Best Debut Short Stories 2020 Read online

  The next day there were no kittens in the morning but by afternoon one of the little black ones appeared at the window, and over the course of an hour she multiplied into four. They batted at broken glass and chased the plastic lids of coffee cups to and fro in front of the window. They scratched around in abandoned planters and bit each other’s necks. They would stop occasionally to stare in the window.

  I went and bought a bag of cat food at the deli. At dusk they lined up on the broken sidewalk and watched me with eight green eyes as I filled chipped bowls with cat food. Their white whiskers twitched in unison and they moved their heads like they were watching a tennis game as I swept up the broken glass in their garbage-can-alley home.

  A large gray cat seemed to watch over the kittens. Sometimes when I walked from the subway to the art studio the large gray cat would emerge from an alley several blocks away and walk ahead of me on the sidewalk. We would both turn right, then turn left, then I would open the gate while the large gray alley cat scooted underneath, both of us ending up at the bowls to feed and watch the kittens.

  At night I went on the internet and read about the difference between stray and feral cats, the cat overpopulation epidemic in New York City, and the mayor’s new campaign to handle the epidemic with TNR (trap-neuter-return). A concerned citizen is advised to contact a rescue organization, then take a class to learn how to trap the animal and bring it to the ASPCA for neutering. Then the neutered cat is to be returned to its original location to live out its life on the streets. I realized the large gray alley cat’s clipped ear was not a dogfight injury but a universal sign that he had been trapped-neutered-returned.

  There were inquiring phone calls, sad kitty posters, desperate pleas to neighbors, and sleepless nights worrying about the kittens. After a month, my sad kitty posters attracted two other codependent caregivers. We joined forces to get the kitties TNR’d, but then in the end we didn’t have the hearts to release them back to the alley. We quickly got three of the four kittens adopted. After much cajoling from the other ladies—“Two cats are better than one! I have four cats already or I’d take one! How can you not love a kitten? Your older cat will love a little friend!”—I begrudgingly took home the most fearless tuxedo.

  “Say goodbye to your sisters,” I told the feral kitten as I cornered her and pushed her into the carrier. “You are never going to have to play with broken glass again.”

  The kitten’s first day at my apartment was a nightmare. When I released the kitty to her new home, she promptly scrambled into my closet and disappeared. My older cat rushed in like a rabid raccoon, straight into the back of the closet, and a ferocious attack ensued. I grabbed the older cat and she turned on me, biting my hand hard. I held tight and tossed her out of the bedroom and shut the door, adrenaline surging. My hand was bleeding. The new kitty was squeezed into the farthest back corner of the closet. Was this safer than releasing the kitten back in the alley? I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  The next day, I had a mammogram and ultrasound scheduled, due to a small lump in my left breast. I wasn’t worried. This had happened before. All previous diagnostic tests had revealed benign cysts. I called my friend who had two cats and fibrocystic breasts. We agreed the diagnostic tests were annoying but necessary, and my friend recommended reading a book called Cat vs. Cat to ensure a better outcome from my new cat introduction.

  I downloaded Cat vs. Cat on my Kindle so no one would see what I was reading in public. There was a two-hour delay for diagnostic mammograms and ultrasounds, and I welcomed the opportunity to be educated in cat behavior while sitting in the series of waiting rooms. In the outer waiting room we got to keep our clothes on, and an occasional husband, son, or fiancé sat with a woman, but no men were allowed in the inner waiting room. We were all given lockers and instructed to remove everything from the waist up. In the inner waiting room we were reduced to our pants, winter boots, and flimsy wraparound gowns. The women who must have done this multiple times this winter were smart enough to wear button-down sweaters that they kept outside their lockers and draped on their shoulders.

  Most women were looking at their cell phones instead of the pile of women-themed magazines: Redbook, Glamour, People, Self. There was a lone Sports Illustrated, presumably left behind by a stray male companion. We all had our locker keys attached to colored plastic slinkies around our wrists. I settled into Cat vs. Cat, tilting the screen when an embarrassing chapter title like “Understand the Feline Hierarchy” appeared in a large font so none of the other braless women could see. They weren’t looking anyway.

