Olivia

It was cold for a July. It was always cold. Livi remembered the warmth, but there was no point in missing it. It wasn't the nature of a cat to question the world, only to survive it. Livi did survive. Her family did not. They couldn't make it through the cold from the ash and the smoke that filled the sky the day the rock fell to the Earth.

She was a simple cat with fur that blurred the line between black and grey, and the ash hid her quite comfortably. Along her neck was a striped collar with a locket dangling from it.

She paced herself along the dusty sidewalks of the dead city, where the skyscrapers had already ended, and the suburbs were beginning to sprawl. Livi hid under abandoned cars and behind emptied dumpsters where the men had taken even the most useless of trash to survive. Where there were sputtering lights in the windows, twitching and twisting with the candle flame where the wind danced with it, there were men. Livi had seen them hunt dogs, deer, and even each other. She would stay in the cold, far from them.

She once had her own man. He gave her warmth and food. He even gave her a name. But she wouldn't come when he said it. She would now. She would come if he said nothing at all at this point. Yes, she didn't acknowledge when her man called her back then, for this was the nature of a cat. They ignored these commands because they weren't pets. This was a partnership. Dogs lived in packs where there was a master. Man was always master. Cat's had gangs. Only the need to eat was master there. Cats relied on partnership, but dogs craved hierarchy.

Livi's best friend had been a dog. He, like her, had been adopted by their shared man. Poor dog didn't survive the cold for long. With winter came sickness, and his summer coat couldn't keep the nip of the cold out. Their man didn't make it either. A lot of men hadn't.

The locket was a gift from the man. It was all she had of her family. She couldn’t remember their names, but until she did, she carried their memory on her collar.

The sun was yellowing low in the sky and soon it would grow red and finally melt into the violet glow of the sunset where it pooled on the horizon. This warned of cold. Yes, it was cold even now, but the cold of night would undo her.

This had been Livi's advantage. The dogs and the wild cats were hunters in the night, sleepers in the day. The time of their hunting was now dangerously cold. Livi was not a creature of the night, however. She had become adjusted to the daytime hours where her man was awake to feed her. She was already master of the hours the others were used to sleeping in.

But night was as cold for her as it had been for them, and so she would need shelter. There were plenty of places to hid away for the night, and few humans to stop her from doing so. The vacant city blocks that now where only home to memories were just recently beginning to moss over and crack, their sturdy walls chipping away and crumbling as slowly as the years went, but they still stood.

Livi wouldn't be able to sleep though until she'd ate something. To her luck, food wasn't as scarce as it might once have been. The problem was where the food was. More often than not, it was in the hands of men. They ravaged the carcass of the city they once helped build, looking for food to steal or squirrels and dogs to kill. They'd go for cats if they could catch them.

Livi smelled the meat, still raw and unseasoned, just behind a wooden fence that blocked off a mud lot where there once stood a theater tightly pressed between the stores on either side of it. The building collapsed long ago, but men didn't see a reason to replace it at the time. They fenced it off and continued their lives. It was but a memory now. Perhaps it wasn’t a theater. Livi couldn’t remember.

Now the lot sheltered food, and the popping glow of fire. Yes, and in the light of the fire flickering up on the walls of the two now dead stores, Livi could see the shadows of men moving here and there around the fire. That wouldn't stop Livi from getting dinner.

She snuck up to the fence and looked through the slits between the planks of wood. She saw the men moving around the fire to stay warm, and noted the dog keeping watch beside them. The group moved around to evade the smoke, and some of them bent low to pet the dog and admire his obedience, as was the way of men and dog.

The men wore torn jackets and had rags from shirts wrapped over their heads and ears to keep warm. Many had rags wrapped around their pants like long kilts to keep the cold off their pant legs.

Livi hopped under the nearest car, startled by the sound of a window shattering from the nearby storefront. She saw the kids, men barely old enough to father children, sneak into the store for a warm place to sleep. They hadn't seen the lit up walls of the empty lot next to them, or the shadows of men on the walls. The shadows stopped and Livi could see from under her car that the men were moving to the back of the lot where back doors led into the store. They would find who was breaking in. They would protect their food.

