The Newcomer - Part I
“Phoenix rested his head on his paw, mouth hanging open slightly, tongue on full display. The younger cat looked sleeker and less age-worn, but no more dignified: his tongue, too, was hanging out.”
In “The Newcomer,” struggling horologist Brynn returns home from work to find not one, but two cats waiting for her. One is her beloved, longtime companion, Phoenix. The other is a younger, yet familiar newcomer. As she searches to find out more about the newcomer, she must also navigate her snippy ex, her persistent brother, and her job at The Time Emporium. What results is a spiral of running toward and away from her problems.
Witty and visceral, Amy Monaghan’s speculative story investigates the human desire to stop the clock and all the repercussions that might come with it.
-Emily
It had been a workday of average monotony when I returned to my apartment around six-thirty p.m. and found my two cats waiting for me at the door. The problem was, I had only ever had one cat.
Phoenix, a nineteen-year-old calico who I’d had since he was two, was there on the entryway rug like he always was. But sitting beside him was a second, almost identical calico. This one was younger and fitter. Whereas Phoenix had arthritis and leaned slightly to the left while sitting, this cat sat up straight. Whereas the fur on Phoenix’s elderly back stuck out at odd angles no matter how much I smoothed it, this cat was well-groomed. Phoenix was making no secret of the annoyance he felt towards this young newcomer. As I closed the door behind me, utterly baffled, the younger cat let out a loud meow and received a swift paw to the head from Phoenix.
“Hey, be nice!” I scolded him instinctively, then furrowed my brow in confusion. “Who are you?” I asked the younger cat.
I went to pick him up to examine him closer but, just like Phoenix, he seemed to hate having his stomach touched and slunk away as if he’d turned to liquid.
“Fine, fine,” I said. “You found a friend while I was gone, huh, Phoenix?”
Phoenix stared at me blankly.
The newcomer cat didn’t seem to be causing any immediate problems, and I trusted Phoenix to hold his own, so I meandered the apartment looking for the place where the newcomer had entered. I was usually good about keeping my space closed up. When I was in middle school my childhood home had been robbed while my family was sleeping, and it had left me with a lifelong paranoia about locking the windows. So I was surprised, shocked even, that I had been careless enough to leave an entry point for strange animals to make their way inside.
Only, I hadn’t.
There were no open windows. The patio door was firmly locked, wooden dowel still in place in the sliding door’s crevice. I made my way all around the apartment three full times before I had to admit that there was no conceivable way a cat could have gotten inside.
“What the fuck?” I muttered, for my own benefit.
I couldn’t understand it. Was it possible he had come in through a vent? Were there even vents in this apartment?
The cats were unperturbed. They had both settled on the living room rug in the last patch of late afternoon sunlight. Phoenix rested his head on his paw, mouth hanging open slightly, tongue on full display. The younger cat looked sleeker and less age-worn, but no more dignified: his tongue, too, was hanging out.
I knelt down next to them and both cats uttered a low chirp. Phoenix sat up and offered me his special greeting: a soft-toothed love bite right on the tip of my nose. It was a sacred, silly sort of gesture that had existed between us since the first day I brought him home from the shelter. I’d never seen a cat do something so gentle or so sweet—but then, I had decided a long time ago that Phoenix was more than just a cat. And now there were two of them. I chuckled, shook my head, and decided that this was too ridiculous to make sense of after a full workday. I would postpone my bewilderment until the morning.
As I changed into pajamas, my phone began to ring and I felt a flare of anxiety. It was ridiculous, but I sensed who was calling simply from how shrill and insistent it sounded. Sure enough, the screen lit up with a photo of my older brother, Jerry: a cheesy LinkedIn headshot that he’d forcibly added upon noticing I’d left his contact photo blank. Something about seeing him in his middle-aged suit always irked me, but I hadn’t gotten around to deleting it. I switched the ringer off, muting it.
I dumped a portion of cat food into Phoenix’s bowl, then a second portion into a human bowl for the newcomer, and planted myself on the couch while the last of the daylight faded.
*****
The next morning arrived, a Saturday, and I awoke to the soft, sleeping weight of Phoenix on my chest. He spent every night with most of his body in contact with mine, either on my chest or curled up in the crook of my neck on my pillow. At nighttime we became one thing, a shared body. It was sweet and irritating and familiar.
