Porcelain Cat

or, a short story

Right, so I realise this is the second cat-related thing here in the space of a week. Could be a regular trend. Not sure. I hope you’re OK with that.

Oh, this isn’t the start of the story by the way (unless it is; but it isn’t), this is just me rambling out some preamble. I wanted to put something up front, a foreword perhaps.

I wrote porcelain cat whilst not working during the terminus of December 2022. A calmer time when there was less to do except wake up and sip coffee in the pre-dawn light, my actual cat Mandarin curled up nearby, purring. Those hours before the world wakes are my favourite. There’s genuine magic to be sensed, borrowed, utilised.

The seed of this story had been there for some time, planted whilst watching an episode of [REDACTED] where the [REDACTED] spoke about their time in a really quite horrific [REDACTED] and it just had this *moment* when… oh boy, well, I can’t say because not only have I probably not captured that sense of [*] but also that it’d presumably be a spoiler.

So that was a waste of time me telling you all that.

|

This is a longer piece (Substack’s auto-reading time estimates this at 25-30mins). If you’re inclined to continue, grab a cup of something warm, or a glass of wine, or that whisky I mentioned, and cosy in. If you like what you read, please do feel free to share it, to comment. I’d like that.

---

(Click.)

I should start nearer the end, the point when I realised just what had happened. /// It began like I’ve told them, that night with her. And it was all her. /// If I hadn’t seen it there, if I hadn’t picked it up…maybe none of this would have happened. /// The shelf had the little cat and that began the end of everything. ///

Ignore the above. I can’t remove those, only scrawl a line through them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to start and I’ll be honest in that I’m struggling. Every time I think I know how, it doesn’t seem to work or flow or allow me to think how I’m going to connect and tell it all. Then again, I don’t know how much I should explain or how much to simply omit, or whether or not to even bother at all with any of this. Perhaps I just leave you not knowing at all and force you to rely upon what family might have said. Or what you’ve read about.

You have read about it, right?

You must have.

Because I haven’t heard, so…

And you know—and I’ve thought a lot on this, too—that hurts more. Much more than The Precedings. That’s what I call it, by the way: what you did. The Precedings.

But these are just scraps and my musings whilst I work out how I will start. Someone here in this place of horror must have understood my pleas because they’ve actually given me this paper and pen. A clicky pen; you know how much I like those. Always fond of a pen that my right thumb can toy with while I think—even the cheap ones that break too easily. I can’t read whatever’s written along the side of it, of course. Just curly squiggles. Meaningless. Whatever. A pen seems a bit trusting, don’t you think? Not like they’d care if I did something—it’d save them a job.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’ve had All. The. Time. You can’t see the gaps when you write something down. No one can. It could have been weeks between that line and this. (Spoiler: it hasn’t.) But I’ve been thinking about it a lot: how to start. So I think I’m going to just pick a place, near enough to how it began, and I’m just gonna write it all down from there, tell it like a tale if you’ll indulge me. It’ll give some sense around things and choices, perhaps. Closure, I suppose. Maybe for me. Mostly for me.

Oh, and I should warn you—because I’m the decent one—there’s going to be a lot of here about her. I realise that writing that might not mean anything, though perhaps it does, but, well, I’m just trying to be upfront and honest. Because I’m the decent one.

(Another attempt. I’m writing this later. If it seems more, I dunno, existential, then it’s because it’s nearing evening and that’s when the screams and howls become too much): I always thought the most vivid experiences were my dreams, when the world is alight and etching memories more visceral than those forged in waking hours. My living, my past, my up-til-now has just been so dull and bland and nonspecific. Did I ever tell you that? Did we ever even open up like that? (I don’t think we did.) It’s all blurred, segued from place to person to job. From job to person to place. And then suddenly it’s all oh-you’re-here and all you’re doing is looking back and not around. I can touch it, yes. I can feel it, yes. But do you ever just stop and look at your hands and think “what the actual fuck are these?” Because if you don’t—and I don’t think you do, you never did—maybe you're doing it wrong.

In dreams, though. In there. There it’s wild and on fire, a mesh of randomness that beguiles with intricacies, the non-physics, the madness that unfolds in that special oh-but-of-course-this-is-normal fashion, only to be whisked away and questioned when you shut back down.

