Clara Cooke

Of all my lives, my ninth one in my eleventh hour is my favorite. 

My ears twitch, and just like that my nap ends. Even though the sunspot warms my striped belly just so. The beach-battered door creaks open and her prayer beads jingle overhead. I watch her appear in the hallway from my perch on the seven-level penthouse suite she has the audacity to call a “cat tree”. I’m curled up in my hammock, affixed to the top floor. 

My Helen. Home again.

Triumphant and toothy-smiled, she returns to our seaside condo. Artsy, Helen blows glass when her lungs are clear, throws pottery when her arthritis allows, and quilts with her fellow guild of quilters on Thursdays. 

“Virgil!” She calls. I still watch her, but don’t answer. “Where’s that pretty kitty?” I won’t dignify that. I don’t move. She’ll come to me when I bid her pay tribute, and not a moment sooner. 

First, she must realize that she interrupted my rest, and for that there is a penance. A chicken and scallop Churu will suffice. She knows this. Clever lady. For she has housed my kind before. 

I remember hairless Harriet and moody Molly from my precious kittenhood, the cats who taught me the ways of Helen. Before them, there were others. 

Now there is only me. There is only us.

Her arms are laden with reusable plastic bags. That crackling sound…so frightening and thrilling at the same time…And if I had the energy, oh how I would pounce on them to my heart’s content.

“They had a sale at Food Lion! Three chicken baby food jars for $2.” She  sing-songs to me from our kitchen. She’s fussy with my eating lately, and while I love the lavished attention, I am sorry to worry her. 

But, I’m often just too tired these days.

I’m proud of her. As economical as she is clever. Good job, my Helen. I won’t praise her outwardly, though. It is not my way, nor my place, to praise. I am meant to observe her griefs, joys, failures, and triumphs. My kind knows this.

All too well, I know this. 

We are their eternal sentinels. Our padded pawprints mark their history alongside their own. Our eyes, glinting with the amber of the ages, have seen the rise and fall of their empires. 

I remember. I was there. 

***

My fur caught the tears of Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s young daughter as Octavian marched through the glittering gates of Alexandria. The girl plucked me from the high priestess’ sacrificial altar and ceremonial knife, and so I suffered the indignity of becoming her snot rag. She would be taken to Rome, paraded around as a grand conquest inside the Circus Maximus behind the dust of chariots. 

We didn’t have long. So I pushed my whiskered nose into her cheek, providing the only comfort I knew how to give.

I watched over the sweet princess who lost everything. 

***

My hisses and hackles sent those flea-bitten rats back to their sewers and cellars. They ravaged Europe, but they did not survive past my threshold, a humble tenement near the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Especially because my Lucia just had her baby. An ugly baby. Certainly not as endearing as a kitten. But it was the baby that she and her fisherman husband had prayed for since before the rats seized Firenze and the sickness broke. 

Lucia found me emaciated and offered me scraps from her fillet knife. Carp or eel, typically. Whatever her husband could catch. Our bargain was struck, and I was willing to offer my services.

One evening, my ears pinned to the persistent scurrying. Lucia just laid her baby down. I saw the eyes first, beady with hunger and hellfire, as they crested the side of the cradle. The rat sniffed the baby once, and that was all it managed before I tore through and broke its neck. The baby wailed. Lucia screamed. But when she saw the dead rat in my mouth, she praised God. She thanked me. 

I watched over the Madonna and child who needed me to stand between them and Death.

***

My purring was the only sound that distracted eighteen-year-old American Private First Class Thomas “Tommy” Gallagher from the shrapnel that obliterated his shoulder. An artillery shell exploded in no-man’s-land and threw him beneath the mud. His helpless body trembled in nerves and fever at a makeshift field hospital near Verdun. 

The nurses spoke of amputation. He heard them and cried for his mother, and for his sweetheart who pressed wildflowers into his pocket Bible. They couldn’t hear him over the chaos of the wounded en masse.

I did.

I trod lightly so as not to frighten him further, and I curled onto his heaving belly. My purr rose loud and steady. It demanded to be heard. 

A rhythm of solace and quietude. Of healing.

Tommy’s cries softened, but tears still ran hot down his temples. He reached for me, and I arched into his good hand. 

I watched over the boy forced to be a man too soon.

***

“Virgil, did I wake you from your nap?” Helen sing-songs once more, Churu penance in her gnarled hands. I watch her struggle with the plastic tube of puréed delicacy, and she reaches for her scissors. 

Innovative, my Helen. 

With a stiff stretch and lop-sided gait fit for an old boy, I gingerly creep down my penthouse suite and follow Helen to her upholstered armchair to enjoy my afternoon treat. Churus are the only thing that stimulate my appetite these days. 

I land in her lap, where I am meant to be. She scratches behind my ears the way I like, and I, in turn, ease the arthritis from her hands. I have to get her ready for pottery. 

My Helen. Thank you.

I watch over the elderly lady as I always have – as I always will. And she watches over me.

What Clara said about the prompt:
“Through the Cat’s Eye” is inspired by and in honor of her family’s tabby cat, Joel, an old boy with tons of spirit, grit, and otherworldly knowledge. His eyes tell a story, and he is the true sentinel of her family. This is for you, Joellie-bear.

Clara Cooke lives a wonderful, simple life as a secondary English teacher in Richmond,
Virginia. She is in her fifth-year teaching, and when she is not planning instruction for her students, she is feeding her soul with writing, a habit that she recently started anew after a ten-year hiatus.