Like Them

Glass from the framed photo lies scattered across the floor.

"This damn cat." He stares at the unapologetic beast as it flees the room, leaving him alone. He kneels and gathers the frame, brushing away the debris. The photo, at least, is still intact.

He never liked cats. She did. And he would do earnest things to please her.

Happily ever after- That was supposed to be how the story goes, and ends. There was a time, though, when that was not the case.

He stares at the image. Its black and white tones. Just another reminder of time and its curse. For sixty years, that photo has been there—never moved, occasionally glanced at, but never truly studied. This time, it is. He lingers on it. Analyzes it. Her posture, his posture. Her smile, his scowl. It feels like the first time he has ever really looked.

He knows the corner of this room was never the right place for it. Perhaps that is why it feels so unfamiliar now.

But that is not the case.

He sits on the bed. His attention shifts to his surroundings.

He avoids this room. He has wrestled with the thought of repurposing it, but always decides to leave it as it was. As she left it. He checks on it now and then—sometimes searching for ways to amend his mistakes. But most days, it only reminds him that she is gone. Forever.

A bittersweet place. A constant reminder of the past and the future, and his place in it.

While she was here, he did not want her here. Now that she is gone, he regrets it.

His eyes fall on the two chairs in the corner, the small round table between them.

A memory. A nightmare.

He recalls his wife sitting on the chair next to him, separated by the small round table between them. His coffee next to him, she prefers tea. He catches her staring at him. Intensely. She is trying to remember if she has met him before. He sees it. He notices it. He does not like it.

It is not her fault she has this disease. But he should be special to her. How could she forget him?

He was there when her mother died in middle school. He was there in high school, the night she ran away from home because her father was drunk and the beatings had been rougher than usual. He remembers finding her at the bus stop three blocks from his house, shivering, her lip split. He gave her his jacket. She laughed—even then, even bleeding—and said he looked like a wet dog without it. He didn't care. He would have given her anything.

He was there when they graduated together, when they married. A love so true, so deep, it belonged in fairy tales. He was there when they bought their house. When they learned he could not have children. When they grieved. When they made peace with it. When they were baptized together. When they got their first cat—the grandmother to the little devil now running through these halls. He is all the family she has left. They respected each other in sickness and in health.

Did that not mean anything?

He slaps her.

Just as her father did when she was a child.

If love does not cure, then perhaps hate may.

"Maybe this will help you remember," he says.

She does not react. She is not shocked. Not angry. But her eyes begin to shine, tears gathering at the edges, and her cheek blooms red. He recognizes that look. It is the same face she wore the night she ran away—except this time, there is nowhere left to go.

He realizes what he has done.

She turns away and goes back to her tea.

The disease, it seems, was contagious. He had forgotten their life together too. His impatience only worsened after that day. He stopped spending time with her. He brought food. He cleaned. Nothing more. He no longer sought conversation. Her presence felt like a burden, and he only entered the room to complete what needed doing.

Are you truly alive if all you witness is the present? If you have forgotten the past and cannot hope for a future?

No matter how hard he tried to help her remember, she could not.

Would it have been more merciful to end it?

He wishes he could forget those final months and keep only the memories of their youth. But would that be right?

He shifts his gaze back to the photo, forcing his mind to return to when they were young. To the bus stop. The jacket. Her bruised lip curling into a smile.

The little devil returns. It leaps onto his lap and settles there. She adored that cat—the last survivor. The others died, or were given away, or sold. He must care for it now. He will not make the same mistake twice. Not if she is watching from above.

Its meow sounds more like a cough. "My-ko," she had named him. My cough. As if the cat were her little cough, always following her around.

Myko stares at him, as if the creature knows what he is thinking. It meows again—or rather, coughs.

And that is when he breaks.

After the slap, after the hollow days that followed, even when he buried her—he felt nothing. This is not my wife anymore, he had told himself. But now, all of it returns. He remembers. He feels. The pain floods through him without warning.

He strokes the cat the way one might touch something fragile and unfamiliar, his breath catching, his chest heaving as he lets it all out.

I will see her again. And I will be better. I must be better—until my last breath. I will show her I am still that young man who gave her his jacket in the rain. Who looked like a wet dog and didn't care.

The tears keep coming. He keeps stroking the cat. He keeps staring at the photo.

At her smile. At his scowl. At the way she leaned into him like he was the only safe place left in the world.

"Is this the same thing he has been doing since we found him?"

Two beings observe through a one-way panel. The room beyond is bare. White. Clinical. Nothing like the home he believes he is in.

The man sits on a steel platform, bones visible beneath papery skin, fingers stroking empty air. His other hand clutches nothing at all—yet he gazes down at it as though it holds everything he has ever loved.

"Yes," the other replies. "Every time we send the signal for death, this is what his system produces."

"Is this how he survived?"

"We believe so."

They found him in the wreckage of a structure—what these humans call a home—in a remote sector of the planet. Alone. Dehydrated. His system failing. The female he speaks of had been dead for a long time. The animal, longer than that.

He should not have lasted as long as he did. And yet.

"'Hope,' I believe they call it," one states.

"Love," replies the other.

"Perhaps both."

A silence.

"Is this a flaw, or a strength? An attachment so deep it overrides physical collapse—even when there are no guarantees of success. Do they all carry this? Is it programmed, or developed?"

The man on the platform whispers something to the air in his lap. His cracked lips move around a word that does not translate.

A longer pause.

"Of all the things humans carry, this may be the most irrational." The first being does not look away from the panel. "Should we seek it for our future models?"

The second being watches the man's fingers trace slow circles through empty air. It does not answer.

On the platform, the man smiles.