Free The Heaven of Animals: Stories by David James Poissant

He’d never seen one, a heart monitor, except in bad movies, the kind with the green line and sonar beep that meant the coma patient’s heart was still beating. Stumbling, calling for Boots, Brig waited for the line to fall flat, bugs cut off in a sudden, strangling hush, like birthday candles blown the fuck out.
    He was high.
    And Boots was gone. Or hiding. Or in the belly of some other animal already.
    “She’s an indoor cat,” the woman had said. Pampered, spayed, declawed, the cat had never set so much as one paw out-of-doors. “She’s my little sweetie.” The woman ruffled the cat’s mane with one liver-spotted, skeletal hand. A diamond ring collared her fourth finger, and Brig wondered how long she’d been widowed.
    He wondered now how long she’d had the cat. Divorced, he’d considered a dog for companionship, but work made it impossible. Had Boots perhaps been a dead man’s replacement? Had Brig lost more than a cat? Had he lost a husband substitute?
    The joint burned his fingertips, and he dropped it, stomped it out. He sat and put his head in his hands. He stood. The palm trees spun. He made one more trip around the apartment complex and wound up back at the lamppost where he’d first found Lily. He touched the pole. He shook it, but it was too deep in the ground to move. He looked up. Bugs crowded the light, dive-bombing and circling. A black-shelled beetle head-butted the bulb a half dozen times before hitting the sidewalk. Caught on its back, the beetle squirmed, wings folding and unfolding beneath it, legs pedaling air.
    He watched the beetle a long time. He hated bugs, the grotesquery of mandible and eye, antennae twitching, the threat, always, of flight.
    Come on, he thought. Come on . But the beetle couldn’t get itself turned over. Brig couldn’t leave it, couldn’t touch it either. Grass grew from a crack in the sidewalk, and he plucked a blade. He tried to flip the beetle over with the blade of grass, but the insect was too heavy. He was pushing it across the concrete. He stopped. He worried he’d hurt it, worried he’d torn up the beetle’s wings. Then the legs, searching, hooked the grass, and the beetle turned itself over. For a moment, it rested, then its back unbolted like the doors of a DeLorean, wings flickered, and the beetle lifted off.
    Brig had no idea what time it was. It was still night, no warmth, no sunrise softening the sky. Tomorrow, he had a meeting in Tempe that he’d skip. He’d skip the whole week, maybe. Maybe take a month off. He could make it a month on credit cards, but this would cost him. In the long run, he’d pay twice as much.
    Or not. Every few weeks, in the mail, he got an offer, another card with zero interest on balance transfers for twelve or eighteen months. He knew a guy who’d open an account, move his debt, then, a year later, move what he owed again. It was a migration that had been going on a decade, and, in this way, he’d stayed out of debt. Brig could do this, and he wondered why he hadn’t, why he let his several thousand dollars fester on a three-year-old Visa and an even older MasterCard, both with shitty interest rates. Filling out an application would take ten minutes. Instead, each month, he wrote two more checks.
    His own laziness impressed him—triumphant laziness, laziness in the face of clear, available solutions.
    He pulled his key ring from his pocket and found the neighbor’s key. He crossed the parking lot, stopped at her door, and let himself in.
    Same floor plan, the apartment was a mirror image of his own. The furnishings, however, were exquisite, walls crowded with dressers, bookcases, a desk of dark, carved wood. It was an apartment trying to hold everything once held by a house. Inside, the smell was cat and potpourri. A low table stood beside the door. A lamp stood on the table, and he pulled the chain.
    On the kitchen counter, by the sink, six cat food cans were stacked like hockey pucks. A page of handwritten