He was 16 when he started trying to move the cats from their place to a yard across town. Before that effort began, he was just another quiet face, one of the really quiet ones who seem to walk through a different space without a common ground between most of us and themselves. Whatever was interesting enough about him to keep him alive had always seemed locked away in another place (no one is without a story, even if they misplace it). Anyway, until he started talking about the cats he was a quiet guy with whom no one had a problem and few had concern.

When he started the business with the cats, even then when he was making something of a fuss, it was still a quiet sort of thing. No one got excited. Personally, I didn't see where he was going with the whole thing and went back to reading the newspaper. If it hadn't been for the man I was seeing I never would have paid the affair much attention. My attention span is very low, by which I mean in order to get my attention at all an issue has to swoop down and really grab me by the neck skin and pull with a lot of feather flapping and foot kicking. The guy that I was seeing wasn't even a boyfriend, my having noticed early on that his efforts in communicating were all directed toward being as infuriating as possible, leading to my efforts to hear him speak as rarely as possible in our time together. I continued to see him because in that effort I felt a isolated degree of success. He still managed to bring the cat issue to my attention.

Maybe it was some history project that got things started. This vague clip of something said, questions asked, interesting gossip repeated but not explained, the charm of an older man reminisced over by a woman who missed the jump, a bunch of small decisions that lead to this kid hearing about bringing the cats home. Those stone cats outside the old building on Commercial Avenue. Mr. Grace used to quip about the difficulty of making anything useful of his son, and the likelyhood of anything good ever coming of his efforts. As likely as those stone cats ever coming home, behaving like decent pets and laying a little warmth on the line. Stone cats can cuddle but the warmth thing... you'd have to be a fool to mistake any trace of warmth in them for anything but sunheat. There was no touching those things anyway. They were mossy as old gravestones.

I have a memory of them, of the damn cats. For some reason, honestly, I think a lot of people do. They aren't cats, they're lions of course, this is the United States and for some reason lions are a thing there are statues of. Lions and gargoyles and men on horses. Or naked women. Personally I like the modern type stuff, like the black sun, stuff that's smooth and vacant and as far from crafty as possible. Ruffles and primary colors make me slightly ill but respectful. The lions are just stone but because of Mr. Grace I always thought of them as cats. Mr. Grace was a man with enormous amounts of atmosphere. His repeating a phrase almost turned the words to stone, into something better than words, like the line of his shoulders wrangled them into structure. So in this small town there were two stone lions that everyone called the cats and unlike quiet boys, everyone seemed to know them. Not just of them. See, everyone else seemed to have a story with them too.

I would love to say I lost my virginity under a hind leg, looking up and considering having my forehead crapped on. Or that I had a picnic with my true love right at the time when I was the most infatuated, and the most odiously repulsively myself that I could ever be and never hope for again. Or that every time I went running I stretched my damn calves against their hindquarters, deciding left or right by the random decision of my nipple ring's position. None of these things are true. The fact is that I've traveled a lot but my heart never lodged itself far from home. Thousands of miles, really, so many... and all to have a lasso tug in my chest and brain reminding me that I never really left. I've tried medication, and the pull gets through, I've tried relationships and booze and even adventures and living. There's no shaking the fact that my soul is tied down to a small town in Jersey. I even tried the cats. I thought, if I can be here and now for just a few minutes, I'll have escaped. Somehow I got fiercely bloody knuckles while sitting on the steps between those things, but nothing helped for long enough. I swear it's probably my fault but I'd do anything for help escaping my white knight. I'd even go back licking to that guy I was seeing, in the last town, in the last state.

I have maps on my walls of Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Frisco looks like a talking head, Portland like a nodding ass, and Seattle a comfortable rat sniffing the air. The kid who wanted to move the cats may have traveled further than myself, having come from Vietnam. Damn trouble, he gave me so much trouble.

I'd almost forgotten everything that young man told me when I had a dream. It was after a good dinner, so I was surprised when I woke up mid-dawn remembering details well enough to make sense of them after waking. The dinner was the most expensive kind, with text expanded beyond the fanciest menu, all organic and hand-made or imported ingredients, enough to make me blush. The rest follows in sort. The dream was of a school bus and a young boy, which also made me blush till I realized he had my eyes. Pale blue-green, and tossled light hair cut dorky and cheaply. In my dream I was confused about him but as I woke up, heart racing and uncomfortably hot, I knew better. The kid I was giving those lessons to was about the same age, high school, with the same bad haircut. Haircuts seem easy till you get a few bad ones or try it yourself. The kid in my dream was the pale skinned compadre to my troublemaking student, the one going on about the damn cats. I'd rather sleep with roadkill than a living animal, don't understand the facination people have with furry creatures, but young people can have a share of my time if they ask for it. Heck, my time is up for the asking.

The student's concern was that the cats be returned to their original location. He had a little drawing on him, showing that the ground had been level at some point (though it no longer was nor had it ever been in any reality I was aware of, and I'm long standing in these parts). The drawing was an indelible little effort with mostly faith bases, worthless but too considerate to ignore. It showed the property across town where a yard stretched bare and patchy to stone stairs from the sidewalk. The building may have been built around the same time, some time passed, when the tracks under the pavement were bare and guiding rather than concrete covered and reminiscent of a more optimistic era.

I was stirring a pot of spagetti the next night when I got a message. I divided my attention until he mentioned boiling over, something to do with pasta... I hadn't mentioned that I was cooking at all but assumed that talk was more important than feeding myself semolina and I sat down to listen. First, I opened a window a few inches. There were splatters of rain touching the glass, the wind aggressive and noisy rattling the frames. What could his intention be, I asked, why would he bother with that kind of thing? What could his interest in seeing things put right possibly be, and where did he get the idea that one place is more appropriate than another? The response was slow but presented as though it had been prepared in advance. The diagrams he has are off, he said. They're funny, somehow, not accurate. I wonder if he knows that. There are a lot of things he should know, I'd guess, I said. But how do you start, what is important? I couldn't sleep that night, with an eye on the curtain, to make sure it didn't flail out through the open window and flap out as though there was a fire inside.

The one thing notable about the boy who wanted to deal with the cats was that he was very difficult to find when you went looking for him. He never seemed to be where he was supposed to be, which may have been why he slipped below almost everyone's radar so cleanly. It was his magic that he was rarely noticed missing.