This is tangential, though. Or perhaps it’s all the same. Maybe what I’m saying is that perhaps even when it matters, none of it really does.

But that night, that waking night—this is what I want to get at. That was and remains, for what little I have left, the most vivid of experiences. Like a drug embedded in my mind, leaching its contents over and over. As a point of pure experience, nothing touches that night. In the good and in the bad.

You know, I’ve asked myself: would I change it?

It feels madness to even contemplate the idea of that question. It’s no doubt offensive for you to know I entertain that. Hell, it’s probably already offensive, what I’ve written. If it’s worth anything: I’m sorry.

Mostly. 

In here there is only truth.

So, yeah…

***

That night started with toothpicks.

The bar had a jar crammed full of those little wooden toothpicks. The ones no-one really uses unless they’re a very specific character in a very specific movie. I remember picking one up, staring at the ends and then placing it between my finger and thumb, feeling the small prick as I squeezed. I held it there, locking it in place and turning my hand at the wrist, like I needed to repeatedly measure out a constant distance. I must have kept doing this for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, I snapped the thing in two. Somehow I didn’t like the idea that it might end up back in the jar with the others.

The warm breeze continued to blow. The soft sound of lapping waves reached my ears, as though for the very first time. A couple left and another entered, laughter wrapping them, their lives about as distant from my own as felt possible. A man padded by in bare feet. From beyond the bar’s canopy, the moon was just a sliver, the flecks of stars becoming visible. It was beautiful, truly beautiful. Serene, peaceful, tropical—just what you wanted. There was that consistent kind of warmth that makes one forget cold is even a sensation, or that sure, it’s easy to handle cold nights because those are only things in your imagination.

But imagination cannot conjure the cold. Only darkness.

I dragged my whisky across the bar and closed my eyes, inhaling. In. Out. I focussed on the breath, trying to locate that point at the tip of my nose where the whisky entered. Does it stay in my lungs? I wondered. I imagined those compounds, a volatile traversal of trachea and alveoli, darting across capillaries and staring down haemoglobin, its bound iron wagging a finger and saying no, not today. And then the whisky rushed back out, fleeing. 

In again.

Out.

In.

Out.

For some time I stayed like this.

The breeze. The waves. Your absence.

In.

Out.

Then I heard her.

“Must be quite some drink.”

I opened my eyes. The words had come all at once, but I made little sense of them. I managed a glance, worried that those words might not have been directed at me. A shape was to my left, a few seats away. I ventured a turn of my neck. A woman was sitting there. She hadn’t been there before, I was certain.

“Hmm?” I asked, casual as I could, turning the rest of my body in her direction.

She stifled a laugh, catching it in pressed lips. Those lips turned into a smile, wry and dry and full of—

“Your drink,” she said, raising her own—a thin and tall glass full of something that looked like fresh lemonade amongst a sea of ice—and motioning towards mine. “Or is that how they drink where you’re from? Eyes closed and through the nose?”

I blinked at her, saying nothing, my eyes feeling the leftover sting of the whisky. The woman was Thai, or what I approximated to be Thai, though I wouldn’t have guessed from her accent. She was thin and tan with short-cropped jet-black hair and an equally black tattoo along her left forearm—a series of parallel lines of differing lengths that ran all the way to her wrist. She wore a dress that was casual yet immediately flattering, the cut of it running over her left shoulder, then under her right, wrapping her body. Its colour was coral—that was what came to my mind at that precise moment. If she’d asked me What colour is my dress? I would have responded without hesitation with a definitive coral. Not salmon. Coral. It went well with her skin tone.

“Oh,” I managed, looking at the whisky. The chunk of ice was mostly melted. “No, I er, just really like the smell. It’s heady. But not too heady, you know? A sort of,” I somehow found myself wafting my hand like a seal, “buttery headiness.” I was laying down a lot of words, an entirely underqualified architect.

She stared at me, saying nothing but keeping her lips pressed. I tried to hold that gaze, my eyes wanting nothing more than to break it off, to find the bar, the stool, the moon. Anything to prevent from having to wonder whether there was another smile waiting to emerge. My right hand, having found the surface of the bar, was edging its way to where it thought it had last encountered my drink.

