A Bird Flew By

10th chapter of Fuega Fuega.



Prologue
As I committed my crimes in a darkened room/A bird flew by and saw what I’d done/It set up a nest outside/And he sang about what I’d become

--"The Bird Song" by Florence + the Machine

Get Out of Your Nest
Butch brought me back to his house, and for the next several days, that was where I stayed. I barely even left the doghouse, except to eat the food that Alpha placed on the back porch and to make dirt. I didn’t feel like going outside; I had nowhere else to go, and there was nowhere worth going to anymore.

Often Butch tried to convince me to leave the shelter, but to no avail. Alpha seemed to be concerned for me, too; she placed trails of bread crumbs and bits of chicken and fish leading from the opening of the doghouse to outside, and I could tell they were meant for me because Butch was obviously trying his hardest not to eat them. Even Alpha’s mother tried helping lay out the trails of food, even after Alpha yelled at her—to go back inside so she wouldn’t hurt herself, I assume. How ironic, I thought.

After three days of my self-confinement, Butch brought Surf to see me. I was surprised by how little the tom cheered me up.

“You’re not still sad about what happened a few days ago, are you?” he asked. “You can talk to me about it if you’d like.”

“No thanks,” I muttered, lying down and turning my face away from him.

He was silent for a moment. I could hear a bird tweeting from the direction of Surf’s backyard. It was probably perched on the peach tree.

“Moping around isn’t going to make you feel any better about this,” he insisted, suddenly sounding much different than his usual calmness.

“You trying to coax me out of here isn’t making me feel any better, either,” I growled.

“Well, then, I guess I’ll leave,” he snarled back. I could hear his paws padding on the grass, growing fainter with every step. “Wouldn’t want to rain on your parade, now would I?”

The next day, Hutch and Snowflake arrived, each having a much different approach to getting me to leave the house.

“Do you want to stay in here for the rest of your life?” Hutch hissed. “If you do, you’ll soon be starvin’, your fur crawling with fleas, and with no hope of leavin’ to go to the outside world because you’ll be too scared to. Doesn’t sound very pleasant, eh?”

“No, it doesn’t,” I meowed emotionless, rolling over and pretending to be asleep.

“But, Fuega, there’s a whole big world out there,” Snowflake mewed gently. “There are wonderful things happening that you’re missing right now.”

“It’s not like staying in here isn’t entertaining,” I murmured, a hint of sarcasm in my voice. “Look, up at the ceiling. There’s a spider, making a web. I can spend all day just watching it use up all its time and energy into making a bunch of thin strands, catch a few flies in it, suck up their blood…and then eventually it’ll die and fall to the ground, and become nothing more than a little speck of dust. Oh yes, I would have my fur crawling with fleas just to see that everyday.”

“Eek, I don’t like spiders,” said Snowflake nervously.

“Wow, you are just no help, aren’t ya?” Hutch growled at the fluffy she-cat. “It’s a good thing you were taken to the vet—if you can’t even coax a kitten out of its nest, you’d be a terrible mother.”

“You know what, you old feather duster,” she retorted, “if you can’t even walk normally, I don’t see why you should be leaving your house when Fuega isn’t. It’s not like anyone actually wants to see your ugly face.”

“While you two spit insults at each other,” I meowed loudly, “would you be so kind as to go someplace else where I won’t have to listen to you? Why do you think I’m staying here? I want to be left alone.”

They both left in a ruffled huff, leaving Butch to growl in frustration.

The day after that, Carly visited, this time while Alpha was taking Butch for a walk. “Just so you know, Butch didn’t ask me to come here,” she mewed before I could say anything. “And I’m being completely honest with you when I say that. You know Butch, he’s not one to think ahead that much.”

“Hmmm,” was all I said in response.

“And let me tell you something about Peanut, seeing as I’ve lived with him for a long time,” she continued. “He’s…he’s very much the sort of cat that strays think of when they hear the word ‘housecat.’ Probably what you were taught to think of as well.”

“I was told that he was different than other housecats,” I said bitterly. “My mother said that she wouldn’t have chose him to bear her kits if he was just another lazy Twoleg-lover, and that he refused to help take care of us because he had already fathered other kits and didn’t think we were special enough to be raised by him.”

