The Thoughtlessness of Big Hands

The first thing I remember is a noise. A sharp piercing sound that was unfamiliar. I think that before then I had not heard anything, so there was no way to mark time or remembrance. But this new thing that was sound came loud and insistent, and the single note was soon joined by others until there was a chorus of high-pitched mewling and that’s when I realized it was my own voice that I was hearing, joined with a tangle of other voices, though I did not know who they were then. The memory takes on other sensations—a feeling of warm bodies moving, a sweet and musky smell, damp fur against my nose.

Soon I could feel something larger moving in front of me and instinctively moved towards its greater heat. Next memory: Milk. I can still recall how sweet it was, though it seems like forever ago since I tasted it. For a long time I marked the passing of days by light and dark and Milk, and at some point the feeling of fur became colors and patterns, the light and dark became sun and moonlit night.

My brothers and sisters and I came to know each other’s habits and peculiarities. Number Two never wanted to leave our mother, and would cry the moment that she stood up from us, and he would keep on crying until she returned. Sometimes it was hours. Perhaps it was his orange stripes that gave him a special affinity with her. The rest of us were darker, and mostly solid colors. Five was the first to understand his legs, and learned to leap and perch on a ledge above us, so that he was mostly a long black tail hanging down until we learned legs for ourselves. Three liked the cool comfort of the Glass door that separated us from the feeders. She spent the sweltering afternoons lying with her side against the clear partition, moving away only when the door opened to bring the hands with the bowl. Four was the one who waited with his nose pressed to that Glass, not for food, but for the hands that brought it--any hands, even empty ones. There was something about him that the hands liked. Perhaps it was his striped fur, swirled with gray and black patterns of whorls and spots. He was constantly being picked up and patted, stroked and whispered to in those wide voices we could not decipher. We all got a share of that petting and carrying, but at some point it was always enough for the rest of us and we did what we had to in order to be set down. But Four never tired of it and developed a purr that was twice as loud as any of the rest of ours, which seemed to delight the hands, and induced all kinds of cooing birdlike sounds from them.

The hands were mostly big and loud, with cracking grating voices and big brown bottles of bubbly liquid in their hands, but sometimes there were smaller ones with higher voices. These were more gentle (for example, the small ones never tried to pick up all six of us smashed together at the same time), and touched more gently, generally, and never tried to feed us the bubbly stuff in the brown bottles.

As we grew bigger, our mother spent less time with us and the Milk was replaced entirely by the bowls. The crunchy stuff was hard to get used to, but we learned to eat it, and the water did not have the flavor of care and warmth, but we learned to want it because there was nothing more tempting any longer. We explored the boundaries of our world and found it mostly small. Sometimes we were carried—singly or in pairs—to the other side of the Glass door. Inside there seemed to be endless space – we could walk so far without reaching a wall—we could even run! This was something new, and we found that the chasing tumbling rolling game was so much more fun on that soft and wooly floor where we weren’t constantly banging our heads on the wood that met us two feet in one direction and five feet in the other. On the other side of the Glass everything was soft, like our mother’s coat, and we wanted to stay there forever. At night, back on our side of the Glass, we told each other stories of the hour we’d spent there in the afternoon, of other doors we’d found and cool dark corners, new smells and soft cushions. Laps, sweaters, and once, a thing called fish!

When we all had our legs, we would perch on the railing that used to be the province of Five, looking at the world Underneath, where things were smaller and quieter. We could see others like us, and got to know them a little, though they were so far below it was hard to hear them. There were different colors too, blue above and green below – even red and yellow in little patches that looked soft, like the wool on the other side of the glass. Our floor was only hard and brown and smooth and we longed to see if those cheerful colors were as soft as they looked.

The only one to find out was Six. She was inquisitive by nature and constantly sniffing and batting at anything that moved, baiting us into tangled, breathless games by chasing our tails when they twitched. One morning, she grew so curious about a thing that moved Underneath, that she began to lean farther and farther out on the railing where we lay in the sun. Three grew upset and began to cry, worrying and fretting in circles, batting at the rest of our tails, but Six would not be distracted. All of a sudden she leaned too far and lost her balance. With a tilt and a yowl, she disappeared over the edge. We all leapt to see where she had landed and when we looked down, we saw that she had become small like the others that lived Underneath. Our mother had been sleeping, but she woke up then and leapt to the edge with us in alarm. She was allowed on the other side of the Glass very often now and did not spend so much time on our side with us, but she happened to be with us that morning.

We call called out to Six and heard that her voice had become small as well. It was pitiful to hear it from such a great distance, and we could feel our hearts break as we tried to think what to do. Three and Four rushed back and forth to the Glass door, batting against it as if the hands might come to find out what was wrong, but it was early in the day and there were never any hands inside from early morning until evening. We watched Six stumble awkwardly on the surface of the Underneath and listened to her pitiful cries, feeling helpless and heartsick. She couldn’t seem to see us above her very well, though she kept tilting her head to look for us. Slowly she dragged herself back towards the wall that joined us above with the Underneath, as though she might find a way to hobble back up, and eventually she moved too far back to be visible any longer.

