to visit us, although people hardly ever come to visit us except for Laura and, sometimes, Sarah’s best friend, Anise. Anise only comes over two or three times a year because her job is going on tours in a place called Asia. Laura won’t come over if she knows Anise will be here, but Sarah and I are always happy to see Anise because when Anise smiles she smiles with her whole face, and she never says anything even a little untrue. Also, as Sarah likes to say, Anise is a person who understands cats. (As much as a human can, anyway.) When I first came to live with Sarah, she brought home a “self-cleaning” litterbox that would make a terrifying whirrrrrrr noise whenever I tried to use it. (I think it planned to keep itself clean by never letting me use it.) It scared me so much that I started going on the living room rug just to avoid it, which made Sarah very unhappy with me even though it clearly wasn’t my fault. This went on for weeks until finally Anise came over and wrinkled her nose at the smell from the rug that now filled our whole apartment. Ugh, she said, doesn’t Prudence have a litterbox? Then she saw the “self-cleaning” monster Sarah had brought home and said, Sarah, you’re scaring the piss out of her with that thing. (Although really the piss was getting scared into me until I couldn’t hold it anymore.) She took Sarah right out to buy me a regular litterbox, and we didn’t have any problems after that.
The other room in our apartment has our bed and a dresser for Sarah’s clothes and—my favorite place—our closet. There’s all kinds of fun stuff for me to play with in both rooms, like old magazines that feel like the dry leaves I used to lie on sometimes when I lived outside, and framed posters on the walls that I can jump up and hit with my paw until they go in a different direction. There are shoe boxes of little paper toys that Sarah calls matchbooks, and Sarah says she has a matchbook from every club and bar and restaurant she’s been to in New York since she moved here thirty-four years ago. Even though Sarah has a lot of stuff, she’s careful to keep everything neat and put-away so there’s plenty of room for me to run around. It’s the one thing Sarah’s good at being organized about.
Way in the back of our closet are a lot of clothes she never wears anymore—she wore them a long time ago, she says, back in her “going-out” days. Some of her clothes have feathers on them, so of course I thought they were birds and tried to catch them with my claws. That was the only time Sarah ever got really mad at me. But if a human doesn’t want her clothes chased by a cat, then she shouldn’t have clothes that look like birds.
It took me a while, but I’ve finally gotten the whole apartment to the point where it has a comfortable cat-smell. It’s not anything a human would be able to smell, but if some other cat were to come here and try to move in with us, she would know that another cat already got here first. The back of the closet especially has a very homey and safe aroma. Sarah put some old things of hers there for me to sleep on, and it’s the closest thing I have to my own private cave.
And, best of all, our apartment is filled with music. Most of it lives on round, flat, black disks that Sarah keeps in stiff cardboard holders. All the cardboard holders have pictures or drawings on them, and some of them look exactly like the posters hanging on our walls. The wall where the music lives, though, doesn’t have any posters hanging on it. That’s because that whole wall is nothing but music, from floor to ceiling. Sarah tells me I’m not allowed to mark any of it with my claws, which means it belongs just to her and not to both of us. Still, I get to listen to it with her. The black disks don’t look like they should be able to do anything, but Sarah puts them on a special silver table that can hold two black disks at one time. Then she presses some buttons and moves some things around, and the disks sing