The Year of the Cat— By Aimee LaBrie
Artwork by Arlene Tribbia
In January, the cat grew thin, wobbled out from under a rocking chair, and died.
The boyfriend I lived with took to going to happy hour after work, calling me from the bar to offer a half-hearted invitation for me to join. “If you want,” he would say. “You should come out, but only if you want.” In the background, the sound of “Love is a Battlefield” blasting from the jukebox at the Locust Rendezvous. The girl who had a crush on him would be there, wearing high heels and smiling with lipstick on. She was younger and much less sarcastic than me. She had a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles across her nose. I probably would have liked her if she wasn't trying to fuck my boyfriend.
When I got pregnant, I called my long-distance best friend, Liz. “Congratulations!” she said.
I was drinking a Heineken as fast as I could, my third one since the line on the test turned blue. “No,” I said. “No congratulations.”
The next day, my head pounding, I called Planned Parenthood. “We have an opening on February 14,” the receptionist said. When I started to cry, she sounded bewildered. "Why does everyone get so upset about this date?"
I was having a hard time at work. I told my boss about the abortion. I said, “Please don't mention it to your friend Frances.”
She said, “Why would I do that?”
I said, “Because it's so interesting.”
A few weeks later, Kyle from HR broke the news to me that I was fired. Effective immediately. “You are an at-will employee,” he explained.
I nodded. I said, “I can probably get a job at Hooters by tomorrow.”
He did not smile. He handed me a paper to sign.
In June, my mother called to say my grandmother's cancer had traveled to her liver.
I asked my aunt Joanne what it meant. She said, “Cancer of the liver?” She paused to light a cigarette. “It means, ‘Goodbye.’”
In October, I discovered another woman’s underwear in our laundry basket.
I moved out the first week in November. The now ex-boyfriend was cheerful as he helped me carry in the cardboard boxes. When everything was unloaded, he said, "I'm really leaving you here?" He sounded tearful. He told me he had once thought he wanted to marry me. Once.
I said, "What? Are you crazy?"
When he left, driving slowly, thoughtfully away in his dad's pick-up truck, I locked the door. I sat on the floor, my hands on my stomach.
I didn't know yet about the losses that would follow. My grandfather, my stepdad, my second, third and fourth cats, my first dog, two more houses, several friends, and six unborn babies that slipped out of my body without so much as a gender or name.
After he was good and gone, I got off the floor and went to the back patio, which had a small, sunny square of concrete surrounded by a brick wall. A yellow cat crouched on the top of the wall. She hissed at me, arching her back, as if saying, Enough now.
I took stock of the patio, the cat, and my arms that ached from carrying things.
I realized I was gloriously alone.
Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the The Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Cagibi, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Fractured Lit, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost, and others. Her second short story collection, Rage and Other Cages, won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and will be published by Leapfrog Press in the June 2024. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her short fiction has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.