Welcome back to my planet, currently viewed in the southeast nine degrees left of Calcutta. Thunder and lightning are traversing the lower atmosphere, much to the cats indignation except for Min, the black and white former porchsitter who lived outside for over a year before allowing entanglement with our big indoor orange boy Martian. Living outside would shake the phases out of me too, to the point of unphasement by usual sky temblors.

Min loved Martian, she fell hard to his indifferent treatment. Any time the hyper orange bastard would escape into city life, she followed. After she came to live inside with us, I would send her out after to bring him back as his outdoor sense could fit into the center of a Cheerio. He chased squirrels for maybe ten feet before the squirrel turned and chattered at him, causing him to puff out and turn tail, humbled and sorry. For all his forays, he never succeeded in bringing a mouse or bird home. He did exuberantly run up a very tall pine in the next door neighbor's yard--top of the world, Ma--got himself stuck, yelled his head off for two days before falling down half the height, saved himself on the branches before falling down the remaining way on the third day. Came home with resin and twigs in his fur and slept next to Brian, who he loved best.

Later in his life (it was only yesterday he arrived...), he developed heart, kidney, and pulmonary failure plus diabetes. I ministered medications and diets designed to ease nature, until he couldn't eat because he couldn't breathe, gasping in short movements. June 19th I took him for euthanasia and cried in his fur when he went. Min, who had fallen so hard for him, searched and searched throughout the apartment in deep resonant calls for a month past. She still misses him. I do too. He was a handsome piece of work.

I will write his story in my book journal, but maybe not yet. His ashes are still at the vet's; if I go there and pick them up, then it's really over. But I will, I have always retrieved the animals' ashes to bring them home quickly, but this, well geez, I don't know why the hesitation other than the closure to his life.

The storm has moved further south, echoes of rumbling fold clouds together still. Min sits behind my head as I type, her black and white self no longer able to sleep next to the orange cat, in Halloween repose. Let the storm shake out the heavy air.