Black Pussy

Black Pussy has passed.

I discovered he had left his body on Thanksgiving morning. I woke up to get my writing done and found him sprawled out on his side at the top of the stairs, his tail draped over the top step.

It was actually quite elegant.

Black Pussy and I found each other when I moved to Kansas City about fifteen years ago. At the shelter, he had been given the name Kydar. When I went to visit the kittens, he couldn’t be bothered. He was asleep on a cat condo, his tail draped over the side of the platform. Asleep on his back, he appeared to be dreaming of either flying or falling, and—whichever it was—he was having a blast. So I left him to it.

When an obnoxious orange tabby named Cowboy thought it was his destiny to come home with me, however, Kydar emerged from the Dreaming and stomped that shit. Kydar proved Cowboy wrong his destiny that day. And it was the first of many times he would prove me wrong. Whatever my imagination devised for him, he saw fit to defy it.

Such was the case with his name.

I had picked the nice, dignified name of Eisenheim for my new kitten. But this was much too big, stuffy and witless for him. But Black Pussy--now that’s a name that opens doors!

For the record, you can call a cat whatever you want: Cats always choose their own names.

They also choose their humans.

I’m grateful Black Pussy chose both.

My partner at the time had a basset hound I thought would be fun to train. And it was, except that Black Pussy picked up the commands more swiftly than the hound did. The hound, it turned out, thought the game was that Black Pussy would do what I said while he would reap the reward. To bust up their racket, I taught Black Pussy commands in another language—a language that exists in one of my story worlds.

He and I were the only ones who spoke the Language, as my fiancé Allen calls it.

I am sad to think I may never speak the Language with anyone again. But I never thought the one person I would speak it with would be a cat.

Black Pussy was not only bilingual. When he was young and small, he learned to ride on my shoulder. When he grew older and bigger, he draped across both shoulders. We learned to paint this way. And when he was not on my shoulders, he was threading through my every step. His orbit forced a mindfulness of footing, a gentleness and sweep of toe and heel. We learned to dance this way. He also loved to play fetch.

A few years after Black Pussy came along (he was about twenty-teen years old then), the lights went out in the relationship that brought me to Kansas City. I found myself alone for the first time in my adult life and in a city that was still strange and cold to me. Black Pussy was there to remind me I was never as alone as I thought. In caring for him, I learned to care for myself. He kept me dancing, helped me to paint. We found our own lights and kept each other warm.

Writing was never really his jam, but he gained a tolerance for it when he was forty-teen years old for reasons I’ll never know. I think it was a combination of my being still, shutting the fuck up, and drawing out the Dreaming without the two of us having to sleep. He also seemed to have realized that this peculiar activity was the place from which our Language had come. Somewhere in there, we picked up a bit of sorcery. For a while, I was the apprentice. He was a most excellent familiar.

Some years later, Allen and I met. I had just begun to date again after years of celibacy and was about to quit humans again. For good. I probably wouldn’t have given Allen a second thought were it not for Black Pussy. I mentioned I might have met a worthwhile human but that wine was easier; Black Pussy calmly and decisively slid my glass of wine off my desk and into my lap.

He may have also told me to stop being a stupid bitch. And that he was tired of my celibate bitch ass being in his face talking nonsense all the time and that I’d better get the fuck out, give him some fucking breathing room, and, yeah, date this guy or whatever the hell I was gonna do. Because, yeah, he was fifty-teen and sick of my shit.

He never seemed to regret this, even after Allen moved in with us and brought his cat, Broken Pussy, with him. Black Pussy was always somewhat dog-like; hence, Broken always thought he was a stupid bitch. He annoyed her most when he tried to remind her to play. She would not-so-calmly but quite decisively remind him that they were seventy-teen years old and should be spending these years napping, embezzling, eating free food, and bitchwatching.

It was handy that Black Pussy and I spoke our own language: We often discussed Broken’s sour attitude.

Lately, we had begun to discuss how maybe he was too big to be a cat for much longer. He remembered how I tried to name him Eisenheim and how that was just too big of a name for a cat. But it might be the perfect size for a person.

People, I reminded him, are not easy creatures. Our magic is to create; our purpose to be companions of the Creator. But to truly understand our magic and our purpose, we suffer, creating shadows until it forces us to see the light in ourselves. And that’s when the magic really happens.

He flopped on his back—his way of smiling. (His life was a double entendre.) “I’ve never heard something so stupid sound so smart.”

I’m not an easy person for humans to get. I’ve always felt closer to cats than other animals, because cats aren’t so easy for humans to get, either. More often than not, the cat gets the human first. Cats walk the edge of the seen and the unseen, of the material and the ethereal, of waking and of dreaming, of the actual and the fantastical.

Here, I know it’s hard to tell what of this is imagined and what of this was Black Pussy. Such is the nature of a cat. Such is my nature, too. If Black Pussy taught me anything (and he taught me much), it is that magic happens in the space where what most people call the real world meets imagination. And that world need not be one of suffering.

On our last day with him, Black Pussy helped me write, helped me paint. We danced. He tried to remind Broken to play and, just before bed, swindled Allen out of mucho cat treats. I didn’t cave to his demands for a saucer of milk (which, I must confess, I may always regret). That night, he went into the Dreaming. And he decided maybe he would stay for a while.

Or dream to be something else his next go-round. Maybe a person.

Maybe something bigger.

I am a bigger human (and maybe less of a stupid bitch) for having known him.