She came in this afternoon carrying a paper bag with something heavy and round in the bottom of it, and I want it understood that I was there for the whole thing — the bag set down, the rustling, the moment she reached in and produced it and set it in the middle of the kitchen table like she was presenting evidence. A small orange-ish lump, ridged all the way around like a tightly packed cushion, with a curled stem on top the color of old rope.
I did not rush it. I want that on the record too. I approached the table the way I approach everything that has not yet proven itself — slowly, from several angles, with my ears doing most of the early work. It did not move. It did not make a sound. It simply sat there in a shaft of the dying afternoon light being looked at, which is, incidentally, something I am also extremely good at, so I felt an immediate and specific irritation that it had wandered into my territory and was already doing my job.
Once she left the room I got up on the table, which I am not supposed to do, a rule I have always found more like a polite suggestion than an actual structural feature of the household. Up close it smelled like dirt — not the clean dirt of the plant on my windowsill, but something older and more outdoor, with a bitter green note right at the stem that made my nose wrinkle on contact. There was no food smell to it whatsoever. I checked twice. This felt like a serious oversight on someone’s part.
I batted the stem. It did not react. I batted it again, harder, the way you might knock on a door a second time to make sure the first knock was heard, and the whole thing rocked very slightly on its ridged bottom and then settled back into exactly the position it had been in before, with what I can only describe as total indifference to me. I have known doors with more personality.
This is the part where I will admit I spent a longer stretch of the afternoon than I strictly meant to trying to work out whether the thing was alive. In my experience, living things eventually do something — blink, twitch, make a sound, leave. This did none of those. But it also didn’t smell dead, exactly, the way the moth did after I caught it, or the way certain things under the radiator have started to in a way nobody’s addressed. It smelled like it was still becoming something, if that makes any sense, which I realize it may not. I sat with my paws tucked under me about eight inches from it for what felt like a very long professional stretch and simply watched. It did not blink. I did not blink either, as a matter of principle, until my eyes started watering and I had to look away first, which I will not be mentioning again after this.
I want to be clear that I lost that round on a technicality.
Eventually I did what I do with most standoffs that refuse to resolve themselves, which is to treat the whole business as settled and declare the thing under my supervision rather than my dominance. I patrolled past it several more times over the course of the evening, slowing each pass, letting my tail drag along its ridged side so it would know I’d been there. Once I put my whole face right up against the stem and inhaled as deeply as I could, hoping for more information, and got nothing new except a faint sneeze that embarrassed me in front of an object that cannot judge me, which did not stop me from feeling judged.
She came back through the kitchen around dusk, saw me stretched out next to it like a sphinx guarding a smaller, worse sphinx, and laughed in that way that means she’s about to say something to me I won’t understand and then do it anyway. She picked the thing up, turned it over once in her hands, set it back down facing a slightly different direction, and said something with the word “carve” in it that I did not like the sound of. I don’t know what carving involves. I have decided I am opposed to it on principle until I learn otherwise.
For now it’s still sitting in the middle of the table, orange and ridged and entirely unbothered, and I’ve taken to walking past it on my way to the water bowl with my shoulder deliberately brushing its side, just to remind it that the table was mine first and that whatever is coming for it next, I was here before any of it started.