She came into the living room holding something small and black between two fingers, the way you’d hold a bug you weren’t sure was dead yet, and said my name in the particular tone she uses right before something is about to happen to me that I haven’t agreed to. I have learned to recognize that tone. It is the same tone that precedes nail trims, baths I did not request, and being picked up and turned to face a window so I can “see the moon,” which I have never once cared about.
The object itself was a strip of fabric, soft, with two stiff triangular points rising off it like it had grown its own small ears. I did not understand what it was for. I understood, immediately and completely, that it was for me.
She sat on the floor in front of me, which she rarely does unless she wants something, and held the thing open like a loop, and said something cheerful about Halloween, a word I don’t have a file for but which apparently means tonight is the night she puts ears on me that are not mine.
I backed under the coffee table. This was not panic. This was a tactical repositioning to a space she cannot easily reach without getting on her knees and reaching under furniture, which I know from experience she is willing to do, but which buys time, and time is all a cat in my position really has.
She got on her knees and reached under the furniture.
The collar went on before I had fully worked out my next move. It sat snug around my neck, not tight, not painful, just undeniably there, with the two ears standing up somewhere above my own head where I couldn’t see them but could absolutely feel their presence, like a weight that wasn’t a weight, like something was perched on me that I hadn’t invited.
I want it understood that I did not take this well. I shook my head. I shook it again, harder, the way I do when water gets near my ear canal and the whole side of my face needs to register a complaint. The little ears flopped and did not come off. I dropped low and tried to back out of the collar the way I back out of the harness she tried on me once in the spring, a maneuver that worked beautifully that time and did absolutely nothing this time, because whoever made this collar had apparently met a cat before and built it accordingly.
She laughed. Not at me, exactly, or entirely at me, but close enough that I retreated to the hallway to sit with my back to her and think about my options.
My options, as far as I could tell, were: wear the ears, or remove the ears by force, and removing the ears by force meant using my back legs on my own neck, which is a maneuver I associate with flea season and do not enjoy performing voluntarily in front of an audience. So for a while I just sat very still in the hallway, doing nothing, radiating what I hoped was a dignified and pointed silence, the kind of silence that says *I see what has been done to me and I am choosing, for now, not to react.*
She took a picture. I heard the little fake shutter sound the device makes, the one that isn’t a real sound but is apparently necessary anyway. I did not turn around for it. If there is a photograph of this moment it will show only the back of my head and the two ears, triumphant and ridiculous, rising up like they belong to someone with better judgment than me.
Eventually curiosity got the better of the sulking, the way it usually does, and I came back into the living room to see what she was doing, and she scratched under my chin in the exact spot that unlocks something in my shoulders against my will, and I sat down next to her on the rug, ears and all, because apparently my principles have a price and the price is a chin scratch of a certain quality.
Here is the part I didn’t expect. The collar, once I stopped actively fighting it, smelled like her hands. Not the fabric itself, which smelled like a drawer, slightly dusty, slightly plastic — but wherever her fingers had touched it while she worked the little clasp, that smell had transferred, faint but present, the same smell that’s on the gray sweater, the same smell that’s on the pillow she doesn’t use anymore. I don’t know how to explain why that mattered except that it did. I stopped feeling like something had been done to me and started feeling, somewhat grudgingly, like I was wearing something of hers.
I still don’t love the ears. Every so often one of them brushes against something — the edge of the couch, the door frame, nothing, apparently, is calibrated for a creature with extra architecture on its head — and I flinch like I’ve been ambushed from above by my own costume. I have also caught sight of myself in the dark living room window, and the two triangles against the glass gave me a half second of real alarm before I recognized the shape as mine, which is a sentence I resent having to write.
She has not taken the ears off me yet. She keeps looking over at me on the rug with an expression I associate with being deeply pleased with herself, and every time she does it I consider making a scene about it, standing up, shaking my head one more time for effect, reminding her that this was never fully ratified on my end.
Instead I stay where I am, ears up, tail curled around my front paws, pretending the whole thing was my idea.