Leonard (My Life as a Cat), Carlie Sorosiak [7 ebook reader .txt] 📗

a beach person, but it just seems kind of silly to be so close to the water and not go. You sure you’d like to come?”

I didn’t know how to convey it: that I wanted her to rush back upstairs and read my message. What if someone else found it first? There was always the possibility that other members of my species were correct about humans. That if humans discovered us, our lives would change for the worse.

I was curious about the beach, though—despite the danger of the ocean. You could just glimpse the sea from the porch, a wavy line of pure blue. On Earth, everything is water this, water that. Have you drunk enough water? Have you released enough water? Did you clean yourself with water this morning?

“Watch out for cars,” Olive said. “And for Norma. This is definitely not on the schedule, but she’s working on her motorcycle today—and I didn’t want to bother her by asking.”

None of this reassured me.

The concrete was warm beneath my paws, a harsh breeze ruffling my bib. We ambled along a sidewalk edged by palm trees, other humans passing us in small motorized vehicles—golf carts, someone called them. Danger mobiles, I renamed them; they made a dull whirring noise as they zipped by ice cream shops, restaurants, and a store that advertised “boogie boards.” I couldn’t imagine what those were, but they sounded so festive, so delightfully human.

The sun was yellowish as we reached the shore, and my eyes were everywhere at once: on a wooden pier with spindly legs, casting itself out to sea; on the millions and millions of specks of sand; on the humans playing ball sports, laughing and sunning themselves by the water. A part of me expected to join them. We’d brought a beach towel, hadn’t we? From what I’d detected, we were supposed to splay ourselves atop this towel, and rotate our bodies as the sun hit. But that was not what we did. We stayed back. We observed.

The truth is, we hid.

At the base of a sand dune, Olive wrapped my leash around her wrist, and then tucked herself in front of the tall grasses, her knees to her chest. She was wearing her faded-blue overalls and a pair of tinted sunglasses; I could see my reflection in the lenses, staring up at her with a question: This is what we do?

“Maybe I’ll just read,” Olive said, opening her book to the middle. She didn’t read, though. And she didn’t talk to me much after that. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence—not exactly. But over the last couple of days I’d gotten used to her voice. She’d told me interesting facts: Did you know that three percent of Antarctic ice is penguin urine? She’d told me she wanted to be a veterinarian. Or a zookeeper. Or a wildlife biologist. She’d told me things confidently, like I understood. Now her body language was changing—back hunching, bare feet digging into the sand.

And it kept coming in flashes: what I’d written on Olive’s bedroom wall.

Soon, she’d know.

I batted a few blades of grass with my paws, examining the beach. Families—so many families here: parents passing out bags of food, children slapping the water in their inflatable wings. I couldn’t look at them for long. It’s difficult to see something and think, That will never be me. Our species isn’t born; we’re created: a collision of particles, a rearrangement of matter. No parents. No siblings.

I snapped my attention elsewhere. Not far away, a pod of young humans was thwacking a firm white ball over a net—back and forth, back and forth. Every once in a while, they peered in our direction, covering their mouths with their hands. They were laughing. The noise rattled in an unpleasant way, crawling into the depth of my belly.

On this planet, every noise is two noises. Sometimes laughter is like Olive and Q, joking at the aquarium about stick horses and sharks named Steve and Martin; and sometimes laughter is like the spike of a stingray or the teeth of a leopard seal.

Olive tensed.

And I felt like panting. The weather was becoming unbearably hot, and I was counting down to our moment of return, when Olive would see the word ALIEN. Did cats pant? Maybe that was dogs, or—

“Is she going to stop staring?” one of young humans snapped, just loud enough for us to hear. Like the rest of his clan, he was dressed in slick fabric, presumably used for bathing. “Did she . . . did she bring her cat to the beach?”

I didn’t have much time to react. Olive just bolted, barely stopping to brush the sand off her overalls. Were overalls traditional beach attire? Human clothing was, for the most part, a mystery to me; I knew what I liked: Hawaiian shirts, vests with plenty of useful pockets. But I found it strange—the idea that there is a “right” kind of clothing. So you want to visit the beach in overalls? Or a turtleneck? Or a pair of green trousers with a matching scarf? What does it matter? How could it possibly impact anyone else?

At the end of the boardwalk, Olive scooped me up. We were weaving through a crowd, through a sea of golf carts and frozen-lemonade stands. She was breathing rather heavily, an unnatural wheeze like I’d experienced right before the vet. There was water running down her face.

No, tears—real human tears.

And I had no idea how to help her.

People have a terrible reputation in our galaxy. War, pollution, the treatment of whales—all of these are distinctly human. But there are also the smaller offenses: their drinking straws, their boxes within boxes. Why ship boxes inside further boxes, only to throw the outer box away? It is terribly wasteful.

My point is, there was already a strong case against humans. That they suffered from greed and gluttony; that they were impulsive and easy to anger, while we were logical always. But I’d seen I