  I was eager to learn about cat behavior. If you brought a new cat into your home, your resident cat would perceive the new kitty as a threat. Cats were territorial and would become extremely stressed by the intrusion. To introduce a new cat successfully, keep them separated in different locked rooms for weeks. Let them sniff under the doors to get used to the idea there is another cat nearby. Slowly, over months if possible, wedge the doors open a crack, so they can see each other. Rub socks on their heads and let them sniff and attack the scented socks. Gauge how aggressively they attack the socks.

  The chapter stressed patience. Some cats will never like each other. I didn’t know this. I saw a flash of my life—chasing cats from one room to another in a cat-patterned bathrobe, spraying ill-behaving cats with a water bottle (but not letting the cats see that I was doing it; it should appear to be an act of God, stressed Cat vs. Cat), cat toys filling the cabinets, endless mammograms and ultrasounds and a few uterine biopsies in between.

  The waiting room was cold and I was hungry. My name was finally called as I was reading “The Importance of Territory: TURF 101” while crossing and rubbing my arms for warmth. I stood at the machine and lay on the table, submitting to the tests, and every time I felt pain I shut my eyes and saw flashes of the older cat attacking the kitten.

  When my tests were done, I was left to wait in the ultrasound room, sitting on a pale blue paper liner. I had continued to read about how to extend your cats’ territory by adding vertical platforms. This can help your cats interact more harmoniously, as they can keep a social order. The dominant cat gets up higher and the cat lower in the pecking order stays on the floor.

  The doctor walked in and said, “There are several things going on,” and I snapped my Kindle case shut in surprise. She described three areas that needed to be biopsied. “It’s probably normal fibrocystic changes, considering your age, but I’d like to be sure.”

  I made my follow-up appointments with the receptionist, who advised me to have all three procedures done in one day. “One right after another. Least invasive to most invasive.” She sounded bored, which reassured me in the same way a bored flight attendant did during turbulence—although the phrase least invasive to most invasive sounded like a line from a CIA manual on torture.

  I spent the next week painstakingly keeping the cats separated and shopping online for an aesthetically appropriate cat tower. I had to carry a tote bag between the rooms with a spray bottle, a can opener, cans of cat food, and a fork. I needed to keep one hand free to grab a cat if one escaped. If I let my diligence slip for a moment, my older cat charged into the bedroom in a flash and pounced on the kitten with fury. After each attack, I’d have to hunt around the room to find the kitten. She’d be curled up on a high shelf in my closet in a basket of socks. She’d be tucked in a shoe under the bed. She’d be jammed behind the air conditioner on the floor of my closet. I’d play with her on my bed while my older cat stuck her paws under the door with her claws extended, growling, hoping to snag some tender kitty flesh.

  The kitten was slinky and soft and buzzing with joie de vivre. She’d chase her tail in a frenzy of spinning kitty cyclone and topple over at the end like a rag doll. She’d wiggle around under my armpit while I took a nap, purring deep-throatedly on my breast. Her little white paws looked like she had mischievously gotten into a tub of white paint.

  “Paint paws! Bunny feet!” I’d stare into her bright g
reen eyes. She’d hold my gaze for a moment, then leap on the curtains and hang like a kitty Tarzan.

  I tried to play with my older cat in the other room but she just sat there, staring at the door to the bedroom like a sociopath. If I tried to hold her, she bit me. Behind her golden eyes were the letters K–I–L–L. I was starting to worry this wasn’t going to work out.

  The older cat was found in the snow outside Key Food on Seventh Avenue. She was pregnant, and the person who found her had said to her, “If you are still here in the snow when I have finished my shopping, I will rescue you.” After the woman finished her shopping, the cat was still there waiting in the snow, “as if she had heard me.”