“What you heard wasn’t true,” said Carly. “I’m sure you could tell that when you actually first saw him. Peanut isn’t lazy, exactly; he’s just not the sort of cat who commits to a lot of things. He’s very simple-minded. Not dim-witted, like Butch is. Peanut just doesn’t like to put himself in situations that he knows are too complicated for his own good. And what your mother proposed for him to do—to leave his housefolk and help her raise a litter of kits on the streets—was way beyond what he knows he’s capable of.”

“Did you ever meet Peach?” I asked. “My mother, I mean.”

“Yes, I did,” she replied. “It’s got to have been about six months ago now, when she started coming around here. I recognized her as a cat my mother had told me about.”

“So she was the same Peach that was in the Muse story,” I murmured.

“Yes, from what Peanut told me about her, she was the same—” Then she stopped and narrowed her blue eyes at me. “How did you know about that?”

I realized what I had done and didn’t answer her.

“Butch told you about me, didn’t he?” she growled.

I nodded slowly.

Carly sighed. “I knew I shouldn’t have told him. He’s too gullible. He’ll trust anyone who can tolerate his stupidity.” She looked back at me. “But it’s just as well. Now I won’t have to do a ton of explaining. Anyways, I recognized Peach from my mother’s story, but I didn’t know much about her, other than she was part of the white cat’s group of ferals. She visited Peanut a lot, and I could tell they were growing fond of each other—or at least Peanut was growing fond of her and she was playing along with it—but she ignored me and Abigail. Often she and Peanut would sneak out in secret so they wouldn’t get caught by the housefolk.”

“Abigail…that’s the dog that lives with you.”

“Yes. She warned me to stay away from Peach. She thought she could be dangerous. But I ignored her—I was nine months old, neither a kitten nor an adult. Listening to my housefolk’s dog was the last thing on my mind when I knew that this cat could hold more information to my mother’s past. That’s all I wanted—information. But as the housefolk always say, curiosity killed the cat.”

I thought about that for a moment, how information could make someone more knowledgeable yet cause so much trouble than there would ever be if someone chose ignorance instead. Maybe Peanut was right in not getting into things more complicated for his own good.

“So one night, when Peanut snuck out to meet Peach on the back patio, I followed behind him quietly. I was hoping that after their meeting, I could follow Peach as she left and talk to her. I hid under one of the rocking chairs as the two of them talked. It was strange to see Peanut talk to this strange she-cat, this feral, like he was talking to her then, when he, Abigail, and I had all grown up together and never really let anyone else into our friendship. Not even Butch or any of the other cats in the neighborhood were as close to each other as we were. We told each other everything. We were all brought together by our devotion to our housefolk, and we got to the point where even our housefolk couldn’t break the three of us apart. Now, to have this strange cat, a cat that had known me as a kit yet I had been too young to know her, suddenly disrupt the order in more ways than I thought possible…I could then see why Abigail had been nervous about Peach.”

As Carly was telling me this, I forgot that this strange cat that she was talking about was my mother. It seemed impossible that this one cat could have such an impact on both our lives.

“And then Peach told Peanut something I’ll never forget: she said she loved him, more than anyone in the world, and surely no one else could possibly love Peanut more than she could…and then she said she wanted to bear his kits. I felt my temperature rise under my fur; it took all my willpower to not jump out from under my chair and just scream at them. I don’t even know what I would have said, I was just so angry at the both of them…I knew Peanut could never agree to such a thing. This was the tom I had known for almost my entire life, the closest thing I had to a father. He would never agree to father the kits of any cat, let alone one he had just met recently, one that came off of the streets.”

“But he did,” I murmured.

“Yes.” Carly sighed. “Yes, he did. And I couldn’t believe it. I did exactly what I was trying not to do—I ran out and just yowled at them. Exactly what I said, I can’t even remember…something about Peanut betraying me, betraying all of us. And how Peach had stolen him from us…wow, I said a lot of nasty things to her. Peanut was absolutely terrified, if I recall correctly, but Peach…she just…” The Siamese she-cat shuddered angrily. “She just stared at me and smiled, like I was some twitching mouse that she had injured, but was waiting to kill because she enjoyed watching it squirm in agony. And I could have kept going on and on, yelling at her until I had no voice left, but she silenced me after a while, probably because she didn’t want the housefolk to come out and find her.”

