One

“Cheddar, get down from there!” Jasmine Brody marched across the floor, and the offending beast released its grip on the curtains of Kedi Cafe and dropped to the ground, scurrying underneath one of the far tables.

Jasmine surveyed the damage to the curtains, shaking her head as she tutted under her breath. It wasn’t as if the airy white curtains were family heirlooms—she had picked them up at the bazaar just a few weeks ago, in fact—but the cafe itself was heirloom enough that anything that marred its perfectly imperfect facade was an offense.

She set off in search of Cheddar again. The orange demon was one of the newest additions to the fleet of cats awaiting customers every day at Kedi Cafe, a kitten from the nearby cat colony Jasmine was in the habit of feeding. He had followed her back to the cafe a few days ago, and he hadn’t left. And even if he occasionally seemed to be possessed by a spirit that made him puff up his back, zoom across the floor, and climb her curtains, she had a soft spot for him.

“There you are, Cheddar.” She crouched beside the table, and the young cat walked right out to her as if he had forgotten he had even had a reason to hide in the first place. He started purring immediately as he pranced his cocky kitten walk in circles around Jasmine, brushing up against her back and her shins in turn as she remained crouched in place.

“What are we going to do with you?” she asked. “I can’t leave you here or you’re going to destroy the place.” She took in her grandmother’s beloved cat cafe. Most restaurants in Istanbul had given up the fight to keep the city’s many friendly strays from coming inside, often feeding them from the kitchen or letting them sleep on vacated chairs.

Kedi Cafe, though, took things a step farther, catering to the tourists who frequented the city. While there were cats to be seen and appreciated everywhere in the city, some tourists felt more comfortable with the idea of an “inside” cat than a friendly stray, even if the cats outside were likely every bit as clean and safe as most of the indoor ones. Jasmine had a great working relationship with Enes, a local veterinarian, who regularly received her business these days as she showed up with a new animal in need of immunizations and neutering on at least a weekly basis. He’d even given her a discount thanks to her repeat business.

There were three cats who lived full time in the cafe, as well as a courtyard behind the building that was equipped for ideal human-feline cohabitation. Cheddar, though…well, it seemed unlikely he would be joining the full-time crew at the cafe.

Which could only mean…

“You’re coming home with me, sir. Where I can keep an eye on you and where there are no curtains for you to destroy. Yes, that’s right,” she cooed the last words at his pointed face, his whiskers vibrating as his purrs increased in volume. “And then you’re coming back here again with me tomorrow, so you’d better get used to riding around in the cat backpack.”

Cheddar followed Jasmine as she made her way back to the kitchen, where she began to gather the leftovers and cat food that she would take to the colony on her walk home. He meowed in protest and she dropped a few pieces of unseasoned chicken on the floor, as if by accident. She didn’t need him thinking she was actually responding to his insistence. It was just a lucky coincidence, as far as he needed to know.

“Once you come live at my house, bud, you’re going to have to learn not to beg.” She shrugged to herself then, as if in acquiescence. “Not that Gator has stopped sniffing the air and meowing every time I open a can of tuna. And if you’re still coming in to work with me here, then I guess you’ll be singing for your supper every now and again.”

Jasmine retrieved the cat backpack with its large plastic window that made it seem like the cat riding on her back was a visitor from outer space and placed it on the ground in front of Cheddar. As she crouched next to it to coax him inside, he bolted in before she could even get all the way to the ground. She looked at him in confusion and he blinked back up at her.

“Okay, then. That was easy.” She placed a few more snacks inside—positive connotation was the key to success with a new experience like riding in the cat backpack—and lifted the carrier up. Cheddar seemed completely unbothered by his change in elevation and had, in fact, barely noticed it. Jasmine slipped the backpack on her shoulders, picked up the food for the cat colony, and made her way out the back door, locking it behind her.

When they were outside, she heard the first faint protest from Cheddar. “It’s okay, bud,” she offered over her shoulder. “We’re going to visit your old home, and then you’re coming to your new home.”

With every step, she felt better about her decision to bring Cheddar to her apartment. The older cats who lived at the cafe full-time were well-behaved, subdued to the point where she had to encourage them to get a little bit of exercise with toys and treats that worked with diminishing effectiveness. Left to their own devices, they would move only to track the path of a sunbeam, and who was she to begrudge them that? Cabbage and Corduroy had come to Jasmine’s grandmother years before, wandering to the door of the cafe a few months apart. Cabbage had arrived with a limp and Corduroy had been in need of a good bath and a flea treatment, and they had both never set foot outside again after their arrival day. The jury was still out on whether Grandma had domesticated them or if it had been the other way around, but they had been living a good life together ever since.

The thought of her grandmother brought an unexpected swell of emotion to Jasmine’s throat. It had been over a month since she had seen her, since she had landed on Grandma’s doorstep to run things in her absence while she took off on a world cruise with her boyfriend, Morty. Grandma had never done anything like it before, and Jasmine was equal parts happy for her and worried about her.

