Stray Cats

Every day is a sunny day in Modesto and I am smoking a cigarette on the roof while watching the clouds drift by. Who still gets married at twenty-three? I did, dressed like I am now, just not barefoot. In a pointelle tank-top and blue jeans, just turned twenty-three, just graduated summa cum laude with no future ahead of me because I am your wife. I took that class on Zoom, never went to the doctor for them to take pictures of my neck like they had told me to, and wrote that letter for your lawyer to give to the district attorney and it’s all over and now I am your wife. 

You’ve been peaceful since we got here and we never have sex. In the mornings I drink my coffee black and smoke. When I get hungry, I eat yogurt mixed with diced guavas from the tree in the front yard. They smell like body odor, the seeds are large, and they aren’t sweet. Then there’s odds and ends from the Dollar Tree. Saltines are my favorite. I write, I do workout tapes, I clean to keep the cockroaches away. No matter how much I clean, the house never stops smelling like them. I never see them, but it keeps me up at night to think that they’re between the walls or underneath the floorboards somewhere, finding something to eat, fucking, having babies, sneaking in when I’m not looking. 

A cloud with a tail like a cat is passing by slowly. When we first came here from San Jose, you brought a stray cat with us that you’d found eating garbage behind your work. We put him up in the office for a while, trying to tame him. But after a month, he never stopped being scared and you still couldn’t handle him without oven mitts. You decided to set him free. How strange that must have been, to be set free into new streets. You tried to help him with the best of intentions but he was so much worse off for it. 

I remember crying onto your knee after work. “I just want to rest, I just want to rest, I just want to rest.” 

And that’s when you said that we should get married. But I didn’t come here to start a life with you. I came here to hide. 

When I was little and I had been cut by something, I’d hide it from my mom because I hated to see her reaction, the big drama of it all. It didn’t even hurt. I didn’t want a Band-Aid. I wanted to bleed without anyone seeing red. 

I hear your car pulling up the driveway. I want to be alone right now. I put out my cigarette and climb down the ladder. I go in through the office door. I can hear that the engine of the car is still on. I walk through the hallway and into our bedroom, where, like I said before, we never have sex. I go into the closet, shut the door, and sit down on the ground. 

You call out to me a few times and then you call my phone. I pick up. “I’m in the closet, I just want to be alone right now.” 

I can hear you pacing. 

“Do you want to talk?” 

“Not really.”

“Okay. I love you. We’ll talk when you’re ready.” 

I like the feeling of the hardwood floor on my cheek. There’s a difference between coolness and coldness, and I like when things are cool. I like being left alone but I don’t like being alone. 

After about half an hour, I pick myself up and I open the door. You’re there and you’re holding a knife to your wrist. “Stop that,” I say with the same irritation as a mother who has caught her son picking his nose. 

“Help me,” you wail, face already wet with tears. 

“Give me the knife.” 

“You don’t love me.” 

I grab your thick, hairy wrist with one hand and try to pry the knife from your fingers with the other. Your grip is firm, I guess you’ll let go when you decide to. “Stop it, give me the knife.” 

“You don’t love me.” 

I grimace. “I do love you,” I force out. 

“You want to leave.” 

“Please, just give me the knife. I didn’t mean what I said this morning. I’ll stay.” 

The struggle for the knife is slow. We’re pushing our weight against each other, and you turn me around towards the wall and then push me across it until I’m seated on the bed. I keep trying to pry the knife from your fingers. “Give me the knife.” 

You don’t say anything. We’re moving like we’re slow dancing. Muscle against muscle and you have more at twice my size. You’re getting me wet with your blood, sweat, and tears dripping down on me. I can’t help but snarl. All I feel is disgust. Am I really going to witness something this time? You’ve got your hands wrapped over mine with the knife between my hands pointing at yourself. You start leaning forwards. “Stop it, I’m going to scream.” 

“You don’t love me,” you howl. 

“I love you. I do love you,” I say with a surprisingly honeyed tone. I use my leg to try to push you away, but you keep leaning towards me. You’ve got me on my back. “I’m going to scream and then the cops are going to come again.” 

“You were going to leave.” 

Your tears are falling into my mouth and it makes me gag. “I never said I was going to.” 

“You said you wanted to.” 

“I changed my mind. Come on, I’m going to scream.” 

The tip of the knife is pressing into the fat of your stomach. 

“Don’t leave me.”

“I won’t, I promise.” 

And then it’s over. 

You take me home the next day. It’s your idea. You’re pretty cool about it, actually, and it’s a nice drive. After a few days at home, I break things off, and after a full twenty-four hours of you blowing up my phone, that’s over too. I have nightmares where you’re on my chest and I can’t get you off. Love was never what made me stay. 

As a little girl, around the same time that I realized that the universe was infinite, I used to cry for Satan because I didn’t understand why he couldn’t be saved. My mom could never explain it to me in a way that I truly understood, just like the infiniteness of the universe. 

That’s how I had to resolve who and what you were in my mind to have my peace, by seeing you as evil, as a demon. But, neither one of us quite human, you were experimenting with me the same way I was experimenting with you. You understood love as catching a stray cat and keeping it safe from its own wildness, and you decided to test that theory. We were gamblers, the both of us, playing a high-stakes game of house. But we were just playing for chips, no real danger of going broke. When you picked me up by my neck you did it like a professional stuntman, firmly enough that the weight of my body didn’t pull me apart too much and so that it didn’t hurt me. I felt like laughing then. 

But cages are cages and sometimes stray cats never go tame.

Sara Ulrika Holopainen is a writer living in San Jose, California. Follow her on Substack.