The Ghost Cat

As anyone who's ever been to my apartment can tell you, the place feels like it should have a cat in it. It's not just the large amount of empty floor space or the occasional pest that warrants the need for the cat, but rather, a cat would ease some of the tension that creeps up your spine like cold fear when you hear the floorboards creak and groan in the dark of the night. If there were a cat in the loft to explain that thud you just heard emanating from the kitchen, maybe the hairs wouldn't stand up on the back of our neck every time you heard it.

But it's more than that. My brother's girlfriend says sometimes, when she's sitting in the living area, she expects a cat to jump into her lap, then remembers that both of my family's cats died before they reached their sixth birthdays.

There is a cat, though, living down with us on Franklin Street. Her name is Sugar. She fell out the front window tragically in 2005. She fell five stories, rolled off the loading dock, and, as she lay awating death on the sidewalk she dragged her broken and bloody body over to where I was crouching in tears and laid her head on my knee. She died two hours later in the 15th st animal hospital.

Four people have since confessed to seeing Sugar around the apartment. The first was a girlfriend I had over for tea one day. She said, quite calmly, "V, do you have a cat?"

"Not anymore," I said, "Why?"

"Because I just saw one jump onto your bed," she said. She was sitting on the couch at the front of the loft, looking back with a clear view of my room and bed past the dinning table. I took her into my room and showed her the portrait of Sugar I had hanging on the wall.

"Is this the cat you saw?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "It was long haired and calico, just like this one."

The second was a student at City College over for a curry. We sat in the middle of the floor, eating, when he said, "V, I think your cat just came to join us," and looked to his left at the desk and the front windows, but I saw nothing.

The third sighting was at a dinner party. All my friends knew I had a "Ghost Cat" by this point. Id seen her recently, and they'd all heard about the two previous sightings by outsiders. The young man who saw her this time, however, had never heard about her before. He looked over at my couch as everyone was settling down for dinner and saw a long haired, calico cat jump onto it. He though he was going crazy but chose to confide in his friend who shouted "You've seen the Ghost Cat!" The young man then identified the cat in the portrait as the one he had seen jumping onto the couch.

I myself saw her just the other night. I was sitting upright in my bed, which is pushed lengthwise up against my window. The room got suddenly colder so I decided to turn off my light and lay down under the covers. I couldn't believe it at first. Surely, I thought, it must be a trick of the light or some film in my eye. So I blinked a couple of times. She was still there. Sitting in the corner of the window, staring out at the night, the moonlight casting a blue, shadowy hue over her face. Her little turned up nose silhouetted under her small, unmoving eyes. Her head was turned out the window and she sat, unmoving until the cold left the room, I resumed the TV show I was watching on my iPhone and she faded off into the background gloom.