Blind Cat

The road that led to his sister’s house was a literal pain in the ass. I’m talking potholes inside of potholes, street vendors that came out of nowhere, and rush hour traffic at all hours of the day. People weren’t riding bikes anymore. He might as well have been the last bicyclist alive. How many times would he put up with getting run off the road, or being needlessly harassed? How many times would he put his life on the line before he told his sister he couldn’t, wouldn’t make the trip anymore?

Well, who knows, really, but there he was that day. His niece, Pam, answered the door. She was eight, but she looked younger. He kept thinking she was six and it annoyed her. She called him by his first name. Bert. Not Uncle Bert. “Hi, Bert.” It was always “Hi”, not “Hello”. But he didn’t mind. He hugged her as she squirmed to escape his cologne.

He had a nephew. Dan. Thirteen years old. He called him Bert, too. Bert, that was all. No “Hi” or “Hello”. They used to play Super Nintendo together, Bert and his nephew. But Bert mostly just watched now as Pam and Dan would play against each other.

And here’s the thing about Bert, he didn’t have any kids of his own. Yeah, I mean it, that’s Bert in a nutshell. He was married, happily. But she couldn’t… well, the doctors said that… Anyway, Bert had his niece and nephew to take care of while his sister and brother-in-law went to work.

About Bert and his wife, it’s important to know how they met. Bert was rather handsome when he was young. Clever, charming even. Yeah, all the young gals in the neighborhood knew who he was. How could they not? Their mothers would always say things like, “Oh, but imagine marrying a guy like Bert from down the road…” And what could these young women do but memorize his weekly schedule? He got off the 4 o’clock bus from the city on the weekdays, walked to the corner grocery store, bought a small bag of chips or a Coke (never both), and then slowly walked home. What could they do but strategically cross his path whenever possible? On the weekends, he would ride his bike to the city or the junkyard, or run errands for his father. He was the watchmaker’s son. The future engineer.

But who was she? She wasn’t really going anywhere. She was loud, that’s for sure. Her dresses were slightly too short. She had curves in all the wrong places. And she didn’t care. She just didn’t care. And it wasn’t even that vulnerable sort of indifference that comes across as callousness or arrogance. She just didn’t know any better!

The day they met, she happened to be selling women’s perfume door to door. She was always getting involved in silly businesses like that. Her mother would tell her, “There’s three buses to the city. Every day. No one’s gonna want to pre-order crap perfume from you… Listen to me, crap perfume they gotta wait three- four! Four weeks they gotta wait to even get the stuff. When they can just take the 10 o’clock bus and get the really good stuff that same day, ya dunce!” It was always “dunce”, never really “Liz” or “Lizzy” like it used to be.

So she knocked on his door that day, the poor girl. She could see someone moving about behind the front window and she tugged at the hem of her skirt, thinking this could be the one, this would show her mom. No, it wasn’t our guy, Bert, who answered the door. That would be too easy. It was his father.

“What do you want?”

“Hello sir or madam. Are you upset at the rising cost of brand name perfumes and colognes?”

“We don’t want any.”

And he slammed the door.

She stood there, stunned, mumbling the rest of her speech to herself. And that was when Bert got home. He watched her for a bit, an empty bottle of Coke in his hand.

“Are you dropping off a watch?”

She turned around to face him. And he knew, just from the look of her, that she was lost. Not just then, not just at that moment. That she was the sort of woman who could go through her life without really going anywhere.

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m his son. I’m the watchmaker’s son.”

And then it hit her. This was the one. This would show her mom.

“Hello sir or madam…”

So he bought some cologne and married her soon enough. I might have wasted your time with all of that, actually. That’s not really our Bert, after all, the Bert of this story. He never did become an engineer. Well, it’s my story to tell, so stop interrupting.

You see, Bert was the sort of man who just cared too much. Too much about Liz, about his father, his sister, his niece and nephew. His brother-in-law? Yeah, he was okay too. God! Was there anybody in the universe Bert just didn’t give a damn about? And even though it really should have been Liz who put her life on hold, so Bert could pursue his career. Bert offered, he insisted, that he would do whatever possible so that she could get herself a little business. She sold women’s lingerie. Nothing too fancy, but she was happy just the same.  And what about Bert? Nobody bothered to ask. He still ran errands for his father on the weekends. And, on the weekdays, he would ride his bike early, every morning, down that hellish road, to take care of his niece and nephew.

