Walnut-Sized Brain

(No, I'm not usually up this late.)

One reason it had been one of those days was that I had more or less booted Callie out the door around 10 this morning, or rather yesterday morning — since the snow is finally melting, I figured she might find a nice friendly patch of ground instead of the aloe plant for a change (the said plant being now deceased, as we finally found something it couldn't live through) — and she hadn't come back all day. Usually she has a low tolerance for cold weather and will appear at the back door, mewing piteously, after 20 minutes or so. I'd walked around our end of the neighborhood a couple of times, once before dark, once after; I'd gone out to call her repeatedly, even though I'd decided around five o'clock that she was probably holed up in someone's garage; I'd been obsessively playing the hamster game all day, not wanting to think about... other possibilities. (We've had coyote sightings in the neighborhood.)


She's sitting on my lap as I type.

Wretched animal.

(She wouldn't tell me where she'd been, either. They never do.)