EMILY ST. JAMES

INSIDE VOICE

The cab let him out at the corner of Ocean and Atlantic, and he fished in his pocket for exact change, so as to prolong this moment a bit longer. He wanted to keep from having to unlock that door and step inside. That would be the moment of truth. It would either have died from the four months of neglect, or it would have grown stronger in his absence. That was the paradox. The longer he was away, the longer it clung to life, throwing itself forward, heedless.

The cabbie tried to give him the few dollars he intended as a tip back, and he shook his head. “You sure?” the cabbie asked, and he thought that an odd thing for someone to haggle over. Maybe everyone had stopped tipping while he was away. After a firm nod, the cabbie smirked. “Thanks, man. Happy Fourth.”

He loved the feeling of California in the summer dusk, the way it drifted over the skin and slid underneath everything else. Kids raced down the sidewalk toward the beach, which already receded behind him. By all rights, he should have headed down to the beach with them, to watch the gunpowder blooms be painted across the sky. Last year, a fog had rolled in, swallowing the fireworks, even as they struggled to burn through. They turned into dull, colorful glows, the warning of what was coming, the horizon not yet seen.

More than that, though, he loved sitting as the sun went down, waiting for the inevitable flame. As the dusk settled, kids would run around with sparklers and enthusiasts would send bottle rockets floating into the sky on impossible parabolas. Growing shadows would slip around him, and it would get cold, colder than he was used to at summer’s height. The sun would set over his right shoulder, though he was facing the ocean, because the Pacific here was to the south, not the west, an impossibility that seemed like a riddle designed to trick the unwitting in a fairy tale.

The beach was where he should go. The kids’ laughter receding behind him felt so wonderfully normal to him, a string tied around a finger so one wouldn’t forget something important. (Did anyone really do that?)

He couldn’t go down to the beach, though. He couldn’t watch the fireworks, even though by all accounts it was meant to be a clear night and one could see tiny explosions all up and down the coast from that beach. He wanted to. He hoped to. But he knew he had to go home. It couldn’t exist as both alive and dead in his head forever. He needed the answer.

He fished around in his pocket for his keys. The walk was only a few blocks, but he found himself taking his time. The lights in the Korean barbecue across the street were already dimmed, the owner having closed for the holiday evening when anyone with any sense would be down on the beach, feeling particularly American. The Jack in the Box up the street still glowed against the growing twilight, but the parking lot was deserted. Anyone who wanted jalapeno poppers had likely had them hours ago.

He was two blocks away. He’d know soon enough. He ducked inside Jack in the Box, ordering the usual.

He slid his suitcase in one side of a booth, then sucked in his breath and crammed himself into the other side. The table cut into his gut right against his belly button, and when he exhaled, he closed his eyes and winced. He didn’t make a sound. It was uncomfortable, but you got used to it. You got used to a lot of things living like he did. He exhaled very slowly.

Staring out at the city from here, holding a double bacon cheeseburger dripping grease, he could see his apartment. The lights were all off, but of course, they would be. He wondered if anyone had tried to break in, had actually managed the trick, only to be run off by its snuffling and scrabbling, by its insatiable need to just be near someone else, by the ache it opened up just from looking at it. It was revolting, but to look upon it was to be overwhelmed with pity, to know that you were on the hook for as long as you lived to make sure it lived, too, even though it never grew, never changed, just stayed, as it was.

He loved this city, but he hated it. Any excuse he could come up with to leave, he took. Any time he wanted to run away, he did. Alaska or the Maldives or Belgium or the oil fields of North Dakota, it didn’t matter. He went, and he took pictures, and he sent those pictures in, and then he dallied. He’d spent a whole week at a hunting lodge near the Canadian border because he had a little money, and the only way to keep from going home and having to sit near it all night, to hear it struggling for breath and opening and closing its many eyes while you tried to just fucking watch TV for two seconds, was to spend all of that money and stay far, far away and hope it died.

