Lifespan, Lovespan & The Golden Storm

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Tara Flaherty Guy

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Lifespan, Lovespan

Lucy lies in a splash of late afternoon sun where it slants in through the patio door, warming the carpet and her soft grey fur. It is unseasonably warm for late October, and the patio door is open. The whispered shhhh, shhhh, of dry leaves blowing across the deck is a soothing sound, like a mother comforting a fretful baby. I would lift Lucy up and whisper that sound to her, but it hurts her to be picked up now; I can tell by the low sound she utters whenever I try. Moreover, she has gone completely deaf in the last few years, and my leaf-lullaby would go unheard. Her soft grey and pink ears no longer twitch and turn toward the slightest sound as they did in her youth; Lucy is 22 years old now. The grand old dame of our house has reached a remarkable age for a cat. And now she is dying.

In her wakeful moments, which are fewer and fewer, she watches the household goings-on
through half-closed eyes, placidly ignoring the other cats. No matter, she was never a favorite among them—she was always inexplicably an outcast, an interloper. Through the years her friendly overtures and inquiring sniffs were rebuffed, even hissed at. Given her sweet and malleable disposition, this is a mystery to me – one I will never understand. I once had a cat psychologist from the University come and observe the group dynamic. Several hundred dollars later, her company remained spurned by the other cats; there were no shared baskets, no furry limbs entwined in a drowsy tangle, never was she a maternal substitute for any of the various kittens who came and went. It has led to a rather solitary life for her, at least among her own kind. Gentle soul that she is, she has lived her whole life virtually friendless. Except for me.

So it is that in these, her last days, her dimming eyes seek me out, as though I were a
talisman, a mile marker, a touchstone. She watches me move through my days as though I were the sun and she the sunflower, turning, always toward me, as I move across her sky. I know with certainty and regret that I am her whole world.

The warm breeze gusts in through the patio door, and I hear the susurration of the
leaves again, a late autumn sound, sad and sweet. I lie down next to Lucy on the floor,
and put my face close to hers, reaching out to stroke her. I see with a small shock that there
are large tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. Surely a side effect of the various
maladies afflicting her, I think; but I’m suddenly struck by a memory that comes
unbidden, of my father’s last days, which also wound down amidst the muted golds and russets of all. One late afternoon I went to check on him and found him awake and weeping softly in the twilight of his sickroom. I bent over him and saw tears overspilling and trickling down his cheeks.

“What’s wrong Dad? Do you hurt somewhere?” Lucid for the first time in days, he
squeezed my hand.

“No, I’m just sad,” he said quietly and turned his face to the wall. He died the next day.

I wipe away Lucy’s tears, like I did for my dad, then I wipe my own, as the westering sun
sinks low on the horizon. A half-laugh, half hiccupping little sob escapes me as I imagine my dad’s faux umbrage at me drying the tears of of my old grey cat just as tenderly as I had dried his.

Maybe we all know when our days are near finished, I think. No matter our species. Suddenly I long for a world where love doesn’t always end in loss, where lovespan doesn’t exceed lifespan. I gently gather my old, deaf cat to my breast. She will not hear the leaves’ lullaby, but she will feel my heart beating next to hers.

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The Golden Storm

I am old now, rather long in the tooth as they say, but the memory is clear, intact, like a
dragonfly set in amber. I have heard it said I was about eight weeks old the day I met my sister,
Maggie, though naturally I would have no way of verifying this. It happened on the same
momentous day that the woman arrived and freed me from my grievous captivity.

The first I saw of the woman was when the Captor opened the door to our large chamber
and ushered her in, explaining, with a flair for the obvious, that this was the “Cat Room.” Inviting the visitor to make herself at home, the Captor turned and left, quietly closing the chamber door behind her. The visitor moved slowly around the room, opening our cage doors, speaking quietly, cajolingly. In fact, she was speaking Cat, with small mews, and chirps that are impossible to spell using the inadequate human alphabet, but might be best symbolized by, “Brrrrrrt!”

“Come on out,” She purred at me and my siblings. Instantly heartened by the kind, albeit
human face peering in at me, I disentangled from the furry pile of my entwined brothers and sisters, and in a giant leap of faith, sprang out of our cage directly at her. To her credit, her reflexes were as sharp as if kittens flung themselves at her bosom every day. They were not cat-quick, of course, but they were superior. She caught me, and held me to her breast, where I could feel her heart beating in a timbre which —though slower and with larger bass notes—reminded me of Mother’s heartbeat.

“Sadie,” She whispered. “Yes, you look like a Sadie,” She repeated, stroking my head,
massaging my ears and generally imbuing me with such a sense of security and it must be said, love, that I knew that she must be mine. And she was. Subsequently, though she moved around to the other cages in the room putting gentle fingers forward through other wire doors, she returned to me— our bond instant, undeniable, and irrevocable.

