When I was thirteen, I met a cat without a soul.
I had first learned to see the souls of cats five years earlier, at eight. It’s a funny age, eight, a time when you either learn to see the world or you don’t. If you do, it’s yours forever; if you don’t, you never have a second chance.
It was a summer day, that day when I was eight; the sky was a brassy blue-gray and the sun slurped moisture from air and ground and skin. I was on my way to the creek for a swim when a tussle caught my eye—a bright mêlée of crimson. Our cat Lila had caught a cardinal. Carmine blood coated the ground, and carmine feathers were everywhere. I screamed and ran for Mother. She, of course, held me and told me it was just what cats did. But Lila stared at me with those eyes of hers, one topaz and one citrine, as if I had betrayed something special between us.

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