Taken from the July 2012 issue of Dazed & Confused:

I once sat next to a lady on a bus. She wore navy cords and hiking boots. She twirled a loose thread in her fingers. When her palm turned toward me, it was creased like mine. It was the year my classmates started calling me “Old Lady Hands”. I had tried to pass a soccer ball, and accidently scored; the glory of the unlikely accomplishment dampened as Timmy Robbins aimed his hand at mine for a high five and winced. 

“Woah! What happened to your hand?” He grabbed the other one, turned it over, and shouted, “Check out her hands you guys. They’re all fucking pruney”, and was immediately sent to the office for swearing. 

So this lady’s hands looked too old for the rest of her. When she glanced up, her eyes looked green, but really they were blue, with little yellow flecks. She pressed the “next stop” button, hugged her things to her chest and squeezed past, her bony butt nearly brushing my face, my breathing so shallow I felt faint, I thought, “You’re my mother.” I don’t know why I told Dad. He just said “Betsy, Betsy, Betsy” until I hung my head. He started driving me to and from school every day. He explained again about some people being like a cancer we need to cut out of our lives. I’d understand later, he said. 

But I don’t. All I’ve learned so far at university is I’m not the smartest, like I was back home. I’m not the dumbest, either. I’m just there, mildly present in rooms, like carpet, soaking up snippets of conversation, smelling food on the wind, devising newer, more interesting ways to walk home. 

I was walking like this, experimentally, getting slightly lost, when I found a litter of kittens in Tompkins Square Park, squirming in a shopping bag, so tiny their eyes weren’t yet open. I rushed them to a vet, who offered to euthanize them for free. I said if I’d wanted them to die, I wouldn’t have taken them to a vet in the first place. He gave me an eyedropper, sold me some formula and taught me how to feed them. As I left, he called out, “Don’t name them. It’s easier that way.”

I stood still, honoring a stitch in my side, when the words “all cats are Grey” hit me like a ray of light

But you have to call them something, so there was Tabby, One Sock, Kitten Black and Kitten Grey. One by one I watched them pull their bodies into little balls and die. I buried them in the back yard, next to the communal garbage cans, because I couldn’t bear to throw them away. Except Kitten Grey. He thrived, and I grew so protective of him I once held an umbrella point to the throat of a young man who pulled a gun on him, claimed he thought he was a stray. By then he was just called Grey.

And then one day he was gone. I put up fifty flyers. When I walked I called his name. And every flash of movement, every shadow, was Grey. The sight of a cat made my heart leap: that split second before my eyes focused, when they were Grey. I lived in this state of half-hope, half-mourning. Someone would say, “It’s just a cat”, or, “Get another one”, and I would recede further, dwell longer. The seasons changed. I put up a hundred flyers. 

I held the CD to my face and said, “How does he know?”, accidentally out loud

I’d been walking and stapling for hours, my fat stumpy legs aching from rubbing against each other with each step, making that zipper-noise cords do. I stood still, honoring a stitch in my side, when the words “all cats are Grey” hit me like a ray of light. I burst through the door of a secondhand music shop panting, “That, who is this, song?” 

Someone laughed, “Another new Cure fan. Break out the eyeliner”, as someone else led me to the Faith CD and put it in my hand. The song ended, and I asked them to play it again. Again, the words “all cats are Grey” were around me like a blanket. I pointed to the picture of Robert Smith on the back cover. 

“He sings this? What does it mean?” Dad only ever played country, and most of those songs had a story you could follow, or a point that could be explained. 

“Who knows...” There were shrugs all round. “Maybe the dude’s colorblind.” In Grey’s absence, I’d started talking to myself, just to hear my voice, to break up the stale air of my room. A little at first, then quite a lot, whole paragraphs. 

I held the CD to my face and said, “How does he know?”, accidentally out loud. 

There were peals of laughter. I paid and left, and continued marveling. There is a world where all cats are Grey: population 2. I listened to the whole album and every song spoke to me, but only one gave me the feeling this man Robert Smith was watching over me like some benevolent, omniscient being, watching me put up flyers, watching me walk and get lost, hearing me call Grey. 

Throughout November we will be publishing an anthology of short stories from our favourite authors to celebrate #NaNoWriMo. Follow them all at http://www.dazeddigital.com/nanowrimo and share your stories with us by tweeting @DazedMagazine with the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.