Flash fiction

Drunk Cat

            She knew exactly how she’d ended up in the tree.  The problem was that she didn’t know how to get back down.  She’d burst through the doors of her apartment complex, about an hour earlier, onto the city street, which was traversed almost solely by stumbling couples zig-zagging from apartment to bar and back. In the middle of March, in the forty-degree air, she wore only her favorite low-cut, sexy pink dress. Jess wasn’t cold, though.  Her bare limbs felt fully clad with the seven shots of liquid courage; liquid comfort; liquid blanket; vodka, that she’d downed before stumbling outside from the loud, cramped confines of her apartment.

            Jess’s post-shot-trot brought her to a tree, standing alone in front of a building about thirty feet down the road from hers. She wouldn’t be able to explain why she knew this was her walk’s destination, but through her whole body coursed the irresistible urge to be up there, perched like some night creature semi-hidden by the few leaves the maple had held onto through winter.

            Jess’s past few hours had been so loud, so enclosed, stuffy, and chaotic that she’d just had to get out.  And when just being outside wasn’t enough, she planted her bare right foot against the tree’s trunk and scurried with surprising ease to a rest on level with the second-story balcony behind her.

            Her friends wouldn’t come out with her, though she’d tugged on their arms and shouted obnoxiously at them for ten minutes straight to, “smell the glorious night air!” But now she was glad they hadn’t come.

            “Too fucking cold out,” they’d said, but she was perfectly comfortable, and now laughed to herself because she got to enjoy this, and they did not.

            First she got her thrill from the fact that no one knew she was up there.  It took all the self-control she still had left in her to hold her sniggers in as drunkenly-bickering pairs passed under her -- oblivious to Jess’s owl-like presence in the tree.  One couple, clearly not drunk enough to miss the hot-pink of her shirt amongst the branches, stared, not amused, as they passed. As they walked away she heard them mumble something about “drunks in trees.” It irked Jess that her intoxication was so obvious.

            Her mind hummed electrically. She wanted to enjoy her own silence but her brain was buzzing to be heard.

            So then she began to make noises at the strangers.  They were subtle, at first, or that was at least her intention.  She shook branches and whistled her best attempt at a bird call. When even this wasn’t noticed or acknowledge by a vast majority of under-walkers she began to meow like a cat. Maybe people would think she was one and call the fire department.

             Now a guy and a girl, having left the bar a block away, are approaching holding hands.  Jess, meowing softly, looks down at the girl’s tight, pink dress and instantly switches her meow to a hiss. She is wearing the exact same dress, and is ready to fight about it. Her inner barbarian had been fed by the vodka. She wants to swing down from the tree like Tarzan and kick the dress right off that girl so she can never ever wear it again. But when Jess looks for the first time down at the path she’d taken to get up to her perch, she feels her plan shrivel. There are barely any branches beneath the one she’s sitting on, and already she’s forgotten how she’d been able to climb up with such ease.

            The couple stops and looks up.

            “Hey, she’s wearing the same dress as me,” The girl says to her man.

            “Meow,” says Jess back down to them.

            “Are you stuck?” asks the man.

            “Meow,” says Jess.

            And the couple walks away, murmuring and glancing back periodically.

            A minute later, an orange cat, scared by the neighbor’s golden retriever, darts up the tree as quickly as Jess had and stops on a branch right next to her.

            “Meow,” says Jess to the cat.

            The cat licks its paw and says, “Don’t speak, enjoy the view.”