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~*~
Gold doesn’t like cats.
He’s never liked them. Slinky and ambiguous, noses in the air and eyes too wide and clever. The way they tremble before they leap. The way they kill without kindness, but an efficiency all the same.
Intellectually, it is strange of him, since they are a type of animal and not a monolith, and because he knows that if someone were to try and describe him as a beast of some kind, a cat would surely be the first to spring to mind.
But part of him remembers too well what it was to be a mouse.
~*~
It’s fitting then, he supposes, that it doesn’t even look like a cat when he finds it. He hears it first, a high, reedy sound. For a moment, it freezes his heart, sounding too much like the dimly recalled echo of a tiny human child, like one left too long in a crib while its mother is elsewhere.
But he opens the door and it’s no child at all. It is wet and clumped and muddy and the eyes are far too large for its face.
It ruins his best towel and soils his favorite chair and leaves long, deep welts on his wrist when he tries to wipe away the mud. It is uncivilized and ungrateful and he names it Simba because it is orange and has too much fur around its head.
~*~
Once it is clean, it is more respectable. He has no idea if it is male or female but he learns cats do not actually drink milk and that it will eat potato chips if it can reach them.
If anyone notices him buying the cans of ‘Fancy Feast,’ they do not say a word. Simba, too, does not say a word when he tosses the disgusting smelling rot into the garbage disposal before removing a bit of meat from the fridge. There was nothing fancy nor festive about it and he begins bringing home better quality things. After all, Simba catches the mice that had been eating his dry goods, and so deserves a reward for his labor. Equivalent exchange.
~*~
One night he lays across his sofa, too tired and sore to tackle the stairs to his room, and when he wakes in the night, sensing something unusual, he is surprised to find a small orange ball burrowed into the crack between his chest and the sofa back. One hand, hesitant, seeks out the starting point of the ball, and the head rises lazily, a snake to a charmer, slit eyes regarding him coolly. The strange sound that had woken him appears to be some kind of purring.
The next night, he leaves his bedroom door open.
When he wakes, there is an orange ball at his hip.
~*~
One morning, the food remains untouched.
He does not panic. He looks. Calls. Bends and stretches, even, looking over and under furniture. The broken screen is in the last room he searches.
The food remains untouched later that night.
And the next day.
On the fourth day, he settles down on the steps of his porch, not hunkered, not in tears. The wind is cold and whips at his face, is all.
At first, he is certain it is imagined, but it comes again. A soft, rickety sound, like a car unable to start. And there is heat against his hand, against his side.
He doesn’t move, only raises his arm, and lets Simba climb into his lap.