by LM Fontanes
Olivia knows the cat is judging her. Now that Matt took off with his dog and six Stop & Shop bags crammed with possessions, it’s pretty clear the cat blames her for the shortage of warmth in the emptier double bed. Not that it misses the dog or Matt, truth be told. Those two took over the mattress like Julius Caesar conquering Gaul. But heat is heat and a cat understands that you grab what you can.
Olivia looks in the tilted mirror next to the closet, the one she bought cheap at Target to put next to Matt’s tie rack but never got around to hanging. Damn if she’s going to hang it now. Maybe she’ll put it on the curb Tuesday without calling ahead to book an oversized pick-up. Maybe somebody driving by will see the mirror and think they need a slice of recognition in an uninspected life. Maybe they will finally feel seen.
The cat watches her watching herself. Yeah, that’s judgment all right. What does it notice? Olivia looks more closely. The cat flicks its tail. Is it judging her body? Olivia inspects her reflection. The neon Sale sticker on the mirror’s wavy surface blocks the nether regions between her legs, a garish fig leaf on a latter-day Eve.
“Do you like what you see?” she asks the cat, remembering she once asked that of Matt, who, if she recalls correctly, didn’t respond. Neither does the cat.
Olivia grabs the bottom of her sleeveless nightshirt and yanks it over her head. She kicks off her scuffed suede slippers then pulls down her pair of buy three, get one free panties, tossing them on the wood laminate floor. She peels the obstructive sale sticker from the mirror’s face and glances once more at the cat in the center of the Matt-less bed before looking at her naked self.
In the reflection, she sees everything that Matt may or may not have seen. She sees everything he loved or didn’t love. But if he did or didn’t see, if he did or didn’t love, he never told her. And, finally, this morning, she told him that wasn’t enough.
The cat rolls on its back for a belly rub. Olivia walks over and obliges. On the surely big enough, warm enough bed, she buries her face in the rumble of her cat’s love.
“How ’bout breakfast?” she whispers to Mr. Whiskers.
Later on, she’d look for a nail to hang up the mirror so she could use it every day if she felt like it.
LM Fontanes is a multi-racial, multi-genre storyteller who writes, teaches & leads. She comes from a family of educators and first responders in working class Philadelphia. Words in/upcoming Roi Fainéant, Frazzled Lit, Silly Goose Press, 100-Foot Crow, JAKE, 34 Orchard, Flash Fiction Festival Anthology, Thomasonian, The Willowherb Review, and long-listed for The Smokey Award and the Frazzled Lit short story prize.
Emerge Literary Journal 