Moonfire

I have many stories from ages three to fourteen that make me want to cover my face with my hands and groan, “What was wrong with me?”. The only comforting word in there is “was”, which I suppose is a perk of growing up. Not that I don’t have things wrong with me now, but at least they’re different things than when I was younger.

There are a lot of things I secretly wish I could have carried over from those days, though, such as the ability to be swept up in laughably romantic notions. For example, I was once convinced that there was a supernatural aura surrounding a stray cat that showed up in my yard. I thought he was magical, like the totem animals spoken of in ancient Native American legends; the Spirit Helpers. I was more than old enough to know better, but my head was so far up in the clouds I didn’t care what was logical or what was completely insane. I was thirteen years old, full of angst, unrequited infatuation, and silly trouble; grounded for six months and bursting with drama.

I named him Moonfire. The first time he came was on a winter night, so cold, cold, shivering cold but the ground was snowless. The stars seemed especially clear; I could see the silken folds of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, as if an angel had dropped her gauzy scarf and there it lay for me to take if I could just reach high enough.

I would wait on the porch for him every night, armed with a bowl of Fancy Feast to entice the feral tomcat. He was mostly black, with a white stripe down his nose like the trail of a meteor that continued down his chest and belly, all the way to his paws. I could always make out his eyes first—huge green eyes like emeralds set deep in jet. It was a full week of cold nights on the porch before he would let me stroke his back while he set hungrily upon the canned cat food. He had an exceptionally large bone structure for a cat, but he was too thin and I could see the slight shadows of his ribcage in the porch light. He wore a pink flee collar; he belonged to someone. Someone who wasn’t taking proper care of him, I decided, and was filled with righteous anger at the negligent owners.

I begged my parents to let me keep him—to make him an “official” pet—but my mother said, “No, he has a collar. He’s someone else’s cat.”

So one night as ran my hand softly over the back of Moonfire’s neck, I very slowly removed the collar. If it was absent and his owners didn’t get him a new one, I figured, I could talk Mom into letting him join the furry portion of our family. I hid the collar upstairs in my bag of treasures, where I kept knick-knacks I felt like I probably wasn’t supposed to have. Just harmless things, really: a list of current crushes, manga comic books that contained cusswords, a burned copy of an Evanescence album that my parents had told me not to buy.

And now the stolen flee collar of a maybe, somewhat “stolen” cat. This is a confession that I have, up until now, only made to two people. Eight years later I still feel quite guilty about it. He stayed around my house of his own accord though, so I suppose it wasn’t technically “theft”. And maybe the owners simply dumped him out here in the country and didn’t want him anymore anyway. (Please allow me these rationalizations to ease my shame).

A few weeks passed and he would curl up in my lap, but only if I stayed very still. Determined to make him adore me, I tirelessly continued porch-sitting.

Then one day, I saw bloody paw prints in the fresh snow. I followed them and found Moonfire huddled in a corner between two walls of the house, a pitiful bundle of fuzz, ears flat and tense with pain. Though I hated to scare him, and though I subjected my arms to a thatch of scratches, I caught him and convinced my parents to take him to the vet. The doctor said it appeared as if his paws—all four of them—had somehow been badly burned. After having the peeled-away skin stitched over the wounds, he was sent home with us, wrapped in bandages like little purple boots.

Every day for the following weeks, with my mother’s help, I bathed his paws in iodine and replaced the bandages. Moonfire struggled, complaining loudly and scratching, as if determined to make us bleed as much as he had.

I thought surely he would run away after this ordeal, but to my surprise he not only ventured more frequently near the house, but also he was no longer afraid of me. He would come running to the porch for his dinner and purr as I held him wrapped in my arms.

Eventually he grew to love my whole family and any guests that happened by, becoming our most annoyingly social cat. He was introduced to the inside of the house and became accustomed to sofas, pillows, and warm laps. I loved holding him when I lay on the couch, his big paws settled on my chest and his wide head pushing up under my chin. He purred like a motorboat, stole food from our forks, and stuck like glue to the nearest warm body.

My magic cat died about a month ago, a brain tumor that slowly paralyzed him. I held him in my lap as long as I could and cried into his soft black fur, though it made my nose itch. His big green eyes were as bright as ever, and his purr still rumbled when anyone petted him. But when he could no longer walk I had to let him go, and I whispered to him in the vet’s office as he was put to sleep.

That night I unzipped my dusty bag of mischief and retrieved the stolen flee collar. I held it for awhile, smiling just a little. Tucking the collar back into its pouch, I realized I now had another rather shameful confession: as I weighed in my mind the insane, criminal acquisition of my magic Moonfire against the years enriched by his endearing presence, I knew it was worth it to me.

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