Vulgar Remedies: Poems

Hide and Seek with Time Machine

53 Hide and Seek with Time Machine The mystery of the childhood cat who vanished one day in June, the heat so heavy it left sand in the front door’s keyhole, the clammy mirrors beaded since the AC gave out. Gave up its weather. We searched the ranch house, the veranda’s terracotta pots, the backyard’s monkey grass. We yelled Pyewacket into the dry azaleas—our halfbrown tabby, half-Maine Coon with a name so strange people would ask us to repeat it: Pyewacket. My mother named him after the witch’s cat in a 1950s film. After she downed two pots of coffee, she tore the blue cushions from each room’s teak chairs. She shrieked, Pye! She finally yanked back the bathroom’s shower curtain and found our cat who’d stretched out to drowse in the cool of our claw-foot tub. I liked to pretend the griffin- 54 footed porcelain formed a magical animal. One who’d let me climb in, until we shifted into one species that prowled the hour before bedtime. Before night sunk like half the family photographs in the flood. Before the first house ticked into its own time zone, now unreachable by any means. Its blinds cinched shut, the brass knocker about to lift— if I remember to bring a breeze—on the red door. Before the first cat in childhood cools to a tuft of grey fur in the brass urn on the mantle. Sometimes I handle its musk, though it’s pulse-less. Sometimes I sleep and think I feel Pye step lightly up the rungs of my spine. That’s when I return to coil in the claw-foot tub, to sleep in its hushed shape, and stay that way as death drifts by, calls our names, and remains unable to find us. ...