“Bert, Bert! On the balcony!”

It was Pam. Her voice shrilled with excitement. Her face was red and sweaty like she had run down from the second floor balcony to the kitchen at top speed. She was such a tiny little thing and she had so much energy.

Bert was washing the dishes. His sister never asked him to, but that’s our Bert. She didn’t have to ask. Dan walked up behind Pam, slowly. That was a new thing he was doing, you know, to further separate himself from Pam. He would let her get a head-start and walk nonchalantly behind her.

“There’s a kitten on the balcony, Bert,” he said.

He avoided eye contact to hide his enthusiasm.

“A kitten?”

“And it doesn’t have a collar! And it’s really dirty, Bert, with mud! It’s definitely a stray. You think we could keep her?”

Pam was leaning over the counter now, her knuckles digging into the marble.

“You’d have to ask your parents.”

“Well, maybe we could wash it. And give it some milk because… it’s really small, you know?”

That was another thing Dan had started doing, ending his sentences in question marks.

“Yeah, all right. We’ll give it a bath in the bathroom sink. And maybe some milk, too. But we’ll have to ask your parents if you can keep it.”

The kitten was sitting at the corner of the balcony. It was a dirty, white little thing. Bert wrapped a towel around it and carried it to the bathroom sink.

The bathroom was much too large for Bert’s liking. Worse still, the floor and walls were covered in awful mint-colored tiles. It was very… clean. He placed the kitten in the bathroom sink. He watched it struggle for a bit, hopelessly clawing at the unfamiliar porcelain terrain.

Bert murmured, “It’s okay.”

But the kitten mewed in a panic.

Pam was dancing around the bathroom, now. Thinking of all the games she would play with her newfound friend.

“Oh, she doesn’t like baths!” She giggled.

Dan was standing by the doorway. He was practicing a lean he had seen other teenagers do.

Bert turned on the faucet, now. Just enough for a steady stream. The kitten clawed at the porcelain frantically.

“Hold still,” said Bert, pinning it down gently, beneath the stream.

“I think I’ll name her Aurora,” Pam said, hopping on the tiles. She made sure to hop on every other tile. These were the sort of games Pam was developing now that Dan wouldn’t play with her as much.

“Maybe it’s not a girl cat, you know?” Dan said.

If it had been a bigger cat, it might have managed to let out some menacing howls. It was pathetic, really, how it mewed on and on, stuck under that steady stream of water. That was when Bert noticed that there was something strange about its eyes.

“It can’t be a boy cat because did you see its eyes? It has girl eyes.”

They were a cloudy grey and didn’t seem to be looking… anywhere, or at anything. This was a blind cat. And how did it get on the balcony?

“I think it’s a boy cat. I wanna name him Yeti.”

And suddenly it made sense, why it was so helpless and tiny. Its mother had left it there. It had been abandoned.

“It’s not your cat! You can’t give it a name because it’s not your cat, anyway!”

Poor little thing. It really was disgustingly pathetic how it mewed, not knowing who or what it was mewing at. What was the best thing to do at a time like this?

“It’s not your cat, either! Bert said we have to wait ‘til Mom and Dad say yes, first.”

There were always a bunch of stray cats where Bert had grown up. His father sometimes had him catch and kill the loud ones, the ones that knocked over pots in the patio and peed everywhere.

He thought he might snap its neck if he squeezed hard enough. But it had been a few years since he’d killed a cat. God. How the thing mewed. They were tiny, sweet little mews. They were terribly endearing. It wouldn’t stop. This blind, hopeless, little creature would not stop fighting.

So Bert slammed its head against the porcelain. Bloody, muddy stains washed away by that same steady stream. And the damn cat was crying! No, it was Pam. And whose tears were on his face? Its legs twitched a bit. He kept slamming that cat on the sink like some dusty rug.

Dan held onto his sister as she gasped like she was drowning.

“Stop! Bert, stop! It’s dead! It’s dead.”