While you're sleeping, snug and comfy in your beds, dreams floating round in your head, do you know what your cat is doing at that wee hour, when moon has risen high, wind has stilled, leaving the air thickly perfumed with night flowers?
Apartment life is daunting at best. Small, cramped corners of life often limited to only one or two indoor cats per unit. This tale is about Necco and her feline neighbors. There are eight apartment units in Necco's building, seven occupied by cats, and one with a dog. Small, rat-like dog, but a dog none the less. No one ever spoke directly to the dog, only about it.
Necco, a pretty pale tortie with sparkling green eyes, spent many lonely nights during the winter, sitting on one windowsill or another, staring out into the starry, cold, darkness. All throughout the silent winter, Necco savored every thought, stored every idea, so that as soon as the warm summer nights came, and the windows were left open, she could have something to talk about with her neighbors.
Summer came late this year; one cold snap after another kept the nighttime windows closed all through June. Frustrated she paced, flew to each window in haste at every shadowy movement on the apartment grounds. Finally, finally, the weather mellowed out and the windows were left open. Necco sat on the wide bedroom windowsill, eagerly taking in great gulps air: scents of sweet, damp, earth, mingled with other scents floating in on the midnight air. Her guardians were asleep in their beds, their breaths slow and even, the soft whirl of the refrigerator could be heard in the kitchen, the low, slow, click, click, click, as the seconds ticked by on the living room wall clock. Her ears twitched quickly in every direction identifying each tiny sound.
"Necco, are you there?" a whisper floated down from the apartment above, barely audible above her own beating heart. Necco twitched her tail, perked her ears and leaned into the screen, hoping it would hold her weight. Markus, a black and white, lived above her. He too had waited seemingly endless nights for the windows to be left open to the outside air. "It's me, Markus," he called in a low whisper. His guardian was a woman who lived alone and rarely left her windows open all night. "Has Thorny come by yet?"
Thorny was a large, charcoal gray and thick black striped, roaming tom that lived somewhere out there in the darkness. There was no single home he permanently called his own. He was a roamer, a charmer, too, there were many homes in the neighborhood with willing humans that claimed him, fed him, caressed him, and talked to him as if he were human, too. Thorny knew everyone and everything in the neighborhood, and he was the apartment cat's only source of news.
Another voice whispered into the warm, fragrant air, "Necco? Markus?" it croaked. Frog was duly named because he had once been strangled on the Venetian blinds cord when he was a little guy. The little orange tabby was only eight weeks old at the time. He'd been bouncing in and out of the windows with glee, pawing the dangling cord until his hind legs slipped out from underneath him, he floundered in midair by the neck, gargling and gasping for breath. His guardian had heard him choking and rushed into the room, untangling him just in the nick of time. Life number one was nearly over by the time she revived him. No one remembered what his real name was. Just Frog is all anyone new him by. His vocal cords had been damaged and he would forever croak instead of mew.
"Frog!" Necco and Markus greeted him in unison. "Have you seen Thorny, yet?"
Frog pushed his head into the screen, sidling into it to get the maximum view of the parking lot. "Nope, not yet, I'll go look out the living room window."
"Let's all go to the other side," Necco suggested, "we can talk better in there, less chance of waking our guardians."
Each cat silently dropped from the bedroom window, sped down the hall and leaped stealthily into the front room windows. Thorny had just come into view, the full moonlight shimmering off his shiny, stripped coat, prancing heavily through the dew covered grass.
More heads pressed against window screens as he came within talking distance. Fluffy Girl, a pleasant Himalayan lived upstairs across the hall from the dog, which lived above Frog. Downstairs under Fluffy Girl was Kattie Kat, a broad tailed tan and cream Maine coon with deeply lined blue eyes. Prissy, a tiny, orange powder puff, of unknown origin lived across the hall from Markus, and above TBC (Troublesome Black Cat). An elderly widowed man was his guardian.
All of the humans living there were fifty-five an older; the apartment complex purported to be a Senior Village. Necco was the only one who still had two guardians; all the others in the village were single.
By the time Thorny reached the main patio and comforted himself under the golden glow of the round patio light, seven dark figures were perched upon window sills, ears trained towards the tom, waiting for the news. Stories flew from the windows to Thorny, from Thorny to windows. Necco and her friends lived in building four. Building three, set at an odd angle to building four, gained some new tenants over the winter months. Necco had seen a catly shadow in a window or two on occasion. Now Thorny was telling the cats in building four about the cats in building three, building two, and even building one. Nanny, an old momma cat in building one, had to go to the vet; she had a cough and never came back. The human, Mrs. Wassel, in building two, had fallen and broken her leg. Her children were moving her into an assisted living home and she would not be able to keep her cat, Freckles. In building three, Mrs. Korn's husband died and the management was forcing her to move into a single, one bedroom unit. Something about a couple needing her handicapped apartment was the reason. The news of that move had all the humans in a stir. Would anyone else who lived alone, and in a two-bedroom unit, be safe? It was a puzzle because every apartment in building three and four were two bedrooms and Necco's apartment was the only one now occupied by a couple. A new manager had come in during the winter and made so many new rules and changes that some of the older tenants had gotten sick over the shakeup and had to go to the hospital. Necco reflected about how disturbed her guardians had been by some of the things going on in the Village over the winter. But just last month, the new manager was fired. The newer, new manager, however, wasn't all that much better. There was still no rhyme or reason for the constant turmoil management kept the elderly tenants in.
Soon the moon had begun to set, the stars were fading in the dark-turquoise sky; Thorny had rounds to make, territory to claim and protect. "Too bad," he shook his massive shoulders and licked the fur on his spine back into place, "about Freckles, I mean. Nice old tom, doesn't have too much longer to live, himself. He's got to be near ninety-two by now (nearly 19 in human years). To have to find new guardians in his late years…" Thorny scratched a flea behind his left ear and shook his head, "just too bad…he'll probably end up getting…the you know what," he pressed his lips together and tried to talk out of the side of his mouth in a way that young Prissy couldn't hear him, "get the needle…" Six of the cats shuddered; they knew what the needle meant. They'd all visited the vet and heard the stories. Prissy was clueless.
Thorny bid them all a goodnight, or good morning if you chose to look at the hour. The cats sat in their windowsills for a few more moments, trying to talk to each other without seeing each other. Not one of them had ever seen what the other looked like. Only what they sounded like, or sometimes when the breeze was just right, what their scents said about them. Things were changing in their little neighborhood.
Now that the windows were open at night, Necco looked forward to Thorny's, and maybe one or two of his friends, visits around three o'clock in the wee hours of the morning and give them tidbits of neighborhood life.
The names and places have been changed to protect the felines and their guardians. What is your cat doing at three AM…do you know?
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