The runner-up in this year’s The Moth Short Story Prize, chosen by Louise Kennedy
Our cat has gone missing and I know something beyond dreadful has happened to her. The love I feel is so zany and powerful and all-consuming that it’s turned me finally fully enragedly mad. I haven’t slept for six days and more nights.
Most of all I’m really upset because my ex, who died last year, would be all over the cat now, rubbing, plámássing, bullshitting her. She was wrong about him, that none of what happened really happened. The cat used to face away from us for a bit of privacy but pin her pervy ears back to take in the bump of human noise. So funny! Me and him, crikey, so many recipe-book dinners and night-long discussions at the Formica table – which countries in Europe to travel to, by what brand of train, and when. Always about the next big thing and the next kick and the next clandestine high. Right manic asshole. The cat knew it. She knew more than me. I hadn’t read any of the signs at all.
The cat was right. Harry ended up with stomach cancer and at first tried to pawn it off on my vegetarian grub. ‘The doctor said it might well be connected to what I was eating.’ Fuck right off! Nothing to do with the three bottles of red wine a night, drowning out that narcissism with giddy highs, all those teeming new ideas? Thinking of when he could fool me next to get away somewhere fabulous with that geebag. ‘I know this alien invader could kill me,’ he wrote.
The first weekend Sarah got in touch to tell me what was going on, Mrs Miggins didn’t leave my side. Ironically, this woman Harry had replaced me with said she had endured ‘so much’ in the acquiring of him, and therefore from both of us by proxy, that all she wanted now was some time for them to be happy. ‘You need to stop ringing him about the cat,’ she said.
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