This was a great fortune for Livi, who snuck back up to the fence and eyed the unprotected food. It was raw squirrel only freshly skinned and torn from the bone, sitting in what had once been a resealable paint can. Right now, of course, the lid was off as they were still filling it, and soon would be eating.

She threw herself up onto the fence, her paws tiptoeing over the splinters, and hopped down onto the lot. It was too cold for water, but she could feel what, in warmer weather, would have been mud. Some grass was spattered here or there, but little in the way of live was in the dirt, buried deep under the ash.

The heart-shaped locket on her collar wobbled when she landed, clanking softly enough to no men could hear, but a dog might. She was quick to pick a piece of squirrel and make a run for the back fence of the lot.

She hid beside piles of wood planks and sheets when the men of the lot came out of the store pulling the invaders into the open, the dog waddling to their side, as obedient as hers had been. The children were looking around at the men, keeping their heads low and avoiding eye contact. They were shivering as much from fear as they were from the cold.

The men looked to the pack's leader, a bearded man with a holstered gun, for a decision. He talked to the boys, no older than fourteen, and seemed to feel some pity for them.

After thinking them over, the man said, "Well Christ, you'll die out there, so sit down an' eat. We have enough..." Food, yes, and the dog finally noticed Livi had some of it. He cut off the pack leader with a piercing bark and charged Livi.

"Damn cat. Git 'em Lucky!" The men yelled.

Up the wood piles Livi went, the dog Lucky nipping at her tail. He tried to jump onto the recklessly stacked stockpile, but the plank his hind leg perched on came flying out under him, taking the stack and Lucky down with it. Livi was already up and over the fence.

Men. Men were such an odd group. There was now laughter from behind the fence. Their little reassurances calmed the dog, ‘next time Lucky,’ and they went back to work. They found joy in such unexpected places. Lucky got bamboozled by a cat who ran off with the food, and this amused them.

Men weren't pack animals like dogs. They were family animals. They brought in new members and cared for each other even when it seemed reckless to, especially for their young. Yes, and to animals.

Livi saw the families of men form up to survive and thought often of her own. She remembered her best friend's warm coat of fur, how soft it was when he snuggled to her side as she slept. He could get away with this when he was small, but age made him larger. Still, she would play with him at any size he got, swatting at him and chasing his tail. She could use his warmth now. And her man's hand scratching her ear and sliding down the fur of her back.

She would run to his lap to be petted when he watched the TV. Yes, she understood the TV the same as she understood the windows or the pictures on the walls. What was the difference between the window, where things moved around from behind the glass, and the TV, where things moved around from behind the glass.

The day the rock fell, she saw it from her man's lap. It was on the TV. The box made so many sounds, but she knew they were harmless because anytime there was a noise from the box, her man would ignore it. From that, she knew she could ignore it. This day, however, he didn't. He was in clear shock and completely afraid of what the man in the TV said, and she too watched the rock on the TV fall somewhere in the world.

It brought smoke, and ash. The clouds of ash shadowed the sun and brought an age of ice over everything. Cats didn’t have families, only gangs. This was always the truth as she saw it, but it wasn’t the truth as it really was. She had a family. If only she had them still to warm her. But she did not, and so she chewed the rest of her food and went to leave.

"Come, kitty..." The younger of the men called her from an opened door in the fence. She stepped back from him. She needed to run somewhere to sleep away from the cold, but this man wanted to her to approach him. He held out his hand and scratched the air as to show he wanted to pet her.

She thought over whether to approach him or run. She turned away but he called back to her, keeping her attention. Finally, she inched a little closer. When he didn't jump at her, she moved in a little more. Eventually she was in range of him, and he reached to pet her. She backed away only a little, staying close enough to take his hand behind the ear. The scratching of a warm hand felt so familiar but somehow foreign.

She finally came in the whole way and embraced his palm, and for the first time since the cold came, she purred.

He looked at her locket and turned the heart in his hand to see it's sides and back. "What's this now?" He brought the locket up enough to read the name engraved in it. "Olivia... is that your name? I'll just call you Livi."

She finally ran off but slept nearby, so that in the morning she would smell the food the boy had left out for her. She ate, and he would pet her a little more. By the third day, she even let him pick her up.