  At least that’s what the cat’s bio said on Petfinder.com. It made a good story, anyway, and when I adopted her I told her, “You will never have to get pregnant and live in the snow again.” At night when she crawled onto the bed next to me and suckled the blanket, I would coo, “Does Mommy miss her babies?” They’d had to abort her babies due to an infected uterus. In the beginning she, too, had had a shaved belly and a surgical scar.

  I returned to the hospital for my biopsies. The first two least invasive procedures were unexpectedly painful, and in the middle of the second least invasive procedure I started to cry. The nurse asked if there was anyone in the waiting room she could get for me and when I remembered that I had come alone I shook my head and tried to pull myself together. When the doctor and nurse finished, I had a surgical bandage on each breast. I went to the bathroom to cry in private. I was so hungry and anxious that I got on my knees and asked God to give me the strength to go through the most invasive procedure. I wasn’t sure I believed in God but I was desperate. I washed my face and pulled up my hair in an elastic band. I walked out of the bathroom and told the nurse I was hungry and she gave me some graham crackers and juice. She told me that my hair looked nice. She finished going over my medical records while I ate my graham crackers like a starving animal. There were crumbs under me on the exam room floor.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “We’ll have to clean up worse than that after your procedure anyway.”

  She found the line for allergies on my record. “Hmmmm, it says here you have an allergy to alcohol?”

  “Yes.” I was trying to suck the juice out of the juice box with the miniature straw, but the juice could barely flow through the tiny opening.

  “What happens when you have alcohol?” she asked, perplexed.

  “I get drunk,” I said.

  It took her a minute.

  “Oh, I got it! I’ve seen this before! Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  She showed me the machine with a vacuum attached to a hollow needle that would be inserted deep into my breast while I lay on my stomach on a table similar to a bunk bed with my neck cranked to the side. My breast would be pulled through a hole and clamped between glass, and a doctor would sit under the table and make a cut to insert the needle. She explained she would need to inject my breast multiple times with lidocaine—“load it up with lidocaine” is what she said—as the area was deep inside.

  “It’s just like novocaine,” she said. “Just not for your teeth.”

  When I left the hospital after my three procedures, I had three bandages on different areas of my breasts. The most invasive procedure was harrowing. How sheltered had I been in my life that a standard procedure that millions of women had every week and that bored the receptionist almost broke my neck, my spirit, my resolve? I didn’t think I would make it through, but I did and I was bursting with pride and relief when the nurse helped me get off the high table, holding gauze over my breast, which was now bleeding and missing some tissue from deep in its core. I stepped over the bloody gauzes and graham cracker crumbs to get to my flimsy wraparound gown. I went home to await the test results. I thought the worst was over—except for the cats.

  The modern, multicolored, stackable-cube cat climber was delivered by UPS the following day, and I had to ask the UPS man to help me get it upstairs. I opened the box and assembled it, trying not to use my left arm so as to avoid pulling on the passageway through my breast left by the tissue-sucking vacuum. The older cat wouldn’t climb it and the new kitten seemed trepidatious. I unstacked and restacked the cubes to make two shorter towers. I lay on my bed after the exertion of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling the cat climber. I wanted to rest before I had to leave for my friend’s birthday party. My breasts were yellow, green, and blue; the cats were fighting under the bed; and the window was rattling in the wind—the window was shattered and duct-taped back together from when my cat sitter broke it.

  That is when I got the phone call. I had to strain to hear the doctor over the catfight and banging windowpane. The result from the most invasive biopsy was DCIS, otherwise known as ductal carcinoma in situ, or early-stage breast cancer. The doctor noted that my cells were high aggression and she referred me to a cancer surgeon. She finished the call saying it could be worse, a lot worse.

  I canceled going to my friend’s birthday party and got on the internet. My shock multiplied as I read that the treatment of choice for DCIS was often a single or double mastectomy. The cancer surgeon would need to look at my results and recommend treatment. If the DCIS was in one location of the breast, the recommended course of treatment would be a lumpectomy. Often this procedure had no body-altering impact and could or could not be followed by drug therapy and radiation. If the DCIS was in more than one location of the breast, the recommended course of treatment would be a mastectomy followed by drug therapy, breast reconstruction, depression, even more dating trauma, body image issues, endless follow-up appointments, support groups, and a lifetime of psychotherapy.

