After the Dog Days

 After the Dog Days

There comes a morning

with no alarm
except birds
arguing over berries.

The clocks still turn,

but none of them
are hers.

No one is waiting
for the expected mistake.

No invisible hand
tugs the string.

No audience

keeps score.

The old life
becomes a weather report
from another valley—

perhaps true,
perhaps exaggerated,
certainly distant.

Katya lives
where time has softened.

She knows the paths
between moments
the way other cats
know garden walls.

She naps
inside forgotten afternoons.

She drinks
from rainstorms
that have not yet reached
the ground.

She remembers futures
that never happened

and mourns them
only briefly.

Freedom,
she discovers,

is not escaping time.

It is no longer
being pulled through it.

The great machinery
continues somewhere.

Names rise.

Empires fall.

People spend lifetimes
trying to become
the center
of stories.

Katya
becomes impossible
to center.

She belongs
to windowsills,
to moonlit roofs,

to libraries
where the oldest books
have forgotten
who wrote them.

Children sometimes
catch sight of her.

They swear
the silver cat
was there

before they opened the gate,

and somehow

already waiting
on the other side.

Old women smile
when she appears.

"Ah," they whisper,
"you're still traveling."

Katya never answers.

Cats have always known
that silence
is the safest passport.

Years become feathers.

Centuries

become dust motes
turning in warm light.

She carries
no revenge.

It would be too heavy.

She carries
only curiosity—

the one possession
that grows lighter
the farther one walks.

Sometimes,
on the longest evenings,

she returns

not to interfere,

not to warn,

not even
to remember—

but to sit quietly
outside the house
where her younger self
still believes
every shadow
must belong
to something larger.

She watches
the frightened cat

stare into the dark.

She wishes
she could speak.

Instead,

she stretches,
closes her eyes,

and leaves behind
a single white whisker
on the doorstep.

Enough
for the younger one
to wonder

if perhaps

there is a future

where she survives
all of this.

And somewhere
beyond the reach
of every net,

every story,

every hand
that ever mistook
love for ownership,

Katya curls herself
into the shape
of a question mark

beneath a sun
that has forgotten
how to set.

For the first time,

time
goes looking
for her.