Viola, Jasmine’s grandmother, was from England, but she had spent her retirement in Turkey. Jasmine had fond memories of her first visit to Istanbul, and of the change she had seen in her grandmother during that first visit, her first winter away from England.

It had been a brighter time than the two of them were accustomed to, that was for sure. In Jasmine’s childhood, she had looked forward to the plane ride to London after Christmas, a part of her family traditions that she could count on like clockwork. After celebrating the holiday with her mother’s parents in Detroit, there would be an early morning journey to the airport, so early that it felt like the middle of the night, and then Viola, her father’s mother, would meet them at Heathrow.

It always felt like the true beginning of winter, that visit. Though there was still the anticipation of New Year’s Eve, the Christmas festivities had settled down and the cold had moved in. Viola’s flat was chillier than Jasmine’s home, and they all wore scarves and slippers in the house and drank more tea in a day than she normally drank in a month.

The days were short, too, of course, even though her dad liked to remind her that since it was after the winter solstice, every day was a little longer than the one before. Between the darkness and the cold, a wet cold that reached all the way to her bones, that trip brought with it a melancholy that Jasmine wouldn’t be able to name or even identify until she was much older.

The first time she identified it was when she noted its absence, that first December day that she arrived in Istanbul to meet her grandmother in her new home.

It wasn’t that it wasn’t cold that day—no, there had been snow on the ground, though not as much as there had been back home in Grand Rapids. Perhaps it was that Christmas wasn’t as widely celebrated, leaving the anticipation of the impending new year a very present focus.

The real change had been in Viola, though. There had been a lightness in her step as she showed Jasmine around her new neighborhood, stopping every so often to introduce her to yet another friendly street cat, all of which she had named.

“This is Pete. And that’s Kahlua over there.” 

Jasmine had smiled at the names, at the lack of any rhyme or reason to them. There wasn’t a theme, that much was clear. They seemed to come to her grandmother in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, and when Jasmine asked her why she had given a cat the name Pete, she had simply shrugged. 

“That’s just his name,” she had said. “Why is your name Jasmine?”

“Because it’s a nice name and Mom liked it, I guess. Well, you can’t argue with logic like that,” Jasmine had responded with a roll of her eyes.

Cabbage and Corduroy were two of those original cats, and Jasmine smiled at the thought of them, at the connection they provided between her and her grandmother even when Grandma was on the other side of the world.

The vacant lot where most of  Viola’s favorite felines lived was in sight now, the same place where Cheddar had lived just a few days ago, and Jasmine felt her lips stretch in a smile at the meow of recognition that reached her ears from just over her shoulder.

“That’s right, bud. We’re almost there. Smells familiar, huh?”

Cheddar made another sound, and Jasmine wondered what sort of response the cat colony elicited from him. Was he happy to be back? Traumatized by some memory of his life there? Or was he simply letting her know that he had had more than enough backpack time, thank you very much, and was ready to be set free to take out his feelings on another set of curtains?

Jasmine distributed the food she had brought, narrowly managing to do so without stepping on any tails as the herd of cats swarmed around her ankles, meowing with delight at the bounty she had brought. She cooed at them, greeting the familiar faces she saw and making a mental note of a few new arrivals. She would need to take one or two of them to see Enes if they stuck around, by the looks of it. In the far corner, closest to the wall of the building, she spotted a couple of small piles of kibble. She’d never seen them before, never seen any indication that anyone else was caring for this particular group of cats. 

It stirred up the faintest twinge of an uncomfortable feeling, something she couldn’t quite name. She noted a vague discomfort at the idea of someone else taking care of her cats, which was ridiculous given that there were more than enough cats here to go around. It was also ridiculous considering that the kibble was being ignored in favor of the leftovers she had brought from the cafe, which warmed Jasmine with more pride than she would ever be willing to admit.

It was a short walk from the colony back to the apartment Viola had left in her care as well. Jasmine shook her head as she unlocked the door, Cheddar once again picking up the volume of his meows. How could it be that adjusted to her new life this quickly? That she felt so settled here with a business to run, a home to relax in, and even a few animal friends to care for, when just a few months ago she had been living paycheck to paycheck, putting up with roommates who had vastly different senses of hygiene than she did, simply because rent in Grand Rapids was too expensive for her artist’s salary?

Well, salary is the wrong word, she thought. You don’t exactly get a regular salary when you’re just picking up contracts that last for a short time. And the fact was, that far more often than she got a commission to paint a beautiful mural on the side of a building, she was getting commissions to cover the side of the building with a single color of paint. It was the kind of job that college students took during the summer, and yet she accepted every one of those commissions that came her way. At least she was working with paint, in the end, even if it wasn’t in the way in which she desired.

Thanks to the opportunity that Viola had given her, Jasmine wasn’t taking any commissions these days. Or at least, she wasn’t obligated to. She told herself that’s why she hadn’t so much as picked up a brush or dabbled on one of the blank canvases she had found locked away in the storage room at the cafe—Viola liked to paint, too. She had, in fact, been the first person to encourage Jasmine to explore her art. After one too many smiles-that-looked-more-like-grimaces from art teachers surveying her childhood creations, Jasmine had decided with an outsized level of authority that she was “not creative,” and had immersed herself fully in the more left-brained subjects and activities her school had to offer.