  The next day the news went from terrible to horrific. My friend’s boyfriend had killed himself the previous night, the night of her birthday party, the night I got the cancer diagnosis. She was celebrating at a friend’s house without him, because they were in the middle of breaking up. My friend found him hanging in their bedroom when she returned in the morning. I could almost feel the cancer spreading as I counted the days until I saw the surgeon.

  The cancer surgeon looked like a college freshman who played rugby. She told me within minutes that my cancer was small and localized. The recommended course of treatment was a lumpectomy. She would cut a half-moon under my nipple and follow the guide wire that would be pushed in earlier to point to the tiny spot of cancer. Then she would cut out the cancer. I was beyond ecstatic. I swore to myself that I would never take my breasts for granted again. The cancer surgeon told me to schedule an MRI as a precaution, so she could take a good look at both breasts to make sure there were no other spots of cancer, but she said she didn’t expect to find anything new.

  THE DAY BEFORE my friend’s boyfriend’s memorial, I was at NYU’s Perlmutter Cancer Center for my MRI. I had fixed my makeup before I left home with the optimistic thought that maybe I would meet a cute guy, perhaps with prostate cancer, who also had an MRI scheduled that day. He would have something early stage also, very treatable—I wasn’t interested in dating someone past stage 1. It would be good also if he liked cats so he could comb the new kitten with a flea comb while I distracted the older cat from attacking her. I suspected the new kitten had fleas.

  While I was in the waiting room I remembered that it was a women’s cancer care center, no hot guys with minimally invasive cancer in sight. Just old ladies, once I really started looking—lots and lots of old ladies who left trails of crumpled Kleenexes, half-sipped water bottles, lipstick-smeared paper cups, canes hooked over armrests, and walkers parked in open areas. Not even any hot young women with cancer, never mind the guys.

  The waiting room was packed. All the old ladies had canceled yesterday due to the icy streets. Today, though, they were back with their orthopedic rubber boots, vinyl purses, and Glamour magazines. Cell phones were ringing endlessly as the old ladies forgot them on their seats, couldn’t find them in their purses, or didn’t know how to tu
rn off the ringers anyway.

  When I was called in, I thought fleetingly that maybe the MRI tech would be a hot guy. She wasn’t, and she had a hard time getting in my IV. She had to call in the nurse, who told me I had thick skin.

  She pinched some of the skin on my hand and said, “Thick skin—that’s good for you. Less wrinkles.”

  They left me alone in the room while they sponged down the MRI machine from the previous person who had lain on it with a cancer diagnosis. The chair I waited on was vinyl and had a small rip in the upholstery under my thigh that hurt when it scratched my bare skin. I squirmed in the seat, fearful about my threshold for pain. Then I wondered if my kitty had fleas and whether I’d have to fumigate my apartment.

  The MRI machine was a cross between a medieval torture rack and some alien probe table. I was laid on my stomach with my breasts pulled through holes in the beige plastic surface and clamped down tight below. My arms were pulled over my head. My face was stuffed in an inset—I could see only blurred edges of beige plastic and paper liners. There was another needle inserted into my arm and they said at some point there would be a timed injection. They placed a large plastic syringe in my left hand to hold—over my head and resting on the table—as if I were going to self-inject, but my hand was functioning only as a holder.

  “The machine has a timer that will activate midway through the MRI and the syringe will empty into your arm. You might feel cold at the injection site. Then you might feel nauseated.” The test hadn’t even started and my fingers holding the syringe were going numb from my arms being over my head. “Then you might stop breathing,” they added, “but that doesn’t happen often.” They continued, “If you do stop breathing, then you can squeeze the rubber ball.”

  They unfurled my right fist and I felt a rubber ball placed in my palm and they curled my fingers around it. I couldn’t see its color since my face was pressed into the inset and my breasts were pinned, so there was no way to move my head, but I imagined the rubber ball was red, like a clown’s nose.