Angry Cat's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

Angry Cat woke the next morning with his jaw tight. The anger sat in his chest the same way it always did. Mother Cat was already up. Harriet was somewhere outside making noise. He walked to the door and stopped. Something pulled at him from the hills. He followed the feeling past the sandbox and into the trees. The path narrowed as he climbed. He had been this way before but never paid attention. Now his paws moved without thinking. He came to a clearing where an old chair sat against a tree trunk. Moss covered the legs. A quilt hung over the back, faded and worn thin in places. He stopped. The smell hit him first—earth and age and something underneath he could not name. Then he saw it. A small toy mouse lay in the grass beside the chair. The fabric was gray and torn but he recognized the shape. His chest tightened. He knew this place. The memory came without warning. He was small. Someone sat in the chair with him curled in their lap. No words. Just silence and warmth and the toy mouse between his paws. The anger had been there even then. He remembered hissing when the sun moved wrong. He remembered clawing at the quilt. But the someone had not moved. They had just sat there holding him while he raged. He did not know who they were. He did not know if it was his birth mother or someone else. But he knew the anger had started before Mother Cat found him. It had always been his. The memory did not explain why. It only proved the anger was older than his adoption. Older than the genealogical document. It belonged to him alone. Angry Cat picked up the mouse toy. The catnip smell was long gone. He turned it over in his paws and felt the weight of what he now understood. The anger was not just inherited. It had lived in him from the very beginning, even when someone had tried to soothe it. Even when he was small enough to be held. He set the toy back down and walked away from the clearing. The question of why still had no answer. But now he knew the anger had been witnessed before Mother Cat ever found him. Someone had seen it and stayed anyway. That changed nothing about the anger itself. But it changed what he thought he remembered about being alone with it.