Here is a good story: It's 2003 and a childhood friend is stationed at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina—which will be renamed Fort Liberty in 2023— where she's in the 82nd Airborne Division. She is done jumping out of planes for the day, heading off the base, when she hears meowing coming from a warehouse. Inside, she finds a stray cat, proud but mangy, and decides to take her home. The cat is pregnant. My friend e-mails me a photograph of the kittens, arranged on her lap, one surfing on her kneecap. She writes, "Don't these remind you of your cats growing up?" She knows a target when she sees one.
A few weeks later, the kittens are loaded onto the back seat of a Jeep and driven north. Two are dropped off at my parents' house, in White Plains, and one is dropped off with me at my studio apartment, on the Upper West Side. The family joke is that these are military-grade cats. Your tax dollars at work. No laser eyes, but they do fetch and come when you call them, and, if they puke, they do so on nonporous surfaces. Twenty-one years later, mine is the last one standing. Personally, I think there's a lesson here about nurture, but I keep this thought to myself.
Since this story will continue, perhaps I should build up an immunity within a certain type of reader: Cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat. Cat. There. Now we can get on with it.
The cat is very sick, so a veterinarian whom I have never met is coming over to kill her. She arrives at 10 A.M., which feels wrong. Murders and break-ups, these are not interactions for God's hours. On the phone the afternoon before, she tells me of her pastoral childhood in New Zealand. Her mother once put a cat down by feeding it Valium.
"Like, a local cat?"
"No, our cat. So, very local."
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 12, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der August 12, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.
LET'S HAVE A LONG TALK ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP JUST BEFORE BED!
Babe, are you nodding off? I know we’re both exhausted after a long day, a dinner party at which you made a three-word comment that left me feeling like you don’t know me at all, and the subsequent ninety-minute fight that culminated in a tentative truce.