Free Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper

one of Sarah’s dresses from her “going-out” days, dull gold with a white diamond-shaped pattern on it. I remember thinking, that day when Sarah tried on all her fancy bird-clothes, that I’d never seen Sarah look prettier than she did in this dress from when she was younger than Laura is now.
    I creep cautiously toward the dress, kneading at it with my front paws to make it into a more comfortable shape. Already I can tell that having something soft with that good, familiar, Sarah-and-me-together smell to lie in is going to make it easier for me to sleep tonight. Laura continues to crouch in front of the closet, and when I look up from the dress, her eyes are looking into mine again. We look at each other, and then, very slowly Laura closes her eyes and opens them again. This was something Sarah did, slowly close and open her eyes when I was looking at her, and I feel a rush of exhaustion wash over my body. As my eyelids droop Laura slowly blinks at me again.
    My eyes close into sleep so quickly that I don’t even hear when she leaves the room. It isn’t until the next day—when I wake upafter having slept late into the morning for the first time since I can remember—that I realize some things are the same everywhere. Even here in this foreign country, all the way on the other side of the world from the home I was raised in, somebody has taught Laura the correct way to speak cat.

4

Prudence
    J OSH AND L AURA KEEP SAYING HOW UNUSUAL IT IS FOR THERE TO BE snow so late in April, but that’s just what happened this week. A giant snowstorm came in with such hard wind that it blew the snow sideways. Back in Lower East side, you would have been able to hear the wind howling through the cracks between the window frames and the wall. It was odd to see so much wind outside while inside, the apartment stayed silent.
    Sarah used to laugh when I would press my nose against the windows during snowstorms, trying to catch some of it on my paw. Even knowing I couldn’t get to it through the glass—and even knowing how cold and nasty the snow would be if I
could
get to it—the urge to catch some as it fell was irresistible. Laura and Josh went to their offices anyway, even though it was snowing so hard. With nobody here to laugh as I batted at the windows, trying tocatch snowflakes, suddenly didn’t seem like as much fun as it used to be.
    The day it snowed, Josh came upstairs to my room with the Sarah-boxes to pull out his and Laura’s heavy winter coats from the back of my closet. He’d thought they’d put them away for the year and wasn’t expecting to have to wear them again so soon. He also wasn’t expecting to find so much of my fur clinging to the wool. He complained to Laura about it, which just seems unreasonable. After all, my fur is what keeps
me
warm, so having some of my fur on their coats could only keep Laura and Josh warmer, too. Really, Josh should be
thanking
me, if you think about it.
    Not that most humans know how to show cats the gratitude we deserve.
    Josh asked Laura if maybe they should start closing the closet door to keep me out, and the fur on my back twitched hard at the thought of losing my favorite dark, cozy sleeping place. But Laura laughed and said it would be easier to move the coats to another closet than to get a cat to change her habits.
    Two weeks after Laura gave me Sarah’s dress to sleep with, things between us haven’t changed a lot. It’s true that I’m sleeping
much
better than I was, now that I have something that smells like Sarah and me together to curl up with. I also spend a lot more time downstairs, now that I’m more used to things. Laura’s eyes have a way of following me whenever she looks up from whatever work papers she has in front of her. Sometimes her fingers bend and straighten, and I can tell that she’s thinking about touching me. She hasn’t tried to pet me so far, though.
    Nobody has petted me at all since Sarah went away, which seems like a long time