Twilight begins the epilogue of the day, the sky’s brilliance calibrated for human eyes, no longer dazzling. At this time, the entire weight of dusk falls onto Cat’s belly. This isn’t too heavy—in fact, Cat rolls over to show his underside, willingly accepting the burden.

Having napped for hours, Cat has absorbed an afternoon’s worth of sun, storing all that warmth in his belly. It is the greatest treasure of any cat, glittering like gold. All of this treasure, Cat now exchanges, for a skein of orange-pink, twilight hues. This loose, springy radiance assumes the exact same texture as cat fur.

The sun has been all but exhausted through the course of the day. Very little remains of it at this point, just some shards propped up by clouds. Fragments of sun are descending all around, flaking into countless crimson streaks.

Cat successfully lures these remnants of star into the room. There, he grinds them into even finer crystalline particles, which he silently spreads across the floor, forming unorthodox geometric figures. Cat enjoys dozing among these mosaics, which, warmer than the bare floor, become a sort of carpet. They carry the heat of the sun within them, pulverized into atoms, too small to be seen. Cat sprawls among them, reaching a lazy paw into every shape, framed by these shapes, yet remaining unbounded. These pieces of sun reach over cat’s body too, blanketlike.

Twilight descends, shifting the shapes, and Cat adjusts his posture with them.

Cat is always whetting his claws so that when the sun begins to set, he can scratch minuscule tears in the sky where solar heat can accumulate. Some days, there are more tears than others, some days, they are farther away, a vague intimation, exactly right for cat’s personality. Cat understands that the world is spinning, and so the sun will reappear day after day. He has many opportunities to see the twilight, each of them equally valuable.

So how to make each dusk feel special, different from the previous ones? At some point, Cat seems to have made a decision to find something unique in every one of these completely mundane twilights.

When he’s in a good mood, Cat can drag the twilight out by as much as nine yards so the sun is forced to compensate, descending the same distance below the horizon. That night is therefore shortened by the whole nine yards, though how much time that translates to only Cat can say.

Cat does everything for the sake of me and Husband, to ensure we get home before dark. If we stay out longer, sunset is delayed; if we get back early, dusk hastens. While waiting for us to return, Cat does his best to hold on to the patterns of twilight, giving us time to change into slippers and step across the shapes he’s arranged for us.

Even if these mosaics have vanished, that doesn’t matter—Cat has already gouged holes in the air, and as long as they remain there, so does the heat they contain. No matter how late we get home, we can still feel the lingering warmth of twilight in the flat.

And if we happen to reach home just at the moment of sunset, that’s the happiest possible coincidence for Cat. He can display his painstaking creations at their very best, no need to wait for next time.

After that, Cat leaps into a human embrace, and we are swept into the afterglow of the sun.