Then she stood up.

And moved one seat closer.

An empty stool was now all that separated us. The air there stirred in an awkward eddy.

Setting her drink onto the counter, she extended her hand.

“Nin,” she said. “I’m Nin.”

I took her hand, shook it and told her my name.

“A pleasure,” she said, the smile surfacing. Her hand seemed to linger on mine a moment longer than a regular handshake should last, but then she swivelled back and shouted something to the barman, reclaiming her drink in the process. She spoke in Thai, her voice and all its meaning suddenly alien. As I listened, I noticed she wore a silver ring through her nose. It caught the light as she spoke, twitching up and down. The barman nodded, yelling something toward the kitchen.

She turned back. “You look hungry, so I ordered snacks.”

The words threw me. Could she tell? I had no precise recollection of the last time I ate. “Thanks,” I said, trying to unpiece my evening. “I didn’t have dinner. I think. In fact, what time is it?” I’d left my watch back in my room, next to my ring, not wanting to look at either, but my gaze went instinctively to my naked wrist.

Nin turned the ice in her glass with her finger in the exact manner that you wouldn’t. “What’s your deal?” she asked, ignoring my question.

“My deal?” I drained the last of my drink, trying to buy myself time, imagining there were three options available and that I was perfectly capable of choosing the correct one to vocalise.

“Yeah. Your deal. Buried in whisky by a beach. Alone, I note.” She trailed off, her eyes moving around and behind me, as though trying to falsify her own statement.

“I’m having a drink.” The secret fourth option, a misclick. “Just a lonesome drink.” I added a weak shrug as a light breeze whisked away my pathetic words.

“I can see that.” Her eyebrows raised. “But I don’t believe you.” The wryness came back. She crossed her legs, smooth olive skin stretching into the space between us. “I’ll guess.”

“I’m sorry? You’ll guess?” My neck had pushed itself forward, like a goose.

She nodded, her eyes turning toward the darkening sky.

I waited, unsure of what else I should do. With my drink depleted, I felt naked. The barman was tending to a couple at the far end. He may as well have been on another island.

“OK. You’re in the army, out here for some stupid army reason.” Her eyes dropped back to me. “But all your comrades dislike you so they leave you to drink by yourself whilst they go do stupid boy-army stuff.”

I released a burst of laughter. “Don’t hold back!” 

She winked at me. It was like an injection. Something unstoppered in my brain, letting release a flood of whatever hormone or chemical it is that says You relax now, stop imagining you’re being filmed, the world waiting to laugh. No-one’s watching. Except her. And she’s waiting. So talk, fool.

“I don’t–”

“I’m joking,” her hand wafted my words away. “I can see you’re not the army type. There’s not enough,” and then she wafted again, but this time across my whole body, “muscle and stuff.”

“Seriously?” I said, only half-feigning disbelief, mock-slamming my empty glass onto the bar. “You know, it’s much less insulting to drink on your own.” And then I did a full feint, daring myself, turning in my own chair back to face the bar, leaving her there to my left. Immediately, I could feel her, pressed beyond the weight of that air.

“Aw, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” But then she was in the space, the air gone and dismissed, her hand on my leg and tugging to pull me back around. I couldn’t help but smile, the flood of that something in me again. And I caught her eyes then, as I turned. They were hazel, like her skin. Deep hazel, with the same jet black of her hair at the centre. The ring in her nose twitched again as her lips pressed out another smile.

We lingered like that, perhaps once more for too long, before my words launched into an attempt at the truth.

“Have you ever seen the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall?”

Her head tilted as though I had made a perfectly ordinary comment. It was a few moments before she spoke. “The one where Jason Segel goes to—wait, was it Hawaii?—after breaking up with some chick Sarah—Kristen Bell, right?—to deal with a break–ohhhh.” Her voice trailed.

“Yes,” I said, a little surprised at the detail. “That’s… Exactly that. Except, well, not exactly. In this tale she’s not here. Not Sarah…Kristen. I mean, my. My—” (I actually choked up a bit at this, can you believe it?) “You know what I mean. I cancelled her ticket, so she can’t be here.”

Nin looked indifferent to everything I’d just said. She merely came back with: “No. Not seen it.”