It had been during one of her visits to her grandmother, one particularly wet and cold winter when the two of them had barely wanted to venture farther from the fireplace than to the kitchen to put on the kettle, that her grandmother had emerged from the spare bedroom’s closet with brushes of all sizes and more colorful tubes of acrylic paint than Jasmine had seen outside of an arts and crafts supply store.

“What do you want me to do with that?” she had asked her grandmother, warily, noting the absence of any paper or canvas to paint on.

Viola had gestured towards the blank wall behind her. “Paint that,” she had said. “I’m sick of looking at it. Make it interesting.”

And that was all the instruction she had given. Jasmine had nearly come unraveled at the lack of guidance, the lack of expectations to meet. But after she had scrounged around for some old paper bags and newspapers to practice painting on, and after Viola had given a few approving clucks at the abstract swirls of color Jasmine had made there, she had gotten to work.

The resulting mural had been her grandmother’s pride and joy, which had thrilled and embarrassed Jasmine in equal parts. The paint was barely dry before her grandmother had invited all of her friends over for a dinner party, during which she had insisted they go around the table sharing their favorite things about the mural.

But Viola had been onto something, as Jasmine had only realized years later. Her excessive praise and celebration of the abstract mess of color on her wall had broken through whatever block Jasmine had created in her mind, whatever was there telling her she wasn’t artistic, that she wasn’t creative.

When she had returned to school a few weeks later, she was the first to sign up when the theater department needed volunteers to create and paint scenery for their next production. She was at the top of the list whenever volunteers were needed for a creative project, and after a few months of that, she even had the courage to enroll in another art class. And luckily for her, Ms. Miller was much more encouraging of her creativity than her previous art teachers ever had been. 

She took Cheddar out of the backpack, smiling as he began to explore the apartment. Gator, the senior tabby cat who lived with Viola, shot a look of betrayal at Jasmine before stalking away from the orange ball of energy that was currently chasing its tail with all the speed and intensity of a Tasmanian devil. 

“I know, Gator,” said Jasmine as she scratched behind his ears. “But he didn’t have anywhere else to go. And I know you’ll be a good role model for him. Clearly, he needs a little bit of direction.”

She felt a pang of guilt for the older cat, for not making this transition as graceful as she knew you were supposed to. If she shared a video of this interaction on her Instagram account, the “experts” would come out in droves to tell her to introduce the two cats slowly, in different rooms, letting them smell each other through a closed door for days or even weeks before bringing them into the same space.

Thankfully, though, Gator was the feline equivalent of a Zen master, adept at navigating the behavioral idiosyncrasies of the wildest kitten. It helped that he often accompanied her to Kedi Cafe and was already acquainted with Cheddar from his workplace. 

The look he was giving her now, though, spoke volumes. I took one day off work and you brought this home to me? This is what happens when I take a personal day?

“Sorry, bud,” said Jasmine with a sheepish smile. “He’ll settle down eventually, I’m sure. You know how kittens are…they’re just a blur of energy and mayhem until they pass out and you actually get a moment of peace. At least we don’t have any curtains here for him to shred.”

She went in search of Cheddar then, a suspicious thudding sound emanating from the bathroom in the direction he had vanished just a moment prior. Entering the room, she found him perched in the sink, smacking at his own reflection in the mirror above, knocking first her toothpaste and then her moisturizer off the shelf with each movement of his paw.

Jasmine swooped in to grab Cheddar, stopping him just before his next swing could take out the glass jar where she kept her toothbrush. “Right. Thanks for the reminder that I need to kitten-proof the apartment.” She took him out of the bathroom, closing the door behind her as she deposited him on her bed. “For now, at least, let’s just keep you out of the bathroom. There’s less trouble to get into here.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt a wave of doubt wash over her. With Cheddar’s orange kitten energy, she had total confidence that he could—and would—uncover any opportunity to wreak mayhem in her apartment. Gone were the days when she could leave a dirty pot soaking on the kitchen counter or a discarded outfit tossed at the foot of her bed. Sure, Gator was trustworthy to a fault. But Cheddar? She could already visualize holes chewed in her socks, garbage cans emptied all over the kitchen floor, and the cat swinging from a chandelier, surveying his artwork.

“Thank goodness we don’t have any chandeliers, then,” said Jasmine out loud as she made her way back to the combined kitchen and living area, Cheddar on and around and between her heels. He cut in front of her just as she  entered the room, leaping from the ground to the back of the couch, where Gator welcomed him with a soft hiss. “We’re going to have fun together, the three of us,” she said, with a pang of bittersweetness. It wasn’t the same as having her grandmother here, staying in her home with one cat who had been her constant companion and another who was a chaos monster. But she needed the chaos, the noise, the activity to keep her from being alone with her thoughts, to keep her from being aware of just how much she would love to feel like she belonged somewhere.