'Cleopatra' by Madeleine Armstrong

It takes me a day to realise you’re missing, because in the summer you barely come inside, preferring instead to roam the gardens long past dusk.

When you don’t arrive for your breakfast, I panic because I’ve known you since your paws were too big for your body, since I was little more than a girl, with everything spread out before me like a feast, and you’ve never disappeared, not even when I moved us hundreds of miles away and that feast started to look more like a picnic, then a ready meal, then a solitary Tesco sandwich.  

I print out flyers and stick them through all the doors on the street, pin them to all the lamp posts, while I call your full name, Cleopatra, because this feels too serious for anything else. I imagine the worst: a speeding car; a locked shed; a half-finished building site of a house.

I can barely sleep without you on the pillow beside me, where you’ve been for the last 4,550 nights, lulling me with your pneumatic purr. You’re not there the next night, or the next, and the posters begin to curl and yellow, and the darkness begins to creep, so slow I don’t notice it at first, then it’s September and it’s been 91 days without you and your demands for food and belly rubs.

I’m just starting to think about donating your Whiskas to a local cat rescue, crying in the garden while I deadhead the roses, when I hear a meow that’s more like a squeak.

I turn, not letting myself believe it until I see your face, your green eyes narrowing in a slow blink, then watch you slink across the flowerbeds like you’ve never been gone.