“Wait. What? I’m sorry? What do you mean you haven’t seen it? You just summarised the plot. And cast. Location…”

“I don’t watch films. Just trailers.”

“You just watch trailers?” My eyes were wide, the goose neck now fully extended. The rest of the bar was lost.

“Yes.” Her voice was flat. She took another long sip of her drink, almost draining it. Then she shouted down the bar, the sudden shift to Thai yet again taking me by surprise, breaking whatever it was that had formed around us.

“Why?” I said, laughing, trying to reform that connective spell.

“Films are too long. I don’t have the attention. Even one hour is too much. Even some trailers are too much. But I still want to know what happens, so I watch the trailers and read wiki pages, synopses, scroll IMDb trivia, that sort of thing.” Her words were matter-of-fact, as though reading from a cereal packet.

Who doesn’t watch films yet still knows the plots of films? I was incredulous. Then another thought struck me and I steadied myself. “OK, now, I want you to think very carefully about how you respond to this.” I paused, an attempt for dramatic effect. “What about books?”

“Oh, yeah, the same.” Nin batted the notion away, indifferent. “If I ever find myself holding a book, I read the blurb on the back, skim the opening page or two, and then skip right to the last page.”

“You’re joking?”

“I’m not.” Her eyes locked on mine again, her expression that same flatness, unreadable. “It’s very efficient.”

“Efficient? Books aren’t meant to be efficient.”

She shrugged. But then the wry smile came creeping back. The little movement of the nose ring. The shimmer in the eyes.

“We are very different people,” I added, her eyes activating that something in my brain.

“We just met. Who said we’d be the same?” She gave me a look as though she were twirling a straw and sipping through it.

“I know, but,” and I caught myself enjoying how words, whole sentences, were flowing up to my mouth all by themselves now, an almost odd sensation, my heartbeat increasing, the world brighter somehow. “Well, that’s just… weird.” I laughed again. “Wrong, even.” I continued before she could have any chance to cut me off. “For me, because I know you care, the beginning of a book is the best part. I almost don’t want to reach the end. It’s the part I savour, sometimes slowing down my reading. Not that I worry about what the ending is, or where it’s going to go precisely, but more I start worrying for the author. The process they must have had to have gone through to reach that point. All the decisions. Or did it just unfold that way easily, without any changes?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m not an author. But that’s what I think about whenever I’m reading a book—a lot of books. Sometimes I just stop and linger at that point and don’t continue again for a few days, as though I’m allowing the author to still make a decision on that last half or third or whatever.”

She nodded, making her eyes deliberately wide. “Fascinating. Truly. You’re right, I do care.” She pressed her lips together once more, holding back laughter.

“You know what, I’ve never told anyone that because I figured that would be the reaction.” I turned back to the bar, trying to make eye contact with the barman. My mouth longed for moisture. Inside, my heart was pumping.

“Oh, don’t be so sensitive.”

Before I could respond, the barman was somehow there holding two new drinks for us. I glanced back at Nin, eyebrows raised.

“You looked thirsty, as well as hungry.” Again the look. The smile. The ease.

We chinked our glasses and shortly after our food arrived. We ate, drank, spoke. Endless speaking. There was a flow to it. A practised one, I later came to realise. But it felt real. If you could put me back there and let me relive it, I think there’s a part of me that would still believe it true. That I, for her, was somehow different, not the usual, that she wouldn’t go through with what she did.

But anyway, that’s about all I remember from that evening. The meaningful bits.

(Oh, I remember more, of course. But not parts I’m going to show you. Not like the way you did. There aren’t enough pages for that.)

I awoke late the next morning, finding myself in her room and sprawled under a loose white sheet, the skin of her body entangled through mine. Her arm was across my chest. Overhead, a fan spun its forever dance in silent observance, pushing enough air to take an edge from the humidity. My head, surprisingly, didn’t ache. Not yet, anyway, and even then that was the kind of headache I could have endured. An entirely different one to now.

“Morning,” I managed, my throat dry and raspy, my heart still ba-bumping away.

Her head shot up, the smile instantaneous.

“Finally!”

