AMY L CORNELL

Cat Lady

You can’t say exactly how it felt to be sitting there in your armchair when the news report comes on about the cat house. There you sit, watching the evening news, three, no four, states away from your old street, and NEWS8 shows a three second shot, taken from the air, from a news chopper, of the roof and yard of this old 50s bungalow you used to know, and there, also, you can barely see your parent’s old house as well, peeking out on the far left of the screen.

Three men in hazmat suits come out of the bungalow carrying what looks like boxes of coats, but you know it is not coats, it is cats. Dead cats and alive cats and though your house smells perfectly clean like toilet bowl cleaner and boiled eggs, you suddenly smell cat piss across four states which reaches your nostrils like it used to when you mowed the lady’s lawn.  She gave you $5 for an hour of work which was pretty good money back then. The lady, you never knew what to call her, the cat lady, would come to the door with a cat on her shoulder and a cat running figure eights around her feet and hand you the money from a coin purse she kept on a string around her neck, the cat smell baked right into the five-dollar bill.

When you mowed the yard, it always felt like one of those hidden picture puzzles from the Highlights Magazine: Can you find the 27 cats in this picture? As you mowed, they were in the garden around the hydrangeas, between the slats of the fence, and perched under the bird feeder. And those cats would move gracefully away from the whirring blades of your mower as you chopped her grass every week. 

In the three seconds it takes you to realize that this image on the news is the very same cat lady house of your youth, you also realize that something creepy must have happened in the house if the national news is showing men in white protective suits exiting the bungalow carrying dead things and live things in boxes and you are able to see the images because of high powered cameras on helicopters whirring above the tree line and being broadcast to you via satellite four states away.

You suddenly realize that you feel nostalgic. The memories of cats and that smell has haunted your dreams and you never understood why until Chopper 8 flashed you this news. You had been at that house, surrounded by cats and all that hair, and you had never thought it odd, except now you remember that the lady had a worn spot on her dress, every dress, on her right thigh, where her hand would naturally lie, rubbing the thin fabric under her bony wrist as though even then she was worried about this day.

Amy L Cornell recently received her MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She has been published in The Artisanal Review, Bloom Magazine and The Hemlock Journal. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.