John | Persons Kitty Patched

The kitty was his polar opposite. It was chaotic. It shed on his freshly pressed slacks. It left muddy paw prints on his spotless kitchen floor. It brought him "gifts"—first a desiccated maple leaf, then a slightly chewed lottery ticket (a loser), and finally, the head of a field mouse, which it deposited delicately on his leather briefcase.

He found her—he had secretly decided it was a her—huddled under the rhododendron bush by the mailbox. Her leg was caught in the plastic ring of a six-pack holder. She wasn't struggling. She was just waiting, her sour-apple eyes wide and trusting.

That night, he wrote a check to the local animal shelter for five hundred dollars. He ordered a plush cat bed from an online store (it was lavender, a color he had never before allowed into his home). And he finally gave the kitty a name. john persons kitty

John Persons was not a man given to whimsy. His suits were charcoal gray, his ties were navy blue, and his lawn was mowed in mathematically precise stripes. He lived at 42 Maple Drive, a house that looked like every other house on the block, except for the fact that it was marginally cleaner.

John Persons did not know what to do with love. He knew about quarterly reports, about mortgage rates, about the proper way to fold a fitted sheet. But this scruffy, purring thing that rubbed against his shins while he made his morning coffee? It unnerved him. The kitty was his polar opposite

So he maintained the fiction. "It's not a pet," he told his neighbor, Mrs. Gable, who watched him through her lace curtains. "It's a pest control solution."

He carried her inside. He didn't put her down. He sat in his "no cats" chair, cradling her against his chest, feeling her tiny heartbeat thrum against his own. For the first time in his adult life, John Persons did not think about being efficient, or proper, or clean. It left muddy paw prints on his spotless kitchen floor

The kitty, of course, did not care. It slept in the sunbeam on his "no cats on the furniture" couch. It knocked his carefully alphabetized DVD collection off the shelf. And at 6:17 every evening, without fail, it sat by the front door and let out a tiny, rusty mew .