 Finally our mother was in a frenzy of circling the railing. When she found she could not see Six anymore, she seemed to come to a decision. Gathering herself into a small bundle, she leaped far out and landed on the edge of an adjacent platform like ours that was halfway down to the bottom. She teetered on the edge for a moment, and then threw herself out again, this time landing not far from where Six had found herself. She seemed winded for a few moments, but then she stood up and we saw after a few careful stretches that she seemed to have fallen well and was unharmed. She too disappeared from view, following the path that Six had taken. After a minute we heard a few cries that sounded like Six and our mother, but then there was silence. We did not know what to think. We waited.

In the evening, the hands arrived home as they always did. We heard the usual commotion inside and then suddenly our mother appeared on the other side of the Glass. We stared at her as she walked slowly towards us, and soon the hands came into view as well, exclaiming and shaking their heads and pointing at her. They seemed excited and we thought it must have been strange for them to find her on the other side of the Big Door, the one where they went to get to the Underneath. Soon they noticed her standing by the Glass and one of them came and opened it and she came out very slowly and they closed it again behind her. She did not say anything for a little while, and then she began to cry out. Over and over she called out Six’s name, and we understood that Six would not be coming back. We began to cry and then we spent the night calling for Six, because we thought that maybe if she could only hear us, she would be happier wherever she was. Soon we thought we heard a reply, and startled, we all went silent, then heard nothing more. But each time we began again, we heard a response and it took some time to figure out what it was. It was the hands across from us. In other buildings, from other directions, hands were mimicking our calls and we could not understand why. One in particular, a smaller one in the window directly across, kept on calling out periodically and she sounded very sad. She called another hands to the window at one point and gestured to us on our ledge. She called out again to us and shook her head. She seemed frustrated by our cries, but we could not stop. We were heartbroken, trapped and our world was so very small. Like Six, we wanted to touch the world below, but we knew from watching her that we could not leap or fall and then expect to come back to one another, so we paced the ten paces from one wall to another and we cried. We knew some songs that Six liked us to sing to her at night, and sometimes we sang those, hoping that she could hear us.

This is what we do every night now. The hands rarely visit us anymore, and we are not allowed indoors. They seemed enchanted with us at first, and were always bringing us in to be stroked by new cooing fingers, introduced to new scents. But soon there were no new hands. The most confusing time took place some time back. One night some smaller hands we recognized came out and touched us all in turn, very gently and kindly, lingering on Four. And then Four was gone. The hands took him inside and we thought nothing of it until it was time to curl up together and we were missing Four’s loud purring that lulled us all to slumber. We slept restlessly and in the morning, woke early. But when the big bowls were filled, there was no sign of Four, and there never has been since.

Soon after Four disappeared, there was a flurry of indoor visits – we were brought to many strange hands and set on strange laps, but each time we were carried back outside and thrown onto the smooth brown floor a little more roughly.Then the indoor visits stopped and now the hands just put out the bowls every night and sometimes they empty the smelly container against the far wall when it is overflowing.

Each night, the remaining five of us, including our mother, take turns calling out to Six. Sometimes we all sing to her together. The hands in the windows around us call back, and sometimes shout very angrily, but we cannot help ourselves. Sometimes the hands inside bang on the glass again and again and shout as well, but it is impossible to stay quiet for long. They will not let us in, and they will not let us out. Our world is small and we have no other. We wish we could go in search of Four and Six, but we do not know where they went, and our mother’s song seems to tell us that it would not be a good place to look for.

For a time it grew colder and we were given a box and a small warm machine to blow hot air into the box. The world around grew white and the colors disappeared. When it got warm again, our mother began to sing a new song, a ragged, needing kind of song we did not know. One night a number we did not recognize appeared on the adjacent platform, making a horrible noise. Could it be Four or Six, angrily returned from far away? We gathered on the edge to squint across at the new number.  But suddenly it gathered itself and leaped towards us and when it landed in our midst, we knew that he could not be either of them. He was monstrous, bigger than any number we had seen, and he snarled and spit. Our mother cowered in the corner and he went for her before any of us could begin to intervene. They did a very strange kind of dance, spitting and howling and hooked together, and after a time, the new number launched himself once again into the night and disappeared. Our mother stopped singing her new song then, and settled into the corner, where she sits still and calm and waits for something that seems inevitable. Now we have all begun to sing her new song to ourselves and feel so strange and unhappy, as if we are waiting for something, wanting something, but we do not yet know what it is. The walls grow closer, our singing grows more plaintive, and the Underneath is as far away as it ever seemed.

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My inspiration for this little story was found in the apartment complex next door to me, which has a tiny 4'x 6' deck that my window looks out on, just ten feet away. Several twenty-something boys share this particular apartment. They used to have one cat and everything was calm and quiet. That was before this spring, when the cat suddenly became *very* noisy -- amazingly, she didn't sound as if she had been fixed. By the time I asked the boys about it, it was too late. Probably wouldn't have made a difference anyway as they were very proud of their expectant cat mother. Of course, all that was B6K (before 6 kittens); they might feel differently now.

Anyway, for those who like a bonus statement of morality at the end of a story, here's a freebie: If you really, really, really think you want more cats, go to the pound or look in the paper or search craigslist -- there are always plenty of adorable strays to choose from so that you don't need to add another unwanted litter to the world! Spay and neuter your pets! Thanks for reading. -- Gillian