She’s mostly white with little black shoes, and a very distinctive black eye, like another kitty has punched her in the face. She looks like she loves to fight; she’s a good match for me I think. When Clark asks what we should name her I immediately deem her “Joan – World’s Strongest Kitty”.
The burning in my chest overtakes me with a vengeance while holding Joan and leaning into Clark on the subway ride home that day. I sit up very straight. Clark asks me what’s wrong. I shake my head, nothing. The fire runs across my chest and through my veins with renewed intensity. This one is bad. Really bad. I look around frantically, trying to figure out the source. I’m listening to everything all at once and I feel the familiar razor focus inside me. For a second I think I will just try to ignore it. That since Clark is with me it’s too complicated. That if I try hard enough I can just forget that anything is happening, but I remember those bodies being brought out of the liquor store, bloody and silent, and Clark’s smiling face across from me at dinner as I ignored a massacre I could have stopped. The consequences are too great. It’s too selfish to keep holding on to Clark, I can’t ask others to keep paying such a heavy price for my inaction. Besides, Clark is on this train too, what if whatever it is gets him too? And thinking about it like that seals it. I know with certainty that I’ll never be able to block it out again. I will always have to act, because it could always be Clark. And everyone is Clark to someone else. If the fire wasn’t so insistent I think maybe that realization would have broken me right then. Instead, I close my eyes and focus. Instead, I do exactly what I know how to do. What I was built to do.
Clark sits forward, concerned. “Bonnie,” he brushes some hair away from my face. “What’s wrong…you look flushed.” I push his hand away from me with my free hand.
“Be quiet. I’m listening,” I say. He looks pale, his eyes searching around the train for what I am listening for.
“Bonnie, you’re scaring me…”
“Be quiet,” I say calmly, thrusting Joan at him. “Hold her, please.” Clark takes the kitten, who now seems alarmed as well, mewing angrily. With Joan safely in Clark’s hands, I stand up. Clark tries to stand up too. I push him back down. Hard. Things are different now. I hold him there, my hand flat against his chest, looking around the train and beyond to the other cars. “Please stay here,” I say to him, a little bit coldly.
“Baby, you’re scaring the hell out of me. What’s wrong?” I look at him for the first time since I felt the bad sound and I don’t know what it is he sees in my eyes but he understands how serious I am and stops resisting against my hand, stops trying to stand up with me. I suppose this is the moment when he realizes that our problems are not over, and that he maybe had no idea what he was dealing with all this time.
“Please, just do this for me,” I beg. He nods and pets Joan on the head to silence her mewing. I walk toward the back of the train through to the next car, and then the next, and the next. Sure enough, three cars back, there’s a bad man and a bad sound coming off of him, the likes of which I haven’t felt in a long while.
I try to sit back down, to do nothing, to be like every other scared little kitten on that train praying that bad things will just go away. But it’s not possible, it’s not who I am, it’s not who I can be, it’s not who I’m supposed to be, and no number of days playing house can make me be someone else. I wish it could, but it’s just not in the stars.
The man with the bad sound has an absurdly large bloody knife and there’s a young boy on the ground, maybe twelve years old. The boy is still breathing, but it’s shallow and ragged, he’s been stuck deep with that knife. His dark blood is running down the grooves in the floor of the train, faster with every turn and rumble of the tracks. Some people are aware of the blood and slinking away from it like it’s a poison that will get them too. Others are letting it slide under their shoes and gel in their pant legs. There’s a girl too. A little girl, three years old, maybe four, her throat already slightly pink behind the knife of this man. They look like brother and sister. Her eyes are red from crying. There are another three-dozen people in this car alternately shuddering and screaming at this scene, trying to gauge their own escapes. I make my move forward and people are immediately caught up in it, yelling at me in hushed tones. “Girl, don’t go over there!” “Don’t you see that boy got a knife!” “Stupid girl – sit down! You’re going to get us all killed!”