Life is Pussy

I stand before the glass to knot my tie, a mundane rite beneath the bulb’s pale glare. My paws pause. The breath inside me dies. #umbra Behind my mirrored self, the darkness thickens— a towering absence stitched from absent light, too still, too near, its edges drinking every photon bare. Two ember-coals ignite where eyes belong, brief, cruel, unblinking in the sable tide. I cannot move. It does not follow when I don’t. It waits. Older than bone, older than grief, a patient smile that needs no mouth to show. The tie forgotten, I am the kitten again— and it has come to finish what it started long ago.