Cat Swarm

This is what happens when she sits alone in her dining room, eating smoked trout and canned sardines. Twelve cats who are molting arrive as a sweet surprise. They smell the flavor and here they are. Now there’s cat fur everywhere. It covers her couch like a winter coat. Empty boxes of cat food line the walls of her apartment, and her adult son threatens to send her to a shelter. “No more cats, Mom,” he says, but she ignores him. “We all have less fur,” she whispers to the cats as she brushes them. Her own fur rises and floats like the fluff of a dandelion caught in the wind.

Meg Pokrass is the author of First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in RATTLE, Waxwing, One Art: A Journal of Poetry, Cottonmouth, New England Review, Plume, The Pedestal, American Journal of Poetry, Electric Literature and elsewhere. Meg lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.