A new plant appeared on the windowsill in the back room this afternoon, small and green with leaves shaped like little paddles, sitting in a plastic pot that still had a price sticker curling off one side. She carried it in from the car wrapped in a sheet of thin paper, unwrapped it at the kitchen table like it was something delicate, and then just put it there. On my windowsill. Nobody asked me.
I want to say I approached it calmly, as a matter of routine inspection, but the truth is I heard the paper crinkling before I even saw the thing, and I was in the room before she’d finished setting it down. It smelled wrong in a way I couldn’t place at first — not the sharp candle-wrong or the metal-plumber-wrong I already know how to file away, but something colder and heavier, like the inside of a shoe that’s been left outside. Dirt. Real dirt, packed into the pot, damp on top where she’d already given it water from the little blue watering can she keeps under the sink for reasons that have never before been relevant to me.
I put my nose right down into it. She let me, actually, standing there with her hands on her hips watching me sniff around the base of the pot like I might have an opinion worth waiting for. I did have an opinion. My opinion was that something had been growing in dirt in our house without my knowledge or approval, and that this represented a serious gap in my usual awareness of what comes and goes here.
The leaves were the next order of business. They stood up on thin green stalks, glossy, slightly curled at the edges, at exactly cat-mouth height if the cat in question is sitting on the sill, which I was, almost immediately. I took one leaf between my teeth mostly to establish whether it was real — plastic plants have fooled me before, and I don’t enjoy being fooled — and it was real, and it tasted like nothing I would ever choose to taste again. Bitter in a way that lived at the back of my tongue and didn’t want to leave. I spat it out onto the windowsill in a way that I felt was dignified given the circumstances.
She saw the whole thing. “Oliver.” Just my name, flat, the way she says it when she already knows how the sentence is going to end before she starts it. She picked me up under my front legs — undignified, I won’t pretend otherwise — and set me down on the floor a few feet from the sill, and moved the pot back from the edge like that would solve anything. It would not solve anything. I have a very long reach when I’m motivated, and I was, at that point, extremely motivated, mostly out of principle.
I sulked under the couch for a while after that. Not hiding — sulking, a completely different activity that happens to look the same from the outside. I could hear her moving around the kitchen, and at one point she said something to the plant directly, in the voice she uses for me, which I did not appreciate. I don’t know what a plant does to earn that voice. It doesn’t come when called. It doesn’t do anything, as far as I could tell, except sit there being green and occasionally getting talked to like it understood any of it.
By early evening I’d decided the sulking had run its useful course and came back out to reassess the situation from a safer distance — the arm of the reading chair, where I could watch the sill without appearing to care about it. The plant hadn’t moved. It hadn’t done anything at all, which somehow made it worse. A bird on the gutter at least has the decency to eventually leave. This thing just sat there in its plastic pot being patient about it, which felt like a kind of insult I didn’t have the right vocabulary for.
Later, once the kitchen light had gone off and she was somewhere else in the house, I went back for a second, more thorough investigation. This one I conducted with a paw rather than my mouth, having learned what I’d learned earlier about the leaves. I pressed one claw into the top of the dirt, just to see what would happen, and what happened was that a small amount of dirt came away and scattered itself across the white paint of the windowsill in a pattern I hadn’t intended and couldn’t now undo. It looked considerably worse than it had felt at the time. I sat with it for a moment, deciding whether to be alarmed.
She found it before I’d resolved the question. I heard her come back into the room, heard the particular silence of someone looking at a mess and figuring out who made it, and then, “Oliver,” again, the same flat two syllables, except this time there was a small huff of air after it that I recognized as something closer to a laugh than a complaint. She swept the dirt into her palm with the side of her hand and put it back, more or less, and didn’t pick me up this time, just nudged me an inch away from the pot with the back of her wrist while she worked.
I let her do it. I stayed close enough to watch, sitting with my tail wrapped around my front paws in the posture I use when I want it understood that I am observing rather than obeying. The plant sat there through all of it, leaves slightly crooked from where I’d bitten one earlier, dirt resettled, price sticker still half-peeled on the side of the pot. It hadn’t won anything. It also hadn’t lost anything, which is its own kind of victory I’m not ready to formally acknowledge.
By the time she turned the kitchen light back on and went to do something else entirely, I was still sitting there on the sill, close enough to smell the damp dirt and the bitter green smell coming off the leaves, not touching it, not leaving either.