Hanna Louise Poston

When we’re too angry to touch each other, we’ll still both touch Sadie, and we end up standing in the middle of the living room, warring nations, both clinging to the bridge over the sea between us, silently sending across the first ambassadors of truce: wandering fingers that meet in her fur.

One afternoon this last fall, Sadie brought in a dead sparrow. There’s an aftertaste of tragedy to a cat-caught bird; what used to be unpredictable and wind-battered is reduced to a handful of silk and laid on our kitchen floor like a sacrifice.

Once Sadie was sure that Joe and I had both seen her offering, she ate the entirety of that bird: claws, beak, bones and every last feather. It took her less than a minute. By the time we had gotten used to the idea of seeing her eat the bird, she had already eaten it and left the room, dribbling a few specks of blood onto the tile.

Sadie is our happiness, elusive and impure. Our happiness grins and licks blood off her chin. Our happiness only snuggles when she feels like it, and given that she’s feline, those times can be few and far between.

But at least she lives in our house now. Morning sun on Joe’s black hair, the three of us tangle together in the blankets, sailing the bed like a rickety boat into what, if recent days are any indication, will be another pretty good day.

-Hannah Louise Poston is pursuing her M.F.A. in poetry in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.


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