Q sits in the living room window, thoroughly washing one paw after breakfast. I look at her, as I always do, with a sort of All's Right With The World feeling when events, people and animals behave in the fashion you expect them to. And then, something shimmers just in front of her. A spider's web — a lone strand — has been cast by some careless arachnid on the window screen. It slants from high to low, left to right and shines like a soap bubble, like a monofilament rainbow in front of my fastidious feline's face. I'd love to take a picture of it, but I don't think it would show up on film. It's an image I'll have to store on paper and in memory.
I watch it tremble on a slight breeze, knowing the sun will move soon and the glimmering line will disappear. For fun, I imagine that it is a crack in space-time, that if Q, my cat, were to tap the thread with a sharp claw, she might rip the delicate air in front of her and cause a sheet of light, as green and ghostly as an aurora borealis, to spill over the window sill and shoot silent, flickering rays into the room.
And then, my fancy tells me, she would give me a slow cat wink and slip between this world and that, stepping into the sliced fabric of space with no more concern than if she were headed for her food dish. Her tail would flip in a jaunty motion at the last moment and the breach would zip up behind her, sealed and healed as if it had never been. And all the while the cicadas, which have been announcing how warm the day will be, would drone up and down their limited scale, uninterrupted.
Maybe this is how cats get from point A to point B, appearing suddenly at your feet to occupy a formerly empty floor tile. Or leaving nothing but the floral print on the couch where, you're quite certain, a cat sat grooming seconds ago. I would ask Q about it but she is gone, the sill empty, the spider web vanished. The sun, of course, has shifted while I've been writing. And I'm certain I would find Q on the bed if I went to look. It is, after all, time for her post breakfast nap.
The cicadas hum louder, a little something they heard from the sound track of an old science fiction film, leaving me to wonder if my cat took the time to walk through the kitchen to end up on my pillow.
Debbie Shave is a freelance writer of humor, personal essays and science fiction. Her work has appeared in Happy Woman Magazine and The Culture Star Reader. She shares her home with two pleasantly — and assumedly — mundane cats in upstate New York.