To Mangit

You were but a tiny thing when I first found you—a gold-gilded kitten covered in crumbs of dust and dirt. Tiny enough to squeal in the middle of my palm, I heard you from the inside screaming outside where my grandmother’s plant life grew.

You were a foul thing. You reeked of spilt gasoline, as if your brothers were tricycles, trucks, and heavy machines. When I carried you inside you were drenched in mud, muck, and filth—a little orange cotton ball who’d been thrown into a storm.

But you were beautiful, too. Your amber-colored irises shared the glint of the afternoon’s warmth. There were bronze trails blazing down your back, seeping slowly down your sides like honey yellow paint lines or like carrot-colored tiger stripes—you looked like you were born rolling in fields of marigold.

The end of your tail curved inward. Like a circular snail shell, it’s a defect of your birth that only troubled you slightly. More often than you had wanted, it caught on charger wires, birthday cake ribbons, cross-stitching string, and even on ends of fabric. But I was always there to free you from whatever caught your tail.

Your paws were soft. Like cotton candy pink pillows, they gave you silence in your stride. The only announcement I had of you darting across the house was the twinkling of the bell on your cherry-colored collar.

Your voice was loud. Even in your kittenhood. The early morning that I found you, my mother fed you leftovers. I can no longer remember the kind of fish it was, but I do remember the shrillness in your shriek, like a siren blaring warning signs on the living room floor, my newest little alarm clock, saying “I am here, I will be yours, now feed me.”

You were named for your smallness, in a language spoken far from here. In the months that passed from your arrival, though, you outgrew your namesake, until you became heavy enough that it often hurt to hold you for long. But I held you anyway.

My mother gave you your name. You are her favorite, and she is yours too. An afternoon in our house is incomplete if I don’t find you asleep nestling in her arms. Not a sound from the both of you. Quiet. As if in that one moment of serene siesta slumber the living room walls bent and fell to a nothingness beneath, the tiles flew away in wisps of smoke, and the world has all but dissolved. And it left only you and her, in a tender state of togetherness, an embrace like a promise for forever, a soft fondness only a lucky few enjoy.

So when you sleep, I hope you dream together. Because for all the years I’ve known her, I’m sure my mother is content in the company of a cat.