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She’d always been a cat of many homes and many names, passed around from place to place since she was a kitten. Sometimes she landed in the lap of someone who needed her a little bit more, a little bit longer than most, but still afterwards she’d always move on again for this or that reason she didn’t understand and didn’t resent – for she loved each new home as much as the last, although she missed those she had left behind. They were never cruel in the way that she knew humans could sometimes be cruel, and she was grateful to all of them for their kindnesses.
And so after she died she moved along again, and again. She didn’t know where all of her old homes were, although she sought them out in the houses in which they used to live; most of them had moved in the intervening years, but there were one or two that had remained, and she visited them regularly – sunning herself in the window of the only man who she had let pet the vulnerable curve of her belly, keeping the creeping reach of dark spirits away from the baby that her one couple of humans had since raised to adolescence with a growl and a well-timed swat.
Mostly, though, she wandered, finding new people to call home everywhere she went. Although they couldn’t see her or rub her ears, nevertheless she laid with her back pressed against them and purred, and when they fell asleep she visited them in their good dreams where she could twine around their legs and let them know that she had claimed them – and that they were hers.
Over the years she collected many people this way, and even re-found all but one of those who she knew in life who had wandered elsewhere. She watched over them for years until eventually, inevitably, the only ones left who she knew from her first life were the couple of ones that were babies back then - all now grown and doing their own wandering, and who did not remember her anyways.
And so she decided to roam once more. She gave a last, good lick at the hair of her new folks – all those who she had known only after her death, and who did not truly know her outside of that liminal space visited by both the living and dead in dreams – and rubbed her face against their faces, a promise that she would one day return.
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On a whim, she wandered farther than she ever had before. She crossed oceans in the way that cats on their tenth life can cross oceans, chasing the ghosts of seabirds and fish as she never dared in life and flicking her whiskers in acknowledgment to ancient shades of underwater behemoths long-dead.
There, on some distant shore, she met and made new homes – a family of eight, whose oldest daughter left milk out for her although she could not drink it and whose youngest stared and grabbed at her in broad daylight as only the most sensitive of children could, a man with one suit, an old suit, who moved so much that keeping track of him became a game for her - these and more she laid next to, purred at, and protected from dark specters in the night.
And among these – an old woman. She lived with a young tomcat who stared and growled at the cat of many names at first until he realized that she was not encroaching on his territory; although they occupied the same space, her territory lay on a different plane, one he did not yet have access to. And so he only flicked an ear at her or watched her without comment when she rubbed against his human’s legs and shook her tail at the old woman in unseen greeting.
When she manifested in the old woman’s dreams for the first time she rolled over and showed her belly, whiskers forward, all four paws in the air. The woman did not take the bait, instead kneeling and holding a hesitant hand over the cat’s head. The cat stretched her neck out in acquiescence, and the woman reached out with a trembling hand.
“Princess?” the woman said, shaky thumb running gently under her chin; the cat leaned into it, closing her eyes to show her appreciation of the gesture. “I remember you.”
And the cat of many names remembered the woman, too. Not by name, place – nor even her face, which was spotted and wrinkled now in happy shapes around the corners of her eyes and lips – but by the cadence of her voice as she spoke, the particular curl of her fingers around her ears when she gave them a good scratch or pet. In her youth she’d been gentle and considerate as few human children were, never tugging at her tail or grabbing at her unexpectedly.
And oh, she’d had such a good lap for laying on, the cat remembered, purring. The best.
The cat of many names – Princess, tonight – leapt gracefully into the lap of the last human left that had known her in life, and it was as perfect as she remembered. “I missed you, Princess,” the woman said, and smiled.
Princess purred louder, content. Tonight she was home, and tomorrow she’d go home again – for she was a cat of many homes and many names, and things were good.