There is a sound a certain bag makes. I have known it for a long time. It is not the sound of the food bag, which is a heavier crinkle, more of a slump, because the food bag is mostly full and doesn’t move much when it’s touched. It is not the sound of the litter bag either, which has a colder, plasticky rattle I’ve learned to ignore on principle. The sound I mean is lighter and quicker, a bright little snap-snap-snap, and it means treats. It has always meant treats. I did not invent this rule. I simply noticed it, the way I notice everything, and filed it away as reliable.
This afternoon I heard it from the other room. The exact pitch. The exact rhythm, three fast crinkles and then a pause, like someone deciding.
I did not run, because running suggests panic, and I do not panic over good news. I moved at what I’d call a purposeful trot, which covers ground just as fast but looks like I meant to do it all along. I came around the doorway already arranging my face into the expression that works best, the one that says I have been enormously patient about this for a very long time even though I have technically been asleep for the last two hours. I sat down in the exact spot by the counter where the treats get thrown, because I know the angle, I know the shadow the cabinet makes, I know exactly where a small dropped thing will land and roll. I did the thing with my tail where I hold it very still except for the tip, which I understand communicates focus.
She was standing at the counter with the bag in both hands. I watched her open it the rest of the way. I watched her reach in.
It was pasta. The small shell kind. She poured some into a pot of water that was already going on the stove, and the rest of the crinkling was just her folding the bag back down and clipping it shut with the little plastic thing she uses, and none of it, at any point, involved me.
I want to say I recovered gracefully. I did not. I sat there for a solid stretch after the bag went back in the cabinet, still in position, still doing the tail thing, on the theory that maybe this was simply happening slowly, that the treats were coming eventually and I’d arrived early through good instinct rather than a false alarm. She stepped past me twice to get to the stove. The second time she said something to me in the voice she uses when she thinks I’m being silly, not unkind, just amused, and reached down and scratched behind one ear without breaking stride, the way you’d pat a doorknob on your way through a room.
I stayed a while longer anyway. Not because I still believed in the treats by that point. I’d worked out the truth within the first few seconds, watching the shells go into the pot — I’m not slow. I stayed because getting up immediately would have made it obvious that I’d been wrong, and there’s a particular indignity in a cat visibly abandoning a position, tail down, the second the position stops paying off. Staying put at least left it ambiguous. Maybe I liked this spot for other reasons. Maybe I was supervising the pot. Nobody can prove otherwise.
The water came up to a boil and she stirred it and the kitchen filled with that warm, starchy smell that isn’t unpleasant exactly but has nothing to do with me either. I watched the steam for a minute because it was there to watch. At some point I turned around and walked out of the kitchen at a normal pace, not fast, not slow, tail up, as though I’d finished whatever business had brought me in, which in a sense I had.
I went and sat on the arm of the couch for a while, in the sun, and thought about the sound some more. It really was the same sound. I’ve heard that bag’s particular crinkle probably forty or fifty times by now, near enough that I could pick it out through a wall, and every other time it has meant something landing near my face within the next ten seconds. I don’t have a good theory for why today was different except that apparently the bag doesn’t always mean what I think it means, which is a strange thing to sit with, because I was so sure. I was fully, completely sure, right up until the shells hit the water.
She brought the finished pasta out to the table a while later with a plate for herself, and I did get up and go stand near her chair, out of habit more than hope, and she didn’t give me any, because it wasn’t that kind of food and she knows better than to start something like that. I didn’t press it. I just stood there a minute, watching her eat, and then went and found a warmer patch of floor near the radiator and lay down on it, unbothered, tail curled in against my side, not thinking about the bag at all anymore, or at least not much.