padlocked the handles from the outside. Through the slits in the door, he burned his droop-dog, jaundiced eyes.
“If even an itch comes from you, I will kill your parents. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
He left.
The only sound was him running down all four flights. I may have heard a slight, slight talking as he opened the door to greet whoever was knocking, but I was so far up and closeted, I’m sure I only imagined whispers.
Cold silence, like in our house when Dad’s sister died. Stillness of all, sound bleeding from your ears. Where did my butterfly go?
I had not one clue who had arrived below. In a strained hope, I pictured a skeptical detective who wouldn’t believe the imbecile at the door wasn’t guilty of at least
something
. I contemplated blowing my vocal chords in blood-curdling screams and stomping and shaking and rattling my new cage. As it turns out, it’s a good thing I chose not to take any chances on sound.
When reality sunk in, I turned lengthwise within the cabinet and slid to sitting. I had a finger-width margin on both sides to wiggle for comfort. My pupils took thirty to forty seconds to adjust to this dim light, but then everything was visible, and with night-scope vision, that’s when I saw it. Like a diamond ring on a branch in the woods, an improbable fortune hung from a hook in the opposite corner: a one-inch-wide, three-foot-long segment of white elastic, the kind Nana would sew into the waistband of her homemade, polyester pants.
Nana
. I grabbed the elastic and placed it deep within my panties for safekeeping.
Asset #28, elastic band
.
Cat urine was the pervading scent of the closet, which triggered my gag reflex, but also made me think of my mother.
Mother is never wrong when she makes an affirmative statement. “There is a cat in this house,” she said once.
“We own no cat,” my father said, laughing.
But to my father’s assurances that her nose was only betraying her and to his suggestion that the rooms were simply stale having been sealed all winter, Mother protested, “There is a cat in this house, as I am the mother of this child.” She pointed to me in her passing tirade, as though I were Exhibit A; her non-pointingarm was on her hip, her back erect, neck high, chin tipped. “There is a cat in this house and I will prove it,” was her opening statement, delivered to her jurists: my father and me.
She grabbed my father’s flashlight, which he kept in a tool box he hid from her, for reasons such as the one unfolding. She searched until three a.m., upturning every closet, crawlspace, attic, shadow, and basement crevice; she poked cracks in the garage and hollow logs in the yard, high, low, loose, and light; she flipped everything until the bulb dimmed from white, to yellow, to egg-yolk orange, to brown, to gray, to black.
She unearthed not one cat whisker, yet every hour she’d proclaim to her weary jurists—which actually was only me by midnight—“There is a cat in this house and I will prove it.” The next morning, my father, the only soul permitted to reproach her, informed Mother she could not continue her “effort to fly faster than the speed of light or prove the existence of a non-existent cat.”
Notably, I never once denied Mother’s claim. I may also have guided her search.
While my father convinced my mother to stop, I slipped through our screen door and skated to a bald spot in a grove of white birch behind our house. Yellow dandelions carpeted this circular, open area, and so my hiding place was a yellow floor, white walls, and blue sky ceiling.
They didn’t know where I was.
I returned quickly.
I said nothing.
Mother continued her relentless insistence about a cat in the house.
The odor dissipated over the course of the week.
Still, I said nothing.
With the waning smell, so waned Mother’s interest. By the following Sunday, not a hint of cat vapor remained. Mother sat in her study in her pinched leather, Dracula’s throne chair,
“If even an itch comes from you, I will kill your parents. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
He left.
The only sound was him running down all four flights. I may have heard a slight, slight talking as he opened the door to greet whoever was knocking, but I was so far up and closeted, I’m sure I only imagined whispers.
Cold silence, like in our house when Dad’s sister died. Stillness of all, sound bleeding from your ears. Where did my butterfly go?
I had not one clue who had arrived below. In a strained hope, I pictured a skeptical detective who wouldn’t believe the imbecile at the door wasn’t guilty of at least
something
. I contemplated blowing my vocal chords in blood-curdling screams and stomping and shaking and rattling my new cage. As it turns out, it’s a good thing I chose not to take any chances on sound.
When reality sunk in, I turned lengthwise within the cabinet and slid to sitting. I had a finger-width margin on both sides to wiggle for comfort. My pupils took thirty to forty seconds to adjust to this dim light, but then everything was visible, and with night-scope vision, that’s when I saw it. Like a diamond ring on a branch in the woods, an improbable fortune hung from a hook in the opposite corner: a one-inch-wide, three-foot-long segment of white elastic, the kind Nana would sew into the waistband of her homemade, polyester pants.
Nana
. I grabbed the elastic and placed it deep within my panties for safekeeping.
Asset #28, elastic band
.
Cat urine was the pervading scent of the closet, which triggered my gag reflex, but also made me think of my mother.
Mother is never wrong when she makes an affirmative statement. “There is a cat in this house,” she said once.
“We own no cat,” my father said, laughing.
But to my father’s assurances that her nose was only betraying her and to his suggestion that the rooms were simply stale having been sealed all winter, Mother protested, “There is a cat in this house, as I am the mother of this child.” She pointed to me in her passing tirade, as though I were Exhibit A; her non-pointingarm was on her hip, her back erect, neck high, chin tipped. “There is a cat in this house and I will prove it,” was her opening statement, delivered to her jurists: my father and me.
She grabbed my father’s flashlight, which he kept in a tool box he hid from her, for reasons such as the one unfolding. She searched until three a.m., upturning every closet, crawlspace, attic, shadow, and basement crevice; she poked cracks in the garage and hollow logs in the yard, high, low, loose, and light; she flipped everything until the bulb dimmed from white, to yellow, to egg-yolk orange, to brown, to gray, to black.
She unearthed not one cat whisker, yet every hour she’d proclaim to her weary jurists—which actually was only me by midnight—“There is a cat in this house and I will prove it.” The next morning, my father, the only soul permitted to reproach her, informed Mother she could not continue her “effort to fly faster than the speed of light or prove the existence of a non-existent cat.”
Notably, I never once denied Mother’s claim. I may also have guided her search.
While my father convinced my mother to stop, I slipped through our screen door and skated to a bald spot in a grove of white birch behind our house. Yellow dandelions carpeted this circular, open area, and so my hiding place was a yellow floor, white walls, and blue sky ceiling.
They didn’t know where I was.
I returned quickly.
I said nothing.
Mother continued her relentless insistence about a cat in the house.
The odor dissipated over the course of the week.
Still, I said nothing.
With the waning smell, so waned Mother’s interest. By the following Sunday, not a hint of cat vapor remained. Mother sat in her study in her pinched leather, Dracula’s throne chair,
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