A possible future

I worry about becoming a Crazy Cat Lady. The idea sort of haunts me, to be honest. It seems to be a definite thing, you know, like a condition with symptoms and a specific diagnosis.

And sure, I am only twenty-four and I only have one cat but I’ll bet it sneaks up on you gradually. You don’t just turn into a Crazy Cat Lady overnight.

We used to have this woman who fed all the neighborhood’s cats. Same time, every evening, it turned into “Night of the Living Dead” over there, cats crawling, staggering, and creeping towards her front porch. We could smell her house a block away, like the world’s biggest kitty litter box.

One night, I turned on the news and there she was. Her house had been raided by the police, animal control, SPCA – whoever does those kind of raids. The UN, maybe.

The woman was standing on her front porch wearing a house dress and holding a picture in her hand. She was crying to the TV cameras. She said, “I used to be Elvis’s girlfriend and this is how they treat me!”

The camera zoomed in on the picture and sure enough, there was Elvis. He had his arm around a young woman who might have been the Crazy Cat Lady in some other life. It was hard to tell because there were no cats in the picture.

A few months after they came and took her cats away, we heard the woman had died.

Broken heart, I suppose.

That’s why I worry.