Through Her Eyes (Camren)

Chapter 4: Sunrise

When Lauren moved in, there was cat food in the kitchen cupboard, a bag so large and heavy, Lauren wondered how her grandmother had managed to carry it into the house on her own. It sat on the bottom shelf, mocking her. This is what you inherited, a house and a gravestone, nosy neighbors and a bunch of stray cats.

She kicked the bag angrily and walked away as quickly as she could without feeling like she was running from cat kibble.

The strays came anyway. Six or seven of them every day, some old and fragile, some young and playful, a family, Lauren didn't think. They sat at her grandmother's back door – her back door – not meowing but staring, eyes burning holes into the knotty wood. Lauren left them to it.

They kept coming back. Every morning for the first week Lauren lived in the too big, too silent house, the cats sat on the back porch, waiting.

"She's dead!" Lauren had yelled at the end of the week. "Don't you know she's dead? She's gone and you're alone! Go away!" She slammed the door, left the cats staring, just like they always did.

She made breakfast on her stove but didn't eat it. An hour later Lauren finally looked out the kitchen window to the porch, and of course, the cats were still there.

So Lauren fed them, that day and the one after, for weeks and months and then a year. When the first bag of cat food ran out, Lauren bought another, and she just kept feeding them.

She wasn't an animal person, she didn't try to touch them and they didn't approach her. One cat, though, Lauren noticed. It was her eyes – Lauren was pretty sure the cat was a girl, no boy ever had such knowing eyes – they burned into her skin, watching, waiting, knowing. What she knew, Lauren wasn't sure. Maybe just where to find free food or friendly humans, maybe where the fattest rats of the city were. Maybe more. She wasn't telling.

She started calling her Cat. It wasn't like she was claiming her or making her hers, she just needed something to call her.

Cat came every day.

——-

For weeks Camila was like a dream. Ethereal in the light, unreal, existent only in darkness, like one of the stars she seemed to like talking about so much as she dug through Lauren's trash gleefully and Lauren stood by, rapt.

For weeks Camila existed only in a certain place and only at a certain time. For weeks Lauren was dreaming, and then suddenly she wasn't anymore.

It was a Monday afternoon, Cocoa's was empty and Lauren was taking the trash out to the alley behind the small coffee shop because she was a kind and helpful employee. That, and it was starting to smell and Lauren had lost the coin toss to Normani, who was the only other person working that day, so.

The alley was a large one Cocoa's shared with several other stores around them, so Lauren wasn't all that surprised when, as she tossed the trash bag into their dumpster, she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She was, however, slightly startled when she turned her head to see that the movement had come from a familiar figure, a little paler in the broad daylight and brown hair, leaning over the side of the adjacent furniture store's dumpster and digging through its contents happily.