The Newcomer - Part III
Stuck with her mysterious new arrival, in Part II Brynn brings the new cat with her to work at The Time Emporium. Already late and flustered, she’s not at all pleased to run into her ex, Rosemary, who she hasn’t seen since the breakup. They have a tense exchange, though Brynn does love her way with clocks.
Phoenix was sleeping on the couch in the sunlight when the newcomer and I returned. I unleashed him from the carrier and sat on the floor beside the couch. Phoenix raised his head with a chirp and nudged my hand to make me pet him. As I sat there stroking the soft fur of his head, the newcomer zoomed around wreaking havoc. He jumped onto the kitchen counter and swatted a cup of water to the floor. He climbed the shoe rack by the door and got himself tangled up in shoelaces, gnawing at them until they were raw and fraying. He disappeared into the bathroom and came out covered in litter, tracking it everywhere with apparent glee.
I watched all of this from beside the couch with growing rage.
That should be Phoenix, I thought.
Phoenix should have been the one annoying me. He should have been the one causing chaos for the fun of it. It wasn’t fair that this random cat who had appeared out of nowhere was demolishing my home. That was supposed to be Phoenix’s job. It used to be Phoenix’s job.
As if he could hear my thoughts, Phoenix meowed, which I chose to interpret as agreement.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. I felt my entire body tense with familiar, irrational fear. When I finally pulled it out, I found myself staring once again at Jerry’s LinkedIn picture. I hated thinking about him getting it taken at some photo studio, trying to be charming but professional, trying not to let it slip he’d been practicing poses for weeks. He did the same thing on picture day at school when we were kids.
A new voicemail notification appeared. I clicked it:
“Brynn, it’s Jerry, which I know you know. I also know you know what day Tuesday is—"
I cut the message off and typed a message to Jerry: call u later. Then I turned on Do Not Disturb.
The newcomer, having exhausted his other sources of entertainment, jumped onto the couch. Phoenix hissed at him but didn’t get up. The newcomer approached him cautiously. As soon as he was within striking distance, Phoenix got to his feet unsteadily and slashed out at the newcomer with tiny razor claws.
“Phoenix, no!” I grabbed the newcomer and pulled him out of the line of fire. Phoenix hissed again and lay back down.
*****
Phoenix was limping when I woke up the next morning; I noticed it immediately. As I set out food for both him and the newcomer, far enough apart to keep them from fighting, my chest constricted with the familiar feeling of fear: the same one I had experienced every time, over the last few years, that Phoenix displayed any sort of unusual behavior. The older he got the better I got at denying it. There were so many things I had become skilled at never letting cross my mind.
“What’s wrong, Phoenix?” I asked him, my voice distant, my throat tight.
Phoenix, of course, did not answer. He didn’t seem distressed, didn’t appear to be hurting, but as he crossed the living room to his food bowl it was clear he was making a concerted effort to avoid his back right paw.
The newcomer cat, on the other hand, was boisterous. He zoomed across the room to join Phoenix at the food bowls, choosing to stick his head in Phoenix’s instead of the one I’d put out for him. Phoenix smacked him in the head. Feeling slightly encouraged by this (surely he wouldn’t have the energy to fight back if he was in excruciating pain?) I decided Phoenix’s limping wasn’t an issue of urgency, that I would keep an eye on him throughout the day and hope it got better. Old people limp sometimes, I told myself. There wasn’t any reason to think it was deeper than that.
By nighttime, however, he was worse.
I sat on the edge of my bed. My cuticles were raw from anxious picking; my brow had developed what felt like a permanent crease. I watched the two cats through the doorway to the living room like they were actors on a distant stage: a tableau of youth and age. There was the newcomer: healthy, vital, perched easily on the arm of the couch and toying with a loose thread in the upholstery. And there was Phoenix: frail, weak, and deflated on the floor in his cat bed. His head hung over the soft lip of the bed in an image of defeat.
I reached once again for the cat carrier, but this time it was Phoenix, not the newcomer, I placed inside.
*****
The emergency vet’s office felt more insidious, more prison-like, than that of the regular vet, although maybe it was just in my imagination. I sat in the waiting room bobbing my leg and counting tiles in the ceiling.
“Phoenix?” A vet tech who looked young enough to be in high school emerged from the back. “You can follow me.”
I stood up and followed her to an antiseptic-scented exam room, where the vet, an older French man with a heavy accent, stood with Phoenix on an exam table.
“Well,” he said, as the vet tech closed the door and left us alone, “I am seeing nothing of immediate concern.”
I let out a deep breath of relief.