“Not going down to the beach tonight?” asked the teenager who’d been tasked with manning the counters. He appeared to be the only employee on duty.

“Nah,” he said. “You’ve seen one firework, you’ve seen ‘em all.” It struck him that was the sort of thing his father, who despised most things, would have said.

“You down there for the fog fireworks last year?” He nodded, and the teenager continued. “Man, that was fucked up.”

“You live around here?” he said, barely remembering the normal rules of human interaction. They had grown rusty after years of disuse.

“Yeah. Anaheim and Pine?” Rundown apartments. Maybe the kid was older than he took him for, had his own place.

The thought occurred to him in that moment that he could give his houseguest away, like it had been given to him. Someone that young, living alone, might want a pet, might want a friendly face to come home to. He could be rid of it. All he had to do was talk the kid into it. He just had to open his mouth and say the words: “Hey, would you like a cat?” Just get him to agree, sight unseen.

He couldn’t. He sat, mouth hanging open, burger halfway in, staring at the kid as he wiped down the counter, humming along with the radio. The kid looked up and laughed at the way he must look like someone playing an elaborate game of freeze tag. “You mind if I turn this up?” he asked, nodding toward the speakers. “Love this song.”

He could only nod. Music might be good. Somewhere, the fireworks began to thrum.

The kid reached under the counter, and the whole restaurant filled with a song he hadn’t heard in ages. Big Star. “You Get What You Deserve.” The kid was whistling along, doing a little dance with his rag, and in an instant, he understood that the kid was gay, that his parents weren’t okay with it, but that he was just fine, living alone in a shitty apartment but making a life of it and working at the Jack in the Box. Being around it had given him this sense about people sometimes, people who might be just lonely enough to let something else creep in and take over, slowly but surely. “Try to understand what I’m goin’ through,” the kid sang, and his voice was incredible, really, something not to be wasted. “But don’t blame me for what folks will do.”

He watched the kid dance and sing. The kid’s life was all in front of him. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t make the kid have such a burden when he’d already likely screamed his way out of his old life and into this one. But to be free…

Boom boom, said the fireworks somewhere, and there was a dim sense of muted applause carried on the breeze.

The song ended, and the kid hit a button somewhere, so it played over again. “You like Big Star?” the kid asked, in the way of teenagers who’ve just discovered a band everybody else knew about long ago, because life is long.

He crumpled up his detritus and put it in a wastebasket. “Love Big Star,” he said. “You like that, try Fountains of Wayne. Same idea, more modern.” It struck him that Fountains of Wayne was only modern if you counted the 2000s as modern, which the kid surely didn’t.

The kid nodded his thanks, and he took a deep breath. The kid’s eyes were so hopeful, so filled with something like joy, probably thinking back over all the things that led him here and finally feeling free, a mountain goat with a toehold who could see the rest of the way up the cliff. He would be killing all of that off.

“Would you like a cat?”

The words were out of his lips before he even knew what he was saying. It was like he had been seized by some future version of himself that was on top of that cliff and extending a hand down to him.

“Excuse me?” the kid said.

“Would you like a cat? I’ve got one I, uh, am looking to adopt out. And you seem nice. And if you live at Anaheim and Pine, you might want a friend. Sometimes.”

The kid grinned. “Thanks, sir,” and the whole world rushed into that moment, converging on the head of whatever he said next, “but I’m allergic.”

He was sure his eyes started to water with tears, but maybe that was behind the mask he wore to keep those tears from showing. Instead, he smiled, nodding. “Well, too bad. Maybe a dog.”

“Maybe!” the kid said, and he returned to his work, bumping the music even louder.

The wheels of the suitcase bumped along the sidewalk behind him. His steps became smaller, both because he was winded from the walk and from the giant hamburger and because he was trying like hell to not go back there. He wondered idly what would happen to it if he just dropped dead of a massive coronary right here, right now, like his father had. He was old, but he wasn’t that old, yet. He had a long, long life still ahead of him. Even if he opened that door and found it dead, some part of him understood it had been too long. It lived inside of him now, snuffling away, clawing at weaknesses in the wall.

