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

Love Lucy. I’d seen pictures of human families, with their communal meals and their board games, and I knew—I just knew—there was more to them.

Yet as we fled the beach, I wondered: Was I so entranced with their dinner forks and their television sets that I’d missed something? Had I misjudged them as a species?

Back at the house, Olive slid me onto the kitchen countertop and poured herself a glass of orange juice, glugging it down. “I was at the beach with my cat,” she finally said, as if this clarified everything. “My cat. How can I fix being weird if I’m doing something weird and I don’t even know it?”

Anxiously, I trailed her to the bedroom, where she pulled out a small computer from a dresser drawer. Patting the bed, she settled back into the pillows, and I sprang up beside her, pawing at her stomach: Look! Look at the wall! I am an alien.

“Sometimes I wish I were a cat,” Olive said, opening her laptop. “I think I’d make a much better cat than a person.”

Suddenly there was an empty bar on the computer screen, and she typed inside it: How to be normal. The words appeared in a miraculous, blinking flash. (This! This was so much easier than a crayon.) Other searches followed. How to make new friends. First day in California school. Signs you are hopelessly weird. And every result sunk her a little lower. It was hard to watch. By the fifth search, I’d almost stopped trying to direct her attention to the wall and started thinking about ways to tell her: You are a perfectly acceptable version of a human, exactly as you are.

Eventually she sniffled and said, “Ah, I need a tissue. Be right back.”

She left me alone with the laptop.

She left me alone with an opportunity.

I figured that I didn’t have much time—maybe a minute or less—so I made the most of it, selecting the appropriate keys with swift punches of my paws, my ears pulled back in panicked concentration. Human fingers would’ve been incredibly helpful, and much more accurate. Several times, I pressed too long, on three keys instead of one; the message turned from hello olive to hello olivehhhhhjjjjhhhhnnn, which just wouldn’t do. I erased. I typed faster, fear and courage welling up inside me.

“Leonard, what are you . . .” Olive said, returning from the bathroom. There was a tissue bunched in the palm of her hand. “Are you trying to write on my keyboard?”

Exactly! I thought at first, before realizing she was joking. I was a cat to her. Only a cat. Cats did not type perfectly intelligible messages inside Internet search bars. And yet—

Olive rounded the corner of the bed, gazing down at the screen.

And she saw.

She stood there, unmoving, for so long, perhaps reading the words over and over, trying to draw meaning from them. hello olive, I’d typed. it is me leonard i am an alien do not be scared. Could I have phrased it better? Who knows. I did my best. And I just hoped that Olive would understand.

Her head snapped to look at me then, her eyes wide, pupils enlarging. I could tell that her mouth was dry, because she swallowed three times in a row: big, gasping gulps. Physically, I wasn’t sure how to react. A small part of me was relieved for the secret to be out in the open. A far greater part was waiting for Olive to say something. Anything. For her to scream, shout, acknowledge me. Should I extend a paw, offer to shake her hand, now that we were being properly introduced? No, no, don’t be silly. Besides, I was too anxious to move.

“This isn’t happening,” Olive finally said, as if trying to convince herself. “There’s . . . there’s no way.” Her voice was quivering, like a thin ripple on water.

My assumption was that I should stay incredibly still—no sudden movements. Sudden movements might frighten her away. Slowly, I lowered myself onto my belly, paws folded beneath me, but then I realized: it looked like I was about to pounce. I abandoned the whole position.

“This is not possible,” Olive said more firmly, but I could see the doubt sweeping in. Hadn’t she said it herself, that I was an exceptional cat? For a long moment, we held each other’s gaze; and then, eventually, she reached over—hand quaking—and deleted my words.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know how this can be real,” she said, sliding the laptop toward me. “But if it is real, if this is really happening, I’m going to need you to do that again. Please?”

Would Olive have preferred a normal cat? Or was the possibility of something more—something like me—intriguing to her? Either way, I typed. I turned letters into words, my throat constricting from the stress of it all. I didn’t want to say the same thing over again—what purpose would that serve? Instead, I wrote: i am from another planet and need your help getting home, adding a please at the last moment, just as Olive had.

She kept taking in deep breaths, only to push them dramatically out. She read the screen three or four times, looked at me—and then promptly fled the room, slamming the door behind her. Not the ideal reaction. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt.

On the other side of the wall, I could hear her pacing back and forth, mumbling to herself. String after string of words, all running together: “You’re not this weird, you’re imagining things, pull yourself together, come on, think, stop and just think.”

My ears pointed back nervously, because I didn’t expect this. She wasn’t scared of me; she was scared of herself. And I wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, if we could just talk this through. But I couldn’t open the door. I didn’t know how to dangle with that kind of precision. So I settled for a frenzied kneading of the blankets, my paws massaging