True Story

by Camille T. Dungy

True Story by Camille T. Dungy

The cat wandered between two women.
In one house, kibble and clear water.
Sometimes, bits of roast chicken, even,
sometimes, translucent fish skin.
That’s the house that first called her
its own and, for all those nights until
she found the other woman, she’d purred 
there without asking for anything more.
But, I’ve already told you, she found
the other woman. Whose house held
the wondrous calm of no children. A blessing.
Wet food in the kitchen. Catnip growing
for her in the yard. The women came
to be like sister wives. Accepting, if not
companionable. Opening and offering
everything when the cat came around.
For years this continued. They lived
next door to each other, the women,
on the wooded west slope of a mountain
whose winding road runners liked to climb.
The cat lay her body down first on one bed
then on another until the arrangement settled
into a system as unremarkable as love.
One woman believed, as Issa believed,
that in all things, even the small and patient
snail, there are perceptible strings that tie
each life to all others. The other woman
was born in Chicago. There, the lake’s current
carried a Black boy past some unmarked line
and a mob on the white beach threw rocks
until the boy was no more. She didn’t
side with the mob, this woman, but she knew
where they came from. She came from 
there too. When the cat got sick, the woman
from Chicago wanted to put her down quickly.
Keep her from all this suffering, she said.
The other woman wanted not so much for her
to live forever as for her to fully live
every second of her allotted time. Meanwhile, 
winter rain threatened the shallow-rooted
eucalyptus on the hillside. Meanwhile, 
the runners still ran. The women argued
in their divided driveway about how they’d prefer
to die. Until she didn’t anymore, the cat
continued eating in both the women’s houses.