She paused, took a few breaths. I waited anxiously for her to continue.

“And then she just unsheathed her claws casually, as though what she was about to do took no effort at all, and before I knew it she and I were trying to pierce each other’s throats.” She lifted her front leg up a little to reveal a scar that ran along her ribcage. “She gave this to me. I gave her a few small marks myself, but she already had enough little scars on her body that they wouldn’t have made much difference. But none of that mattered—all I could see was Peanut standing to the side, doing nothing. He was torn. He was actually torn, between this fox-hearted street cat he had met a few weeks ago, and me, the cat who had been his best friend since I was eight weeks old.”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to fight,” I muttered, not really meaning what I said.

Carly chuckled darkly. “I could have been killed by this cat. If he really cared about me, or either of us, he would have jumped in to help instead of waiting for the housefolk to wake up and drive Peach away. Even after that night, he and Peach continued to see each other. I couldn’t do anything about it; I was stuck inside due to my injuries, and even after I healed I didn’t bother. I did notice that they were much less secret about their meetings—the entire neighborhood, humans and animals, knew how I was injured, so what was the point of keeping their meetings secret? You could certainly tell when she was in heat, from the way she yowled.”

I scrinched up my face; thinking about my mother in heat was the last thing I wanted on my mind.

“Soon my housefolk, as well as all the other humans on Hart Street, couldn’t take the noise and just the ruckus in general that Peach had caused, but no one was able to catch her. They even called the animal catchers, and they put up traps around our house. But she was smart enough to avoid them all. Finally my housefolk decided that the best thing to do was to neuter Peanut. They hadn’t bothered to fix us; Abigail had been already spayed when they adopted her, and of course they wanted to keep me intact because I was a purebred. But it was already too late—about a week after Peanut came back from the vet and was well enough to go outside, Peach visited him for the last time. She told him she was pregnant, and she wanted him to help her raise the kits. But I guess he finally realized how much damage she had caused, and he said no to her. And I suppose you know the rest.”

“Did you ever forgive him for what he did?” I asked.

“I sort of had to,” she replied. “I live with him, and I really don’t have any choice in the matter. I could leave if I wanted to, but I don’t—I’m not that desperate to get away from him. Peanut never formally apologized to him, and I never formally forgave him. We just eventually started talking to each other again, after Peach had left. But he, Abigail, and I have never been as close as we were before Peach came around and ruined everything. And while I can understand how Peanut is never the kind to jump into things that he thinks would be too risky, I still think he was the biggest coward in the world that night. But maybe, now that you’ve heard the story from another perspective, you’ll be able to understand that his choice about not wanting to raise you was not a cowardly one. He did it for us, for his friends, not some stray he got pregnant.”

After a moment, I said, “Well, maybe you need to see the night when you and Peach fought in a different perspective, too. Maybe it wasn’t such a cowardly thing to do after all. Maybe he had reasons for it.”

“You don’t really believe what you’re saying, do you?”

“I’m not the one who has to figure out what happened,” I meowed. “You were the one involved, you should know more about it.”

“I’ve learned from that to not go waltzing around, expecting information to fly at me with no trouble at all,” she mewed coldly. “I had the same problem as you do, Fuega; I always wanted to know more about this and more about that, and I never stopped to think of the consequences that that knowledge would bring. As the humans say, knowledge is power, but that power can be good or bad. Often, it’s both. Now, I guess I should ask you what I was trying to accomplish in the first place when I came here: would you like to come outside? It’s gotten really sunny after all that rain, and you seriously can’t watch spiders all day.”

Just then, the spider that I had been watching before fell from the ceiling and landed on the ground in front of my nose. With one last, sad twitch of its twig-like legs, it became nothing more than a speck of dust.

“No, I guess not.” With that, I got up and followed Carly as we hopped up the fence that ran along the backyards of the houses. We headed towards the end of the street, where the house up for sale was, and where I would officially meet Peanut.