Work Text:
I don’t like to walk home from work. But when your car is broken down, your cell phone is dead and there’s no charger at your work, and it’s nearing midnight, you may as well walk. I put my dead cell phone in the driver’s compartment in my car and my keys in my trunk. I turned into a cat and walked home. I’m grateful it’s only a half mile between the fishmonger’s store and my home.
At night, I’m not expecting a car to notice a cat dressed in a chef’s coat, a trucker-style hat, chef pants, nonslip black booties, and a small sea-green neckerchief. But when I sense the blinding headlights of a car, or hear tires grinding on the road, I hide. I don’t hide often, but I manage to stay close to ditches and drains. They’re not perfect. The ditches expose you to people that may or may not shapeshift. The drains are clogged with trash even the people who adopted this road don’t want to touch. A few cars passed by me that night. I didn’t have to hide in a drain and no one noticed me in a ditch.
I told my girl if I’m not at home by a certain time to leave a bowl of cat food by the apartment’s back door. We live in a place where the landlord doesn’t allow pets. He didn’t say there was a ban on shapeshifters, though. And there was no ban on keeping a few cans of that foul-smelling Fancy Feast so-called “pate” inside the house. I wasn’t going to eat that pate.
I pushed the bowl around on the concrete porch that’s at the back of our apartment with my nose. The food bowl was a metal bowl. Of course it made a scraping sound. I heard my girl pulling apart the blinds to make sure I was there.
My girl saw me stretching out near that bowl of Fancy Feast pate I refuse to eat as she opened our back door. She opened our screen door and picked me up. I transformed into the Bess she knew me as, the fishmonger with the sea-green neckerchief who charmed her with a smile, a catfish wrapped in newspaper, and my number written on a picture of some politician I don’t care about.
My girl gave me a peck on the lips. “Bess, babe, you need to buy a new car.” She grabbed the keys to her car and the backup key for my car. “You can’t keep coming home looking and smelling like a chef who rolls around in grass. Can’t believe I just said that. And you need to leave a charger at work. What is it, about forty dollars for the cord and the plug? I don’t want you to come home hurt, babe.”
“But at least we’re doing the laundry together? And a shower?”
My girl laughed. “All right. After we get back. Come on. Car first, shower later.”
I smiled. Sometimes I put a smile on my girl’s face. And when I do, I always cherish it.