Shop Cat
by Michelle Neuffer
When I was small my father took me to a video store, not a Blockbuster, but a mom-and-pop place, with rows of tapes in hard grey plastic boxes, handwritten labels on the front. Friday nights we rented movies, although the selection never interested me. I rented E.T. nine weeks running. But the store had a shop cat, and that’s what I was after, stroking its soft white fur while I crouched next to my father’s sturdy legs in the New Releases aisle. In the colder months, the mittens clipped to my jacket scared the cat away, but more often than not it rubbed its fleecy jowls on the Velcro of my shoes.
That kind of place no longer exists; it no longer exists to such an extent that I can’t be completely sure that I didn’t imagine it wholly, the handwritten labels in sepia ink on grey boxes, the cat’s blue eyes, how upset I was when I learned from a well-meaning employee that cats with white fur and blue eyes are statistically likely to be born deaf.
The store is, of course, gone, and my father is, too, and I don’t even remember E.T. all that well anymore. When I, sobbing, asked my father why some kitties need to be born deaf, he used one of his clean white handkerchiefs to wipe my face. “You can still pet deaf kitties,” he told me, “As long as you approach them from the front.”
It didn’t make me feel better. There are things you can’t appreciate until it’s too late, and by then they’ve already made you who you are.
Michelle Neuffer grew up in Chicago and now lives in central Illinois. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida. She can be reached at https://www.michelleneuffer.com/.