl of kibble I set out for him. After some swats as I wiped him down with a wet washcloth, The Noodle trotted off to explore. I gave him about an hour then went searching for him. He was nowhere to be found. I looked under the bed, in closets. I opened all the drawers. As my heart started racing, my eyes darting maniacally over every surface, I noticed a hole in the screen of my bedroom window. The fucking cat had ripped it and escaped. I ran to the window – it faced the building’s backyard – and looked down. I expected to find cat innards splattered on the ground. Nothing. I looked up and saw my new cat climbing the fence that separated my building from the neighbor’s. “Noodle!” I yelled as sternly as I could. The Noodle stopped and looked at me. “Please come back!” He paused as if considering my request then disappeared down the other side of the fence. 

Looking for The Noodle on the city streets just emphasized how big the world was and how small my little boy was. Every rat darting under a car became The Noodle. My new cat was probably happier free, being “rescued” was an imprisonment from which he managed to escape. He was better off in some ways and worse in others; I knew he would live a possibly happy but extremely short life. I had such a profound sense of loss for an animal I barely knew: The Noodle had already clawed my chest open and curled around my heart.

For three days, I went in the street and called his name; my neighbors gave me sad faces. “Don’t give up!” one said even as we both knew he had probably been hit by a car or eaten rodent poison. On the fourth day, after I accepted my total failure as a cat mom, imagining myself blacklisted on the dark web network of cat rescuers, I heard a loud snarly cry in the backyard. I looked out the window. The Noodle glared up at me as if I had done something wrong to him. I raced downstairs, through the building’s dank basement, and grabbed The Noodle. When we got inside, he found the bowl I’d re-filled with kibble that first night and scarfed it all. In the middle of the night, he went and meowed loudly at the windows from which he’d absconded. “Fat chance,” I told him as I covered my head with a pillow to block out his noises. 

He never got out that window again, but he often escaped when I opened the door to my apartment. He usually ran up one flight and then stopped. He had filled out and was less spry. We had a routine: I would call his name, pretend I didn’t see him, walk back to my apartment as if the situation was hopeless; he’d come running after me, nip my ankles as if to say, “Here I am, Dummy!” Eventually, I moved to Vermont for work and got a small house with a yard. The Noodle sat at the window for hours, chirping at birds. He’d watch me in the garden and scrape on the screen, just like old times. There’s no way I was going to let him out in a place with predators like coyotes, fisher cats and foxes.

Twelve years after The Noodle’s first misadventure in the big city, he developed a small lump on his left leg. The vet tried to remove it, but it only came back as an even bigger and amorphous mass. As he lugged that extra weight around, The Noodle would sneak up on me and try to escape. In his final weeks, I let him sit outside in the grass, free and in the sun. One time, after I tore out some weeds, I looked around and he was gone. That little shit, I thought. Even on death’s door, he has me in a panic, breaking my heart. I eventually found him, only a few feet away. He had dug a small hole and was cooling himself in the dirt. He was surrounded by flowering phlox. I only saw his face, looking at me, like he was playing hide and seek. He was my mischievous urchin to the very end. 

What Rebecca said about the prompt:
The protagonist of the story, The Noodle, looks a lot like Jellicat (one of the pop-up judges).

Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, Cowboy Jamboree, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, trampset and elsewhere.
You can find her published work at rebeccatigerwriter.com.
Social Media: X and Instagram

Read more from Rebecca:

Raw Lit – ‘The Bone Gods’
Cowboy Jamboree Magazine – ‘Stupid‘