Keeper

The Gift

35 The Gift All winter the feral cat hid beneath the barn. Only sometimes when I walked the rutted road, kicking mud chunked in frozen fists, she’d run ahead, always just on the edge of vision. The woods stepped forward in thin light, branches clean as X-ray bones, the leaves, by that time, vanished. The cat, too: darted past, slipped under the barn floor. Gone. Mornings she left birds on the back porch, dropped just by the door, and I tried not to look too close, buried them behind the flower bed, the one soft place I knew. That road stayed frozen for months, trench and hollow dredged by trucks then stiffened into place, lines my boots traced all the way up to the birch wood and back. I never thought to call them gifts, the birds. Mornings I found bone-chill air, husks of wing and blood, I tried not to look too close, wanting October back again— amber, amber, crimson, gold—not the absent cat, the cold, everything sliding past zero. The cat spread the feathers in lavish arcs, and her eyes, as I passed the barn, glowed. She left the birds for me. I’d spent months 36 staring at stripped trees, looking the wrong way that whole time. It took a long time to find what I needed: not the reaching branches, but the ground. ...