the stray

When I was on the cusp of becoming a woman – still just a young girl, of course, but “becoming a woman” is what we call it when a young girl is thrust alone into a bloody river and must find a way to survive – when I was on the cusp of this, my father found a feral cat in the woods behind our house and, being a biblical scholar, named the wild thing Ishmael. Ishmael had green eyes and tabby gray fur and despised humans. But Ishmael was hungry, and there is not much a hungry thing won’t do to be fed.

They formed an agreement, the man and the feline. He was permitted to see her so long as he kept the kitchen scraps coming – but he must never, ever touch her. On this she was firm. Should he try and break the contract, he would receive a hiss between incisors the likes of which he’d never heard. Crouched low on her haunches in the moonlight, she’d suck the meat from the bones of our dinner without taking her eyes off the threat of him, even for a second.

One evening, a plate of half-eaten cornbread in hand, my father followed a strange braying through the brush to find Ishmael incapacitated by birth pangs, glaring up from the ground to curse the offense of his presence. This is how we came to find out that, unlike her biblical namesake, Ishmael the cat was female. My father’s chance had come at last. He would save the wild thing.

She was in no state to protest when he returned with a cardboard box.

In our laundry room, life emerged and a mother does what she must: surrender to survive.

Days turned to weeks and weeks to months and when every last kitten had left in new arms, Ishmael found she still couldn’t deny that the house had food and warmth and bed and that those things were, it turned out, rather nice. But the house also had a door, which she made religious use of, so if she was trapped it was only by her own corporeal weaknesses.

Insofar as “tamed” means attached to humans, Ishmael never was; but over the years she became something between stray and domestic, often present but rarely proximate. She would tiptoe into a room, eyes wide, and my father would nod, pleased with his work, pleased with his own benevolence; a kind man.

My brother doted on her too, and she tolerated him best. “The cat whisperer,” my father christened him, repeating it with pride to anyone who would listen.

But me, I never tried to love Ishmael. We had other pets, other cats even, ones eager to cuddle or chase a laser pointer. We had other pets, ones who didn’t tell me where they’d come from or who they’d once been, ones who didn’t elicit vague sadness to look at. We had other pets, and I no longer played in the woods behind the house, for I was becoming a woman.