Trip

by Scott Garson

The cat was a terrible person and refused to sit with her, or even be held, except in the morning when she had come in from her hour-long run, and he pushed to her shins, wanting transport into the place of scent and light, and she bent to snatch him and shouldered the broken screen door and stood with him there on the step, for two or three minutes, carefully loving him, and feeling the world as he did, the movements of birds, their voices, shaping the sky, and a car, displacing air on a ridge at a distance that became real to her and magnificent, just for right then, just with that small little being in her arms.

Scott Garson is the author of Is That You, John Wayne?—a collection of stories. He lives in Missouri.