She kissed me, nuzzled her lips into my neck and then sat up. The sheet fell from her, exposing a body lean and tan and curved, one that I thought would elicit from every boy—straight or otherwise—a pathetic lustful whimper.

A body that I had indulged in.

A fog parted and I stared at Nin as this realisation hit. A wondrous disbelief overcame me and I took a long moment to recall as much as I could from those hours past. I pulled her in, kissing her, wanting her again, my hand running across the small of her back.

She pushed me away, sitting up, teasing.

“Later. Again, I promise. But I’m hungry. And…” her hand trailed down my chest towards my navel, “I’m sweaty. Not surprising. But I shower. Then we eat.” She sprung off the bed, a cute scamper towards the bathroom. After a few moments, the taps were on, the sound of water and her movement under it.

Whilst she showered, I stumbled upright and—once located—threw on my shorts. Then I meandered about her room. It was a bedroom and living room combined, connected on one side to the bathroom and on the other, via a beaded curtain, to a small kitchen. I picked my way around the clothes-strewn floor, glancing at books (had she lied?) and old records. It was a shelf of stuff I’d never heard of, mostly. I like music, but records have never been my thing. Too much effort. They look nice when all lined up on shelves, the mystery of their content compressed into such a thin slice, but where do you start? Which record do you pick to own? What do you decide to play when presented with such immense choice? Then there’s the sound system, the setup, the room for it. It's always felt too much for me, so I’ve never bothered. But you know all that.

Then my eyes settled on something small on one of her shelves. It was just sitting there next to a pot containing some kind of indoor bamboo plant. From the corner of my eye, my brain had made an instinctive leap that it was one of those pawing Japanese cats you find in restaurants and cheap shops. But that wasn’t it at all. It looked nothing like one of those. This was a simple yet ornate representation of a cat sitting on all fours. Though no features were fully defined (here I could see no observable tail at all), it was certainly meant to be a cat. Its gaze was clearly ahead, as though into some far off and distant place. I touched it, hesitantly. It was a smooth porcelain texture, the feel not cheap but not expensive either. Not that I know anything about porcelain, but that was my best guess. As I was wondering about this, for some reason I turned my head, chancing a look towards the bathroom. Nin wasn’t standing there in the doorway; she wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t wondering what I was doing. No, she was still showering. I shook my head and turned back to the little cat, picking it up and placing it onto my left palm. It was no bigger than a sparrow, but it felt heavier, denser than its size betrayed. Turning it—carefully, for I had a very real fear of dropping it—I looked at it closer. The more I looked, the harder it was to define specific features. Everything seemed to blend into one. But taking that whole, relaxing your eyes, it was, undoubtedly, a cat. I felt satisfied with this assessment. Before placing it back on the shelf, I noticed something else: a tiny blemish on the area of the front right paw; a sort of grey scratch mark that ran in a line, almost like it had been broken and then glued back together. Thinking nothing more of it, I returned it back to where it belonged and—for a reason then that I had no explanation for—felt compelled to move myself to the very other side of the room. At that moment, I realised I was feeling somehow guilty that I had even picked it up in the first place.

If I had dropped it—if only I had dropped it—I would have realised guilt was entirely the wrong emotion.

“You want to make coffee?” Nin called, her voice pitched above the sound of the running water. In my mind, I could see her neck craned, her ears waiting expectantly for my reply.

“Sure,” I shouted, almost following with the auto-idiotic questions of “where?” and “how?” but my brain stopped and did its best to spur initiative. After a quick and bumbling 360, I moved towards the kitchen, passing through the curtain of beads. They jangled as I brushed them aside; the little bells along the lengths of the strands must always be happy when someone walks through.

I had near to no recollection of being in the kitchen the previous night. Then I saw the open bottle of vodka on the table and remembered that this wasn’t some film where the newfound couple bumps through the door, half-stripping with every step as they knock their way towards the bedroom. No. We’d sat and drank and snacked and chatted. More than we had at the bar. Recollection came with that slow landslide of a hangover subsiding. I smiled, seeing the crumpled and empty packet of nuts, the dead candle with its wax pooled on the table. Two nuts were half buried in that wax, like a small archaeological scene.

