tabby

I am alive and these are the words we use to explain why

Horses. Tabby tells me about horses and Silkwood and Buster, her cat. We�re lying in the snow at 9:30. It�s a Tuesday before the war and we are far beyond late for school.

There are birds climbing into the sun-dried sky, which is mushroom-grey and wet-looking like a can of Campbell�s soup. There are A-bombs now, and shell shock has become a thing of the past. Yet there are shards of left-over metal. They are lodged in the earth and lodged in our hearts and in our minds. The snow is like sheets of paper, simple, crisp and white. We use these places to begin new life.

Tabby dropped her notebook in the snow that day. Her worksheets, covered with the perfect lines and curves of her left-handed cursive became wet and muddy and it was funny, only we weren�t allowed to laugh. But we did. Oh God, how we laughed. We laughed so hard on that sunny moring that we fell in the snow and lay there. . . making snow angels and talking.

Our noses ran, but we didn�t care. Instead, we rode bareback and looked back and took back what they took from us when we were small. There were no clouds in that winter sky and as we lay there in the snow things felt like spring after a long cold winter.

After some time, after an hour, after the sun had risen high into the noontime sky, all far away and yellow as it was, we awoke again. The wind had come up and disturbed our peaceful musings. I pulled myself to my feet, boots heavy with snow. Tabby dusted herself off, using her mittens to swat at clinging bits of ice.

Tabby reached over and took my hand then, held it in her mittened palm. We walked the rest of the way to school like that, silently. I think there was something hovering over us that morning that we both understood, but wanted to deny, and we did, even just for a few suspended hours on that warm winter�s morning before the war.

I lost sight of Tabby not too long after that. There are swirls of ammunition smoke that muddle up the truth and a fog that prevents us. Things got moving toward the war and her family moved away, back to Warsaw where they had lived before Tabby was born. We wrote letters back and forth faithfully for awhile, but we were growing up quickly and the war was escalating.

I remember one of these letters specifically. Tabby wrote to me in her curvy left handed cursive and told me of the ghetto in Poland and how they had to leave Buster behind. They were going into hiding. This was the last letter she ever wrote to me.

Most nights I just pray that she is safe, others I pray that she�ll come back, my Tabby cat.