Cat Man

Me? Ow!

You’ve been sleeping in lately—I quite like that.

The way the room gets slow and blue around us. The way your arm finds me without looking and stays there. Heavy. Like a promise you forgot you knew how to make.

I knead at the blanket; you breathe through your teeth. I climb atop your sternum like it’s my own private loge seat. The light scales the wall; you ignore it; I don’t. We split the morning like a guilty pastry, letting the coffee die in the kitchen for sport.

No grand speeches. You breathe, I purr.

We maintain standards.

Dinner’s getting a bit petite, but you won’t hear me complaining. Svelte photographs, and I slice under your arm now, streamlined and couture. The lines stay clean, cuddles last longer, and we both can pretend this is about discipline and not indulgence.

But I especially like the way your thumb tests the ridge between my shoulders… almost like you’re making sure the blade’s still sharp.

It is.

You plate minimalism; I accept it gravely—then lounge longer to reward your taste.

At which point you go back to menacing the wallpaper.

Your phone lives face-down like a repentant aristocrat while the calendar cosplays a friendlier month and the laptop keeps its mouth shut like it knows better. Papers stack with the confidence of things that mean business, though they’ve rather mislaid their verbs. I watch you approach the desk—slowly; stoically; in the manner of men walking the perimeter of a pool they don’t want to admit is cold.

There’s an email subject lingering in the air like ozone; it’ll rain if you say the word.

Your mother’s name has learned to drift—there in a reflection, gone in a thumbswipe. Not unlike a donor plaque after a gala. You clear one square foot of desk with statesmanly gravity and appoint it governor with coin; keys; receipt. I drape myself over the keyboard to conserve the ghost-heat of industry and listen to the house think. Whenever the inbox coughs, we both do aristocratic deafness—it’s practically civic.

You touch the back of my head absentmindedly—once, twice, a third time—like a man counting something valuable in his pocket. And then you stop, as though such generosity might prove habit-forming.

Quite right. Standards must be upheld!

But do you remember how she used to sit on the floor?

No performance about it. Knees sharp like folded wings; forearms resting on thighs; a certain quiet in her wrists even you would have heard if you’d listened. She’d pat the carpet with that absentminded rhythm that makes a cat forget his pride, and I’d come crawling out for her every time—also because she didn’t narrate me back at myself, which is sort of how you pass customs here.

You laughed in your throat around her—low, like a man trying on someone else’s jacket and finding it fits. All engines and hymns.

Before bed she’d finger my spine like a prayerbook. You’d always toss me that stupid little glare—like don’t go soft on me, faggot!—and then proceed to do exactly that.

She practiced the gentle heresies. Left the door cracked; never named the weather; let silence settle into furniture. The house remembered her name without being told—still does in all those potions and lotions in your shower, and also in that refrigerator situation straight out of Kitchen Nightmares, and in that spectral pink nightgown hanging judgmentally on your bathroom door for it has to be over a year now, right?

I guess it’s her due for making you finally get rid of the last girl’s shit—these kinds of hauntings are sort of just priced in with you, eh? Well, at least this one’s benevolent; a protective spirit, not unlike the mother in 13 Ghosts. The notion soothes me.

Especially when the front door keeps picking up new accents; when heels far higher than they need to be keep negotiating just a bit too loudly with the hallway; when our home is filled with affectless murmur one night and pure affect stepdaughter giggles the next. The smiles have too many teeth; the eyes forever estimating square footage—and at some point, inevitably, drifting down into my own.

They always want my blessing up front—a bit like how tourists expect the cathedral to meet them halfway. And so I’ll offer the ecclesiastical blink, and then a single courtesy lap… and then nothing. Small cruelties here and there help keep culture afloat.

Of course they like your jagged edges; love the story they tell themselves about what it means to have bled on them. And you indulge them; extend the shit-eating smirk with fuse tucked in—the one that sends women your own age scampering for the door.

When the world was smaller and softer they’d orbit your flame like moths—called it chemistry (I sat beneath a chair rolling my eyes calling it set design). But things have changed with these Interns to Apocalypse, so keen and capricious and lethal with captions. There’s always a coin-toss there, and it’s always decided by the moon.

Now, most of them just want to scratch a werewolf between the ears. And some just want to play at being pork belly. But others—the affectless and naught-but-affect, both the dead- and saucer-eyed—they react differently when you roar at them, don’t they? All they see is that late-bloomed mask that still has its price tag swinging.

And on some level that’s always been your problem. You’re so fucking legible…

Like, by all means call yourself “Cat Man” if you want. It’s cute—I’m flattered, truly! Only it’s actually important that you realize it gives ‘philosemitic evangelical’ in this situation, because at least last I checked our kind are ambush predators.

I mean, have you ever interrogated why that realtor with the baby voice never let me near her gormless little chihuahua? Why even her successor’s German Shepherd acted skittish around me? Like, obviously weight class exists—so do risk profile asymmetries. And anything up to cheetah will always purr pretty for an elephant seal… but what do you think happens when that cheetah’s actually just a sabertooth with bulimia?

Look, it’s not a hanging offense—amidst our first months together it even landed as a point in your favor given that I’d long been Belle of the Ball at that silly cafe (btw what ever happened to the girl who came with—the quiet one? I rather liked her…), and like any vain young queen didn’t much relish the idea of losing my courtiers. But we also weren’t on the iceberg then; you were just playing Hungry Hungry Hippos, as artfully as one does, and while the lion might smirk at the hippo all day you can bet your ass he respects him… the way I obviously still respect you—and love you—clearly!

At the same time… well, I’ve watched you sleep from the beginning, and it’s really only been over the last few months or so I’ve started licking my chops despite myself.

Yet none of those shivering kitties on the iceberg seem likely to eat your big fat head any time soon, and at this point I’m more concerned you’ll regress to something even less animate—some chthonic old iguana collecting moss in a dark and fetid fishtank, his precious few moments of ambulatory conscious life spent entirely on eating bugs.

That can’t happen, bestie—it won’t happen.

You know you talk in your sleep sometimes? Half-lines, little whispers to someone offstage and unimportant... I file them away like scraps of shorthand.

In the window, the city does its one good trick—lights slurring, sirens practicing their scales—and the room catches that haunted hum you pretend not to love. I pad to the door and back, a circuit like a ward. And when you lift your hand and forget to lower it, I step into it, because in spite of myself I am susceptible to old-world courtesies.

We do not discuss progress; merely enact it in small and elegant ways.

And we keep a tidy ship where we can. Two plates retired to the sink like veterans of a good and righteous war; one glass stationed by the bed as if the night demands a watchman; boots reclined against the wall like old conspirators.

You breathe, I edit.

Misplace a key? I forgive you with my entire body.

Because we maintain standards here—clean paws, clean lines, no panic. Nudge, don’t shove; rearrange, don’t renovate. We’re civilized men, and respect a soft correction.

And if the world knocks? We’ll let it sit in the hall a minute. It’s not going anywhere. There’s enough here to work with—blankets with provenance, a window that keeps secrets, a cat who understands optics.

I’ll hold the line and keep the jokes dry, and you can handle whatever it is you’re telling the ceiling with that look. We’ll call it even.

The litter box is stacked thigh-high with shit.