Poets Square

Poets Square

I moved in first, to the little brick house in Poets Square. Tim had a few weeks left in his lease and he was still packing his stuff, going through all his closets, scrubbing everything thoroughly enough to get his security deposit back. I had already abandoned my old place. My whole life had opened up to all the possibilities of our new house, our little rental, a place we had chosen together. I was ready for a wholly new kind of life.

I was sleeping on a bare mattress in what would become our bedroom. I was imagining all of it: the art we would hang on the walls, the speakers we would set up in the living room, the music we would keep on in the background. The way we would hide here, me and Tim, from everything happening in the world. It was a quiet neighborhood. No problems could reach us.

That first night in the new house I sat alone in the empty living room, every small sound echoing. The TV wasn’t set up yet; the internet wasn’t working. I spent the evening just listening, learning the noises of the neighborhood. There was a sound at the door that could have been the wind. A sound in the backyard. What sounded like footsteps on the roof.

I kept peering outside—was that the door rattling? a tap on the window?—but I couldn’t see anything. I might have thought I was imagining it, except my dog, Maggie, heard it too: her ears were swiveling again and again toward the scuttling sounds across the bedroom ceiling. I stayed up all night that first night, hearing the thumps against the trash cans in the driveway, watching the motion-activated floodlights flash on again and again. Every time there was no sign of anyone around.

The next morning—​my first morning there, in the new house—​I got up early and went outside, newly brave in the daylight, and the evidence was everywhere. Across the front step, the roof, the driveway: tiny pawprints.


Before we moved in together, Tim lived ten minutes away from me, in downtown Tucson, in an apartment building with a safe gated courtyard and a few stray cats always milling about. We had a favorite of the cats: a big brown one we called Mushroom Risotto. You can name a cat anything, Tim told me, and this had never occurred to me before. I would have agonized over a name, anxious to get it right. Tim could walk outside in the dark and see a stray cat and instantly name it after whatever we had eaten for dinner.

That was the summer the mountains were on fire. We could smell it from anywhere in the city, the low lingering smoke. The pandemic had begun and Tim and I were alone in our bubble, alone in our new relationship. I was spending every night at his apartment and from his building’s balcony we could see all of it: the ambulances screaming toward the hospital, the protesters outside the police station, the flames eating up the mountains. The cats ambling about the bushes below us, their occasional howls late at night.

That summer felt both fraught and easy, watching the world’s problems but feeling far away from them. The fires cutting through the forest—what could we do to stop them? I went to work and wore my mask and shielded myself from the smoke, and focused so singularly on myself, on Tim, on what my life could look like in our burgeoning relationship. I would have considered myself a good person then. I wasn’t the one who had set the mountains on fire. I spent every evening on Tim’s couch, watching him cook for me, savoring the safety of his gated building, his warm meals, his attention. Every night Tim would walk me back to my car and we would kiss in the dark and look for Mushroom Risotto, the cat, his wispy fluff disappearing into the dark. It was the first time in my tiny life that it felt like the world could end, and instead of doing anything about it, I was busy falling in love.


In daylight I followed the pawprints around the house, trying to figure out where a cat might have come from or gone, but there were too many prints to make sense of. I didn’t mention it to Tim, even after a few weeks had passed and he was sleeping in our new bedroom with me. Every night I could hear the cat—two cats? maybe three cats?—prancing across the roof, leaping from the fence, scurrying across the driveway.

I was always worried about ruining things. It was the first time in years it had felt like anything in my life had gone correctly, the first time I felt like I might get the chance to climb into bed and feel cozy and safe, with no cares, no responsibilities, nothing owed to anyone. It was probably just a neighbor’s cat.

