They said he didn't know what color he wanted to be, so he came out calico

They said he didn't know what color he wanted to be, so he came out calico.

They said he didn't know what shape he wanted to be, so he came out different.

He had a limp at birth, and it didn't go away.

Some days, he'd lay next to the cars, just watching the sun hang there in the sky.

Some days, he'd bury his face in the mud and then they'd have to scold him and bathe him and then watch him limp around all fuzzy and disoriented and stumbling around like a newborn calf and they'd point and laugh and say how cute he was. And that was why they kept him.

They stopped looking for him after he was 2 years old and still got lost from time to time. They'd just leave the water dish out for him and act like nothing had happened in the morning. They still loved him, they just didn't think they had to tell him anymore, unless he was in trouble for doing something stupid and they yelled at him and he tried to cry in their arms and he made mewing sounds and they told him for all the wrong reasons.

The others in the litter were smarter. They knew how to open the trash bins at night and steal all the old pizza and uneaten rice. His brothers and sisters always left the best bits for him on the deck because they knew he couldn't get it himself.

He didn't want it most of the time, but he was grateful anyway. To him, all food was the same.

He watched the stars sometimes, or the rain, or the vines that grew so fast that if you blinked, you swore that they had just moved. He watched his siblings grow and find things to do and trash to collect and games to play. He watched the little one in the family get taller and the tall one get grayer like a penny or moldy bread. Everyone talked to him and told him their problems because he was cute and he listened and never said anything and always stayed and let them stroke his fur, even when it started to itch or the hugs were starting to stifle. He knew everything about everyone, but he didn't understand them.

Why did these things matter to them?

Why was that piece of paper so important?

Why wasn't he at work today?

Why did she throw that full bottle away?

What did it matter that the tv was on too loud?

Everyone he knew seemed to be so much more capable of understanding these things, but they didn't understand themselves. They kept asking him, "How am I justified? What do I need to do with myself?" He would just purr and lick their outstretched hands. That was his answer. He meant it. It was all he knew.

He walked away sometimes. The auras were spiky and the rain called him to discover things, so he walked. He tasted the gravel outside the house where someone hung himself, and he walked in between all of the fence posts in a white picket fence, and he burned his good front paw on the roof of a car in the summertime. He walked all the way to the highway, once.

He walked past houses and cars and people and fields and a swamp and a graveyard where no one visited and a statue of a deer and looked down a canyon with trees growing up the sides and half of him wanted to throw up and the other half wanted to jump and sail and sail and whip around until his tail turned him upright so he could die right-side-up. He walked in the slope next to the highway and watched people toss little glowing things out of the window and he watched the people behind them yelling through the glass even though they knew they couldn't be heard.

He saw a prom photograph propped up by bits of broken grass on the side of the road.

He saw a bottle of Henry Weinhard's in the sand near a coffee shop. He kept walking and there was a church and women shouting and someone with headphones that were on too loud walking away and he went past people who fell asleep waiting for the bus or stared at him as he just watched things. He danced through an empty, blackened patch of land. It was wide and broad and smelled like dirt and tires and old cement. He danced all the way to the railroad tracks that ran through the middle. They were old and rusty and smelled like loneliness. He hopped from one track to the other and then slipped and cut his elbow and kept walking.

There was a ditch he had to jump and a road he had to cross and then he was going up a steep road to the highway. Cars were so scary, so loud, so huge, he could barely keep upright when they whipped past a few inches away. He had never been so calm. He became one with the noises around him. The wakes of air were his breath; the sounds of the horn and tire and broken clutch were his mewing in the daytime; the colors of every passing car were his pallet for eternity. He reeked of oil and exhaust fumes.

He weaved between the fence posts on the edge of the highway and danced around the bits of a broken Jack Daniel's bottle. He had to get off the shoulder at one point to avoid being run over. He fell down the embankment. It was at least thirty feet up from the ground. He swam through a mire and crossed another set of railroad tracks and then clumsily scaled a chain-link fence and caught his belly on the barbs at the top and was bleeding for half an hour after that.

At the bridge, he could go back onto the road, and looked down at all of the other cars and tried to imagine where they were all going and where they would be all at once and swayed from side to side for a while. It was so mesmerizing. He wanted to be a part of it. He wanted to jump down and make a story for someone that day or end this search for what people call a "reason to live" or at least be content with the cold air around him because he would know that it was all he would know in the last moments of his life. He leaned and leaned and leaned and cried and then he walked all the way home.