The Escape

The day has come. Marko wakes early and sits in the kitchen. Today he will make his move and if, by the time the roundpiece has made three equal slices of pie, he has not been fed, he will get up and go.

Marko waits. He sits and watches the city from the rusted rail, brushing up the acacias and begonias, and watches other owners hug and shake hands. In the shop, the man with the flannel and moustache said he would be going to eat salmon forever. No man is an ocean, and Marko didn’t want salmon forever.

Cats like Hemingway. Marko discovered this on another shut-in day when he found the story with the matador lying under the aquamarine sofa. He wondered what Hemingway was doing in a place like this. Then he saw Maria.

Maria was a Hemingway reader. She hated James, Fitzgerald; all that East Coast savant crowd. She lived across the corridor, and her door had a rosary outside of it. Her owner owned the café downstairs, so she was never too far away. His owner sat in the city and ate chowder and played with American Express. He came back late smelling of late blossoming red and Dunhills. No packets in the trash though.

She invited him to dinner. They’d set a date on a fence overlooking a man hunting through restaurant bins. Marko knew how that felt. He’d been looking at trash all his life.

Cats going to dinner happens way more than you think. They hate the city too.