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CHANCE THE CAT: DAVID MEANS

January 22, 2024

The New Yorker

Does it matter that a cat story resides solely in the body of a cat, remaining neutral as the creature moves through the landscape, operating on pure instinct, and, no matter what, embodying the projected will of the human?

- DAVID MEANS

There is little else that the cat can do. All one can do is attempt to watch the animal as it performs its actions, with time suspended and meaningless. As it does, the painful history from the first to the last, the dirt back roads, the chains, and the rattle of iron, are voided in the cat—that dusty old symbol, the red open mouth at the end of a Poe story, a freakish shadow, razor teeth crying behind a wall.

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What matters is that they were walking that day in opposite directions along the same path, with the neo-Gothic buildings of the university framing a sombre Chicago sky. There was William’s smile and then his voice as Kayla heard it for the first time. She was from a place called Sparks, not far from Reno, a neat little bungalow house on a street snaked with asphalt seam sealer. There was an exchange of words, an adjusting of bodies into casual positions and a forward movement, slightly dancelike, as they talked. It was his freckles, and the frankness of his eyes, and the commonality of the place where they met, too, the way their paths crossed into the initial physical contact—he was looking at his phone when he bumped into her, sent her staggering back—and the comic aspect of the way their bodies touched that afternoon.

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What matters is that a few weeks later the two of them found him on the corner of Fifty-third and Woodlawn, a street cat with matted black fur and a smear of white cutting across his face at an odd angle that broke the symmetry of his features but made him oddly beautiful. His paws were bloodied and his eyes bloodshot and, when she went to him, he let himself be lifted into her arms and then he relaxed, sagging. It was a cool fall night. “I want to keep him,” she said, and he said, “Yeah, let’s keep him, yes,” and they took him to her apartment.

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