When the Captor reentered our chamber, the woman made arrangements, exchanging a
handful of the worthless green papers that they use for trading, in return for me. Gently placing me in a container-contraption with holes in the walls, and a swinging barred front door, we were soon in her conveyance, humming and bumping down the road toward what I intuited would be my destiny. I would be hers forever, I was certain of it, until one of us shuffled off this mortal coil.

The conveyance eventually slowed, then stopped, and I felt myself lifted aloft in my
container, and transported into a large, cool, unfamiliar space. I detected all manner of interesting scents and smells, which I was heartened to discover, did not include the ubiquitous cat-toilet smell I had been breathing for weeks. I couldn’t see her, but the woman continued speaking to me softly in Cat, as though to reassure me, which I remember appreciating, even as young as I was. She gently lowered my container to the floor, landing me softly upon plush carpeting. Once there, she gently pinched open the latch on my container and swung wide my prison door.

Encouraged by her continuous brrrrrrts and tiny mews, I tumbled with young kitten
clumsiness outside of the container. I remember staring rather dazedly around me, intimidated by the vast new area, which apart from myself, appeared to be Cat-free, something I had not
experienced until then. It was at precisely that moment that I heard what I would later recognize as a door slamming open, then a louder, deeper voice than hers.

“Are you home? Did you get one?” I heard the big voice say from a distance, which I could
tell by the up-Doppler effect, was approaching me and the woman from somewhere away.

“Yes,” she said quietly, then added, “Shhhhhhhhh….not so loud, she’s afraid.” I blessed her
kind heart, and shrank back against her knee, gazing up the tall new human with the loud voice who seemed to have no thought or care for my sensibilities.

“Well, let’s see how this goes,” he said without further preamble, and strode across the
room. Pulling back a sliding glass door, he called out into the wilderness that I could see beyond the chamber walls.

“Maggie, come! Here, Mags, come meet the new kitty!”

In the blink of an eye, without allowing me even a millisecond of preparation, a huge golden
hurricane rocketed through the open door and bore down upon me with an incalculable velocity. It uttered a sharp sound which I would come to understand later was a “bark,” which turned my bowels into ice water, and then it was upon me! This honey-colored force majeure was all long fur, terrifying gigantic eyes, slavering tongue, cold nudging nose, and unbearable breath. The monster began emitting a high-pitched whistling sound.

I will ask you to remember as I acknowledge what was perhaps one of my lowest moments
that I was just a kitten, unknowledgeable in the ways of the world, and suddenly apprehended by a slavering beast. I sprang straight up into the air a distance at least four times my own height, then I’m sorry to say, my bladder loosed itself all over the plush carpet.

At that, the tall, loud one swore, and pivoted, sprinting off as though I had detonated an
explosive device in the chamber. The woman picked me up and held me to her heart again, away from the golden storm, an action which calmed me then, and many times to come, in what would be our long life together. The boorish one returned with a cloth and a red container labeled “Resolve,” and set about spraying and scrubbing the exact site of my humiliation, an action which did nothing to endear him to me; he acted as though my innocent, terrified emission was akin to a hazardous waste trainwreck in a rural river town.

If you haven’t discerned it by now, the golden hurricane was in fact my sister, Maggie. She
was a dog, of the sort I have heard referred to as “Golden Retriever,” a purebred status which to her credit, she never did lord over me. What I would come to learn in the 13 years that my sister Maggie and I had together, was that her hurricane was made of love. Her rain was slobbery kisses, her wind the whistling whine of delight, her nudging cold nose was simply an invitation to join her in play, which turned out to be Maggie’s raison d’être. And though it is widely known that cats prefer “napping” to “playing,” I daresay we came to a mutual understanding, and indulged ourselves in both in happy proportion, for all our years together.

When Maggie reached the end of her days, I was at her side in quiet, purring support, and
stayed there until she breathed her last. Our humans laid her to rest under the riotous lilacs on the lakeside of our home, where I visit whenever I’m permitted out of the house. I’ll never forget my sister, Maggie – that great golden storm – whom, to my great surprise, I loved my whole life long

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Tara Flaherty Guy‘s cat, Lucy, who “Lifespan, Lovespan” is written about.

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A picture of Sadie who narrates “The Golden Storm”.

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Tara Flaherty Guy is a creative writer living in St. Paul, MN. Her work has been published in Talking Stick, Miracle Monocle, Emerge Literary Magazine, Exposed Brick, and Longridge Review among others. Guy has a BA in Creative Writing from Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and three geriatric, self-involved cats.

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