Coffee, my mind reminded me. I scanned the shelves and counter, looking for coffee-things. Like record collections, you know I have no intimate knowledge of brewing coffee, mostly just how to drink it. Come to think of it, the usual hangover desire of coffee had not yet made itself known. Instead, there was just a low buzz, the increased heart rate, a heady mix of feelings from last night and most likely a decent percentage of vodka still within me.

Coffee, my mind reminded me. I filled the metal kettle, figuring that was a good place to start. Then, after unlidding just about every container I could see, I found one holding coarse grounds that smelled suspiciously like coffee. Next to this was a glass funnel sat atop a large beaker and beside it a stack of filter papers. Even without a degree, I figured this all likely went together (if only your father could have seen me do this one thing) and I spent the remainder of the kettle’s boil folding a filter paper, inserting it into the top of the funnel and—having no idea of quality nor quantity—heaping several spoons of coffee onto the paper. As I closed the lid of the container, my eyes landed on something that gave me pause. Tucked between several tattered recipe books there was a thick, squat book. There was nothing inherently odd about this—the black and nondescript spine blending between the recipe books either side—but, jutting out of the top at an angle, emerging like a two dimensional Everest, was a Polaroid, its border white and glossy. Enough of it was showing for me to know precisely what it depicted. I saw my hand reach forward with its own curiosity, pinching the peak of that Polaroid and holding it in place as I slid out the entire book, tugging on the spine.

The kettle finished with a click. The sound of everything else flooded back into the room.

I set the book onto the counter, opening to the page with the Polaroid. And I stared.

A breeze wafted through the open kitchen window, setting the beads to another short jingle. My neck had broken out in a sweat. A distant part of me was aware I could no longer hear the shower. 

I leafed back from the open page, ignoring the desire to push the book back into the shelf, to rid myself of whatever it was that I was feeling. It was a photo album—a book full of Polaroids. Generally that’s what photo albums contain, but where this one differed was that it was a book full of Polaroids of just one thing: that little fucking porcelain cat. Except, again, that wasn’t quite true. It wasn’t a book full of pictures of that little cat. No. I noticed discrepancies as I frantically flipped the pages, my fingers fumbling each. These were not all the same. The eyes on this one gazed down, not ahead. This one was larger. This one had more of a suggestion of a tail curling around its body. This scratch mark was on a different paw. This one didn’t even have a front left paw. Even more disturbing—perplexing should have been the word, but I felt a shiver turning intrigue into something far worse—was the pencil mark beneath each photo. A name, a month and a year, written in small, neat writing. In English and in writing far too neat for a man’s hand.

Flopping the album open to the very front, I looked at the date and then snapped the whole thing shut, shoving the book back onto the shelf and positioning the rogue Polaroid—one that had no name or date at the bottom—back to what I hoped had been its original protrusion.

A decade of photos, month by month.

A decade?

What?

“How’s that coffee?” Nin shouted, now from the adjacent room, though seemingly from another world. A place where Polaroids of almost the same object don’t litter a photo album.

“Cooking along just fine,” I managed. That didn’t seem like what you should say when brewing coffee, but I hoped it was enough. I glanced through the bead curtain but couldn’t make out enough to know if Nin was standing there peering at me. With a shaky hand, I gripped the kettle and poured, a little too quickly, some of the grounds and water spilling down the sides of the funnel. I slowed my pour along with my breath, trying to shake off why I even felt so strange. So what? It’s just a photo. Maybe she collects them, or makes them and sells them, giving them each a name, and this is just her record of it. That’s it, surely. No bother here. Just your average book of Polaroid porcelain cats stored in the kitchen. That’s all sorted, then.

It turns out, instinct is there for a reason.

The kettle was now empty. The drip-drip of coffee continued into the waiting beaker. The scent of it began to reach my nose. Some sense of reality clawed its way back.

Did the photo-cats matter when she was next door? When last night had, in fact, actually taken place?

Did that real little porcelain cat sitting squat on the shelf next to the bamboo matter?

As you fucking well know (and I know that you do know): it did.

“You can have it,” she said.

We were sipping a second cup of coffee. Nin had cleared the table of last night’s refuse and made eggs, but not before throwing that first cup of coffee down the sink and mocking me for an “inability at even the simplest of tasks”. Food and caffeine, along with her simple jibe, had stilled my unease and by then I was beginning to question whether anything had even felt amiss.

