The top of the refrigerator has been in my peripheral vision for weeks now. Not the side of it, which is nothing, a flat white wall I have no interest in, but the top, which I can only ever see from an angle, from the floor, looking up past the cabinets. There is a wicker basket up there and something stacked beside it, maybe paper, maybe boxes, I genuinely could not tell you, because nobody has ever shown it to me and I have never been invited.
This morning the counter below it was clear. No drying rack, no cutting board, nothing in the sink. Just the counter, the cabinet doors, and above them, the gap, and above the gap, the refrigerator, sitting there the way it always sits there, saying nothing, offering nothing, daring nothing.
I want to say I considered this carefully. I did not. I got up onto the counter the way I always do, assessed the distance to the top of the cabinet beside the fridge, and went.
The jump itself was, if I’m being accurate about it, flawless. I cleared the gap with room to spare, landed on the top of the cabinet with all four feet gathered underneath me like I’d planned the whole thing months in advance, and from there the final step onto the top of the refrigerator was barely even a jump, more of a short confident walk through the air.
And then I was up there, and it was better than I expected.
The basket turned out to contain rubber bands, a roll of something papery, and what smelled like onions from a few days ago, which I did not investigate closely because I was too busy looking at the kitchen from an angle I had never had access to before. I could see the top of the cabinets stretching away toward the window. I could see the crumbs on the counter she keeps meaning to wipe up. I could see the back of her head at the kitchen table, bent over something, completely unaware that there was now a second presence in the room looking down on her, literally, in every sense that mattered.
I sat with my tail wrapped around my front paws and allowed myself a period of real satisfaction. This is mine now too, I thought. This whole shelf of air that nobody uses.
The trouble started when I decided to leave.
Going up, the cabinet top had been right there, an easy stepping stone. Coming down, I discovered that my own body, positioned at the edge of the refrigerator and looking toward that same cabinet top, made the distance look considerably worse. It is a strange thing, how a gap can change size depending on which direction you’re facing it from. I am not a small animal. I am, if I’m honest about my proportions, a very substantial one, built more for impressive stillness on a windowsill than for midair course corrections, and something about being up that high made me suddenly, acutely aware of exactly how much of me there was to get safely across a gap I could no longer measure with any confidence.
I tried backing up to get a running start and nearly put a paw into the basket of rubber bands, which made a sound I didn’t like, a kind of slithering paper sound, and I abandoned that approach immediately.
I tried the opposite side, where the fridge meets the wall, in case there was a shorter way down I hadn’t noticed. There wasn’t. There was just more wall, and more distance, and the counter looking very far away and very hard.
I sat back down in the middle of the refrigerator top and made a sound. I’m not going to pretend it was a dignified sound. It was the sound you make when you have put yourself somewhere on purpose and are beginning to suspect it was a mistake, but are not yet willing to call it one out loud.
She heard it before she saw me, I think, because when she came around the corner into the kitchen she was already looking up before her eyes found me. And then she did the thing I was afraid she’d do, which was laugh. Not unkindly. But definitely a laugh, hand half over her mouth, looking at me sitting very stiffly on top of the refrigerator with my tail curled tight around myself like a seatbelt.
“How,” she said, which I did not think required an answer, since she’d watched me do exactly this kind of thing before and knew perfectly well how.
She dragged a kitchen chair over, climbed onto the seat, and reached up with both arms. I did not make this easy for her, mostly because by that point I had convinced myself the jump down was now somehow worse than it had been five minutes earlier, which wasn’t true, nothing had changed, but conviction doesn’t always require evidence. I let her get a hand under my chest and most of my weight settled onto her forearm before I allowed the rest of me to follow, and even then I kept one back paw braced against the top of the fridge for an extra second, just in case this was some kind of trick.
It wasn’t. She brought me down in one unhurried motion and set me on the counter, where I immediately sat down and began grooming my shoulder with great focus, the way you do when you need everyone in the room, including yourself, to understand that nothing of note just happened.
There was a rubber band stuck to the fur along my side. She found it before I did, picked it off without comment, and set it down on the counter next to the chair she’d used. I looked at it for a while after she left the room. It had been up there, in that basket, this whole time, and now it was just sitting on the counter like it had always belonged there, which I suppose it had, to someone, somewhere, long before any of this started.