Kenny is trying to sit on my computer. She’s purring beside me, her little pink nose with its black specks as if she’s sniffed the pepper, the run of short fur in a diamond to a ridge at the bridge like two soft oceans meeting, her twitching ears, those eyes that blink. She has one orange ear, one black, the rest of her white but dappled in patches, she has a tortoiseshell tail. She’s assumed loaf position, her whiskers so close to my wrist I can feel her breathing. She thinks it’s amusing, the way I’m typing carefully so as not to disturb her pose. I woke thinking of Tabitha Twitchit, her photograph is on the windowsill in the bathroom in a silver woven frame. The Queen of my childhood, a silver tabby about whom I laid the silver, I carried her on my shoulders, she slept on my pillow, her purring would put me to sleep. I learnt to cut hearts for her supper, the slime of red and the ventricles rubber, the smell of them short, a musk of lukewarm death. Sometimes she’d have cod instead. Cats settle where I settle, when I came here we brought Thomas from a newsagent where we’d stopped to buy tobacco and she gave birth soon after to six kittens then moved out to live in the barn. Like Ivy who gave birth to Rosalee Parks, became persona non grata in the kitchen and did the same. The barn is rented to a builder, Ivy’s always preferred men. I’ve made a nest for her under a large stone flower pot, it has something of the Greek temple to it, I leave food out. The builders are starting to get the hang of her. They’re happy they’ve inherited a cat. She will become their ratter. Kenny has put her paw on the bed table. She rests her head on her leg. I’m told the rhythm and tempo of a cat’s purr is the exact tempo used by machines in hospital to promote the healing of tissue. If I can sleep with my head nestled against that beat I am happy. I feel the waves of her breathing through my bones, her cheek is against the table, that drumbeat of cat rumbling through my blood, healing worry and pain and ancient hurts; she is mending, all the time she is mending.
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My daughter has ended up with ten !! I’ve only had one growing up and he was as mean as can be. Then a rescue when my daughter was little. She named her 777 🤣😂🤷♀️
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