In the morning the wind still howled. The snow was halfway up the windows on either side of the door, and still falling hard.
When I opened the door to go outside, the snow was over my head. I couldn’t get through.
Nickel had leaned the snow shovel inside the night before, and he shoveled a path through the drifts for me. I leaped through the snow.
Back inside I shook the snow off on the rug by the door.
“Thank you, Nickel,” I said.
His hair was plastered to his head. He looked the same way he had when I’d first found him.
Flora still slept by the fire.
“I found the weather box and listened,” he said. “The storm will last for days. No one is allowed on the roads. No phone service. No cell phone service working either.”
“The power went on and off all night,” I said. “We only lost power for hours once that I remember, though.”
It is a windy afternoon storm. Sylvan’s class of poets sit in a group. There is a fire in the fireplace. I lie on the red rug, listening. The students who want to be poets are eager and fresh, like washed apples. Sylvan and I are the only ones with gray, grizzled hair.
“They know so little about life,” Sylvan whispers to me as he puts out plates of cookies and seltzer bottles.
“Maybe they just don’t know what they know,” I say, making Sylvan smile.
They all pat me. Students are always kind to their teachers’ pets Sylvan has told me.
One young man reads a poem about a farmer walking his animal to town.
I sit up. It sounds like Ox-Cart Man. Sylvan nods when he’s done reading.
“What do you think, Teddy?” he asks.
The students laugh.
“Shallow and derivative,” I say before I realize that I’m talking.
No one but Sylvan hears me, of course.
“It has been written a different way, Dan,” says Sylvan. “Go read Ox-Cart Man.”
A thin, nervous girl, Ellie, reads a poem about her lost love.
Sylvan taps his foot nervously. I know he hates it.
“Ellie, have you lost a love?” Sylvan asks her when she’s finished reading.
She shakes her head. There are tears in her eyes.
I get up from the red rug and go stand next to Ellie.
Her lips tremble.
“What have you lost?” asks Sylvan. “What are you really talking about in this poem?”
I lean against Ellie, and she puts her arm around me.
“My cat,” she whispers.
She is crying full-out now, and I glare at Sylvan. I curl my lip at him.
He looks at me, and his face softens.
“Ellie,” says Sylvan softly, “write about your cat, dear girl.”
And the lights go out, Ellie’s tears making the ruff of my neck wet in the dark room.
“You were not kind to her,” I tell Sylvan later.
He sighs.
“I know. Sometimes writers are not thoughtful of other writers. We want to be inspired. Cranky when we’re not. But trust me, she will write a wonderful poem about her cat.”
And she does.
It’s called “Gray Cat Gone Away.” It ends:
IN MOONLIGHT
NO
SOFT SWEET PAW ON MY CHEEK
NO
FUR CURLED UNDER MY CHIN
JUST
A SAD SPACE LEFT BEHIND—
GRAY CAT GONE AWAY.