“Thank god,” I said. “So he’s fine?”
“I did not say this exactly. He is very old, you know. There is a significant decline in his muscle mass, and his heart rate is lower than ideal.”
“Okay. What do we do?” I asked.
The vet removed his glasses and wiped them on his scrubs. I was reminded forcibly of my father, who always did the same when trying to buy time before answering a question.
“There is nothing, specifically, to be done.”
I waited for him to say more; he didn’t.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“He is nineteen, I believe? These are natural things to be expected with a cat of his extremely advanced age. All I can advise, at this point, is to begin preparing for the future.”
“So what you’re telling me,” I said slowly, “is that there’s nothing he needs right now. He’s good.”
The vet looked at me with an expression that reminded me of Rosemary. I looked away quickly and hurriedly began placing Phoenix back in the carrier.
*****
Leaving for my shift at The Time Emporium the next morning felt like deploying to a distant war. I separated Phoenix and the newcomer, exiling the latter to the bedroom with a makeshift litter box made from a plastic storage bin. Phoenix slept peacefully on the living room couch. I gave him a long look before slinging my bag over my shoulder and heading out.
Rosemary was there when I arrived. She looked up with disinterest as I entered the shop, then turned her attention back to the pocket watch she was repairing on the counter.
“Morning,” I forced out cheerfully to no reply.
It was going to be like that, I supposed.
I breezed past her to the back office where an old-fashioned time punch hung on the wall. Slim chance that a place like this would ever be computerized. As I punched my timecard, I sensed an ominous presence appearing behind me.
“Your cat destroyed a 1904 Anton Schneider.”
“Tell Martin to take it out of my paycheck,” I said.
“That’s all you have to say?”
I turned to face Rosemary.
“You don’t even like cuckoo clocks! Do you know how many hours of anti-cuckoo clock propaganda I had to listen to while we were dating?”
“I don’t know why you brought him here yesterday,” Rosemary said. “You couldn’t get a cat sitter?”
“Phoenix is sick.”
The words came out almost involuntarily, and as soon as they had I wanted to wave my hands in front of me so they’d disappear like smoke. Phoenix wasn’t sick. He was fine. Still, I looked at Rosemary with a hesitant hope that she might say something comforting.
“Sorry,” she said, shrugging, “but he is pretty old.”
The bell on the door of the main shop room tinkled, indicating a customer. I shook my head and pushed past Rosemary.
“Hi, welcome—” I started as I walked out, but the place was empty. “Weird.”
Rosemary settled back in her chair at the repair counter.
“Is it?” she said. “They probably just had the wrong suite number.”
It was then that I saw it: on the sales counter sat a large, blue velvet sack that hadn’t been there before. It was about the size of a microwave. A gold drawstring with fraying tassels was tied shut at the top. The sight of it sent an odd shiver through me.
Without thinking, I crossed the room and undid the drawstring loop, letting the velvet sack fall to the counter. Inside, just as I had known there would be, was a clock.
It was old; I could tell that much immediately, although I wasn’t sure about exact dates. It had an ornate mahogany frame with little wooden columns and dozens of carved lily flowers. Behind a foggy glass casing, a polished brass pendulum swung back and forth endlessly. The clock face was made of brass as well, with alabaster numbers that gleamed in the light, and two hands that seemed to move faster than they should. I frowned as I realized—the hands were rotating in reverse.
“Counter-clockwise,” said Rosemary from right behind me, causing me to jump. “Cute trick.”
“Did we have a repair drop-off scheduled today?” I said, my eyes still on the strange, backwards clock.
“Not that I know of, but it’s not the first time Martin’s forgotten to tell us about one. Leave it for now. We have other shit to do.”
I took a seat at my workbench, but I couldn’t help it: my gaze kept drifting back to the backwards pendulum clock.
By the time the workday was drawing to a close, Rosemary and I had cold-shouldered each other into oblivion.
“I’ll close up,” I said, hoping it sounded like a favor, and she left without a backwards glance.
Alone in the dark shop, I stood before the brass pendulum clock again and leaned in closer to stare at its racing, backwards hands. I had seen trick clocks before, but there was usually a punchline, a purpose to the trick. Looking closer, I suddenly froze. Among the lilies and Greek columns and ornate designs carved into the wood of the frame, were two tiny identical cats. They sat opposite one another on either side of the wooden casing, so enmeshed in the intricate carvings that I hadn’t noticed them at first.
I hesitated—but only for a moment.
The velvet bag slipped back up over the clock easily, and I hoisted the parcel into my arms and hurried out of the shop.
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.
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