“Inside and Out” by Matt Dube

Inside and Out

I was in the other room when my sister-in-law told my wife that she was giving the two of us an invisible, hairless cat. We’d just moved their dad into a nursing home that specialized in dementia care.
Most of the patients were old, but some of them were my age, so I wasn’t sure when I was talking to a resident or a caregiver. Like the woman who told me she thought we were kin. I told her I was only part of the family by marriage, and she patted my elbow. “That’s what I thought, too,” she said and laughed. 
The brother-in-law and I were there to drop off a recliner, the only place my father-in-law had slept for the last while. We carried it past him without even noticing he was sitting in a wheelchair in front of the nurse’s station. I came back to sit beside him for a while, both of us quieted by questions about what happened next. But already later that day, when we came back with a plump pillow for his narrow bed, he’d found a place sitting in the entry foyer, facing the automatic doors. I could tell that residents sat there all day, watching the door that only opened to the outside when the nurses released the electric lock, waiting for it to open and let in a little breath of the outside world.
And now we had a cat, invisible and hairless, so that it won’t trigger my allergies (even hairless cats have dander, my wife told me, finding the flaw in her sister’s plan). But it was sweet. She wanted us to have something else to care about when we drove back north. At least that’s what I thought. I encouraged my wife to take a picture of the corner of our couch and send it to her sister, tell her that the cat had already claimed her spot.
Outside our door, there’s a visible cat, too, glamorous with long hair that shifts from bone-parchment to mascara-black, a Siamese sphinx who reclines on our welcome mat in the square of shadow our gutter overhang provides on these hot summer afternoons. The cat is well-cared for — no tangles snarl its hair or briars or dirt. It looks at us with untroubled blue eyes, but when I encouraged Jen to take a picture for her sister, it rolled over, jack-knifed, did everything but run away from any claim of ownership. 
Some afternoons, I stand with the doorway open. I don’t look down to see if the cat cuts between my legs to come inside.

Matt Dube

Matt’s non-fiction has been published in Essay Daily, Iconoclast, Scud, and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing and American Lit at a small mid-Missouri university, and he reads submissions for JackLeg Press.

Headshot: Matt Dube

Photo Credit: Staff