Lost Cat
by Treena Thibodeau

You are not doing enough. This announcement goes out at regular intervals over the P.A. system inside the cramped fitting room of my skull. You are not doing enough. I’m supposed to be meditating, but instead I’m dress-rehearsing conversations with people who now only exist inside of glowing rectangles. Visualize: sending my breath out. Think about viruses, try to pull just my own droplets back in. Sometimes it helps if I visualize a cat’s tail sliding through my fingers. I don’t have a cat, so I mentally borrow my sister’s. If no one is around to hear, I’ll screw headphones into the sockets of my ears and sing along with kirtan recordings, making a mess of the Sanskrit. I sing loud enough, maybe I’ll call monsters out of the lake. This week a creature that is not a goose but is definitely the result of something a goose fucked landed on the water and is now on patrol. We nicked this house too, a family member’s rural getaway in a part of Connecticut called the Quiet Corner. We came here the week the morgue trucks came to Queens and have remained since, possessions spreading in the cabin like a spill. I thought I would feel lost here in the woods, so far from the familiar grid of home, but I do not. Squirrels get into the frame of this house and chase shelter and I put out a catch-and-release trap but they are too wily for it.