The keys went into the lock easily enough, and he twisted the door open, putting on the light. He didn’t want to say anything, wanted to use his inside voice, in case it was just asleep, rather than dead. He set the suitcase just inside, looking at the massive pile of trash that covered the floor, the empty boxes and trash bags from aborted attempts to clean and discarded fast food containers and old magazines and newspapers he’d bought from days he thought important to remember with children he would never have. “Obama wins!” shrieked the L.A. Times from yellowed type across the room.

He was holding his breath. He had been from the second he set foot on this block, he realized, and he slowly, carefully exhaled. Breathed in again. Exhaled. Breathed in.

The house was eerily quiet. There was no noise, no sound. Just… him. Breathe in. Breathe out.

And then somewhere, one of those giant fireworks, the ones that simply flash once in the sky, a camera going off somewhere in the distance, let off a terrible, echoing boom. The building rattled, even this far away.

The sound settled into the walls, and once it was done ringing, he heard it. The soft sound of paws scrabbling against cardboard, trying to get across the oceans of trash to him, hearing him. He heard a watery meow, the soft snuffle of its constant cold. He felt the cheeseburger rise in his throat, but it couldn’t get past the mask, so he could just vomit and be done with this.

He saw it. It was just a kitten. It was just a kitten. Headed for him. The tiny little paws navigating the trash piles it had lived in for so long expertly, the calico coloring all up and down its body. From here, in the semi-darkness of the room, it looked so harmless.

He choked back a sob. It got to his shoe and rose up onto his pant leg and started to climb, mounting his body with surprising agility. Its meow still sounded like it was trapped at the bottom of the ocean, transmitting across the great void.

The closer it got, the more of its eyes it opened. First the two one would expect, but then another right next to the nose caked over with mucus, and then a much smaller one just below the bottom of its jaw and a large one in the middle of its forehead and another (just off-center enough to make one nauseous) where its cheek should have, might have been, and one in its left ear. And its mouth opened and inside was another eye, one you couldn’t see right away, but one he knew was there. It landed on his shoulder, and it nudged its head against his, and it was wet all over.

How long had he been weeping?

It perched there, riding, not falling, perfectly balancing, all the way to the couch, no matter how much garbage he had to kick out of the way. He realized with a start that he had left the door wide open, but everyone was at the beach. No one would be coming to visit or even take his things. He was trapped in here, alone. He turned on the TV, desperately looking for a movie, as it meowed and meowed right in his ear. It was hungry. It had been without food for four months now, and probably water, too.

Sullivan’s Travels was on. He removed the creature from his shoulder, setting it in his lap to pet it. It seemed to like that enough to purr, a purr that sounded vaguely of a ship’s anchor being hoisted.

Onscreen, Joel McCrea laughed at Looney Tunes. He reached down and covered the creature’s face with his hand, easily surrounding it. His hand closed, beginning to squeeze. He felt the skull give way, the blood squirt into his hands, the meowing end as tears spattered his face. He let out a roar he’d been holding in for 15 years, and he squeezed harder and harder, closing his other hand around the body and twisting, breaking its back.

He released the head. It opened all its eyes one by one, then climbed up his arm, toward his shoulder, its wet paws leaving little tracks. It was hungry.

He stood, the laughter from the TV mixing with the applause down on the beach. The fireworks show had ended, and Independence Day could be put in a box for another year. He set the creature down on the couch and went into the kitchen to find it something good to eat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily St. James is the author of the upcoming novel Woodworking (out 2025). She is also the co-creator of the fiction podcast Arden and a television writer. Her non-fiction writing and criticism have appeared in Vox, The A.V. Club, The New York Times, and many other outlets. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and an ever-changing number of cats.