The new neighborhood was quieter than my old one, and darker—there were no streetlights—and from the backyard I could see the stars better than in any other place I had lived. Every night after Tim went to bed I snuck outside in the dark and stood silently and stared at all the constellations stretched above me. I knew that I was waiting in the dark for something other than stars. If I stood still long enough, I would see them: the sets of glowing eyes, the rustling of a tail disappearing into the bushes. There were more than three cats. The movement along the roof, the dark shapes along the edges of the yard. In the dark we would regard each other, me and those infinite pairs of eyes.


Have you noticed, Tim said one morning, making coffee in our new kitchen, that there’s always a few cats around?

Yes, I said. A few.

The first cat I saw in daylight was gray and white, skinny and long-legged, and sound asleep on the hood of my car when I went outside to leave for work. Excuse me, I whispered to the cat, and when I jingled my keys his yellow eyes flashed open and he panicked, raising his back the way cats do, and ran. That night there was a black cat sitting on our front step when I got home. The next morning there was a fluffy orange tail disappearing into the bushes in our backyard, and a calico cat perched on the fence. Tim was still hauling boxes inside; we were still unwrapping mugs in the kitchen for morning coffee.

Oh yeah, he said, when I told him about the calico. I saw that one this morning. He pushed the blinds aside and peered out. Oh, he said. Not that one.

Sometimes I swear I could look out the window and see a single black cat sitting there, like an omen, and a moment later look again and see a white cat in his place. It felt like every time I blinked there was a new cat outside our house, like they were coming from a portal. I would go outside to check the mail and look up at the sky and see an enormous cat perched at the top of our tree, peering down at me. I would open the back door and come face-to-face with a slinky Siamese, her brown points like knee-high boots, her blue eyes completely crossed. It felt like we were on a prank show, like someone was waiting to see how many different cats they could leave in our driveway before we finally went insane.

I started taking notes, cataloging each cat. The white cat you saw this morning, I would ask Tim when we talked on the phone during lunch breaks, was it short-haired or long-haired? I had a little notebook, and I was cross-checking my notes. Long-haired, he would say, and not fully white. It had some orange on its tail.

That was a new one. I made a note.

Where are they coming from? Tim asked. Where do they hide? We had toured the house before we moved in and there hadn’t been any cats. In daylight they were still barely around. We asked our landlord, introduced ourselves to our new neighbors just to ask if they knew anything about the cats. I was a little afraid they’d say no, that maybe I was making it up. The landlord thought the cats might belong to a neighbor; she remembered there might have been strays in the area. Oh yeah, all the neighbors said, waving me away. There’s a few stray cats around.


Tim was making a lot of risotto those days, when we first moved in together. He loved cooking, and especially loved cooking one recipe again and again, homing in on the flavors, making small adjustments. My unrefined palate could never taste the differences, but Tim would nod or smack his lips, savoring each bite, understanding how incrementally he was making improvements. I envied Tim: how devoted he could be, how precise.

Nearly every night Tim would cook a big pot, leaning over the heat and stirring endlessly, while I lounged on the couch or puttered around the kitchen. I didn’t cook. It had always felt like a great failing of mine, that I could barely feed myself. It had been a while since I had felt cared for, and I sank into the feeling. I had spent years living in survival mode, living alone, and I was exhausted by it, with nothing left of me to care for anyone else.

And then suddenly there were these daily steaming bowls of buttery rice, cooked down to broth, the nutty mushrooms, the cheese Tim grated on top. The cozy house we suddenly shared. The cats outside. We had started bickering about them, just a little. I was worried about the cats, every one of them, even the ones I hadn’t even seen yet. There were at least a dozen of them from my latest count. How long had they all been surviving out there? Was I supposed to be feeding them? I was trying consciously not to assign them names, not to attach my heart to theirs.

By then it was September and the fire in the mountains was out, quenched down to a smoldering scar across the horizon. I could see it from our backyard, the burn scar, the stretch of red fire retardant dropped from helicopters. See? I would think, tucking myself into the bed we newly shared. They didn’t need my help to put out a fire. If I ignored anything long enough someone else would fix it.