Phoenix sensed me stirring and purred, stretching out his front paws. Blearily, I scratched his scruffy little neck and thought about the second, almost identical cat from my dream. But even as the thought crossed my mind, I felt something move near my head: a brush of warm fur against my neck. I sat up abruptly, earning a chirp of irritation from Phoenix, and looked towards the headboard. There, curled up on my pillow, was the second cat. He looked up at me with wide, amber eyes the same shade as Phoenix’s and gave a deep, contented yawn.
So not a dream, then.
I climbed out of bed and both cats stood up gamely. The younger one jumped easily to the floor; Phoenix ambled down the little staircase beside the bed that I’d bought for his arthritis. The cats trailed me to the kitchen and meowed plaintively as I put on a pot of coffee and tossed back a Prozac.
“Okay, okay,” I murmured to them as I dumped their wet, pungent breakfast in the two bowls on the floor. I leaned against the counter and watched them tear into the processed meat pâté as if they hadn’t eaten in days.
As the coffee gurgled in the pot, I watched the cats and began to notice small details that had escaped me the night before. Like the way the heart-shaped patch of brown fur between Phoenix’s shoulder blades was mirrored on the younger cat. Or the way they both had one black paw (the back right one, to be exact). Now that I really looked, actually, the two cats were almost identical, except for the obvious age difference. What were the odds of that?
*****
“Everything looks good,” said the vet tech. She handed me the carrier containing the newcomer cat. I hefted him onto the seat beside me in the quiet little waiting room.
“He’s about two years old, already neutered, teeth in good shape, no fleas or worms,” she continued. “And he’s chipped, so that’s great news. We can go ahead and give his owner a call right now.”
“Amazing,” I said, but an unexpected sadness began to creep over me at the thought of sending the newcomer on his way.
“Just wait right here,” said the tech, “and I’ll try the number on the microchip.”
She headed back through the door to the exam rooms and offices, leaving me alone in the waiting room with my visitor. I peered through the mesh at him. His angry meows had quieted and he was watching me with a hesitant sort of interest.
“You have a family somewhere, huh, bud?” I said, wiggling a finger into the carrier to scratch his little head. “Time to go back where you belong.”
My phone rang. I fumbled it out of my pocket and held it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Hi there, I’m calling from Eastside Veterinary Group, how are you today?”
It was the voice of the vet tech who I’d just spoken to a moment before. I frowned, wondering why she hadn’t come back out to talk to me in person.
“Yeah, hi,” I said.
“I’m calling with great news. We have your cat here in the office. Someone just brought him in.”
“Wha—huh?” I said stupidly.
“He’s fine, totally fine. Probably a little confused, but he’s in great shape and you can come pick him up anytime today.”
“No, sorry,” I said quickly, realizing she must have dialed me by mistake. Had I given her my phone number? “This is me, Brynn, the one who brought him in.”
There was a moment of confused silence on the other end, then the vet tech reemerged in the door to the waiting room with a cell phone pressed to her ear. She stared at me holding mine, then hung up.
“Follow me, please,” she said.
I picked up the cat carrier and followed her through the door, down a bleach-scented medical hallway, to an office with a computer and a desk full of vaccine records. The vet tech swiveled the computer monitor to face us and fixed me with an accusatory glare.
“This isn’t an animal shelter,” she said coolly. “We don’t take surrenders.”
“What do you mean?”
She nodded impatiently at the computer monitor. I leaned forward, awkwardly managing the carrier in my arms, to read what was on the screen. It was the information from the cat’s microchip. All the information anyone could need. His age: two years. His vaccine status: up to date.
His name: Phoenix.
His owner: me.
I stared, open-mouthed, at the screen.
“Sorry, no,” I said. “This must have gotten mixed up somehow. I do have a cat named Phoenix, and he does look like this, but this cat isn’t mine.”
The vet tech’s contemptuous expression deepened. She pursed her lips and held the door open for me to leave.
Outside, I held the carrier up for a better look. The cat twisted around inside it, turning his back to me as if I had dealt him a great betrayal.
“Phoenix?” I said, feeling insane.
He didn’t turn, but his little ears flattened and tilted in my direction, like he recognized the name.
To be continued…
Amy Monaghan is a queer writer and visual artist. She is a graduate of the MFA Screenwriting program at UCLA, where she was a winner of the 2019 Screenwriter's Showcase, and also holds a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2024 she was selected as Grand Canyon National Park's Artist in Residence.
Follow her on Instagram and read more of her work here.