I raised my eyebrows. “Have what?” The door was open and once again I could hear the lap-lap of waves.

“The cat. My little cat.”

Like the tide pulled by an invisible moon, the unease returned.

“I know you picked it up,” she continued, standing to clear away the plates.

My eyes widened. “You know I picked it up?” I tried my best to sound confused.

She nodded. “Every morning I stroke my lucky cat, but this morning it was looking the wrong way. I know you stroked him too.” She smiled. The tone wasn’t accusatory. It was almost… sensual?

I stood. It seemed the correct movement to make. “Sorry, Nin,” I broke into honesty, “I saw it when you were showering and–”

“Oh, no apologies.” She walked over and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Perhaps the luck it brought was in bringing you. And so I, in turn, gift it to you. A memory of me you can keep.”

“I might have enough of those already,” I managed. I pulled her close, almost instinctively. But in my mind I broke away, my eyes glancing through to the shelf beyond. Nin had tied the curtain back and I could just make out the cat. It was still there, gazing towards its far-off land of porcelain. Had I been so careless as to leave it askew? If Nin had caught that, what of the book of cats behind me on the shelf? You mustn’t turn, I told myself. You mustn’t. So I continued to hold her, taking one final glance through the curtains before my eyes shifted back to hers.

“I couldn’t,” I said, swallowing. Something felt deeply wrong with all of this.

“You don’t want it?” Her bottom lip curled like a child.

“I just couldn’t. It’s yours. If it’s lucky, then that’s even more of a reason I couldn’t.” Nin pressed her body into me then. My own body, disconnected from my mind, couldn’t grasp why I resisted. “I couldn’t possibly; not if it’s lucky,” I found myself whispering. But then her lips were too close to see, her hands dropping and toying at her t-shirt and all that lay beneath. And I found that I was too foolish to resist.

Later.

(See how I omit that span of time, all those details? For you, I do that. Does it paint a better picture for you, having to imagine it? Or will you always prefer it your way, caught in video, to be rewatched over and over?)

Much later, when I left, the shelf that had held that little porcelain cat was devoid of all but the bamboo plant.

But I didn’t see that.

Not then.

Only later, when it was very much too late, when someone else had rummaged and found where that cat had been placed, hidden, and all this horror was set in motion and I was shaking my head and shouting, pleading, disbelieving… Only then did I come to realise the role that I had played. The role that I had been meant to play, I should say. But I doubt Nin knows how it ended, or if she cares. I’m just a name, a pencil mark, a date. Some strange sense of accomplishment for her, like those countless others.

***

You know, there was some part of me that was always fascinated about what it would be like to be in a place like this. A macabre longing to understand, I think—not one to truly know. But I do know, now. And let me tell you, it’s worse than anything you or I or anyone else could imagine. A million, trillion times worse. I don’t think there are words, and now that I’ve written all that I have there isn’t much sp–

/

–there is a loud bang as the door is swung open, hinges making their brief scream for oil as the metal bars smack into the wall. The clamour of those thousand other angry and weeping voices is set momentarily louder. Two guards stand in the doorway, their foreheads licked by sweat. It is the afternoon, the day’s heat not even close to finished.

The man standing away from the door and by the wall has dropped his pen. It lies on the floor like a dead cigarette. The papers are still in his hand, pressed against the wall as though a table. He folds them in half, his face that of a student caught by a teacher for sharing a dirty note. The others in this soiled space murmur in voices the man still cannot understand. Their faces turn to him as one of the guards enters, handcuffs pulled from nowhere and now around the man’s wrists. The links jangle the happy tune of purpose.

No, he protests. No. Not yet. But I haven’t finished.

His words are as lost to the guards as their shouts are to him.

The papers fall from his hands, a silent descent to the floor as the man is dragged from the room, words of protest still emanating from his foreign tongue.

As those words are added and blended with all the others, the second guard steps in and picks up the sheets of paper. He unfolds them, studies them, leafs through each tattered one, the lines of his forehead creasing into a frown. Then he scrunches the pages into a ball. With a low laugh, he casts them out through the slitted window before bending down and pocketing the pen, his thumb resting over the end.

Click.

---