There was very little life to be seen from the balcony, just an endless blue sky, and grey urban buildings between which a brown river wove impassively. No trees up here, very few birds. The cat lounged in a slice of sun on the concrete, her tail swishing. She heard a knock from inside, and the woman she lived with moving to answer it. She stood, stretching briefly to disguise her interest, and padded inside, where the woman was leading a man to the kitchen table. The man was tall and smelled clean. The cat watched as they spoke, and the man produced a white cardboard box with a label. He pushed the box across the table to the woman, who opened it and inspected it for a moment. From within she pulled out something thin and crinkly. The man spoke, the woman nodded, and the cat heard a crinkling sound from within her hands. She put her hand to her mouth, and tipped her head back. The man kept talking while the woman stood to fill a water glass and drink from it. There was a loud slam down the hallway. The cat jumped and whipped her head around. Loud noises, and then music started blasting down the hall. The cat had lived in many places with the woman. This was her least favourite. It reminded her of the shelter, where the woman had initially collected her from. She couldn’t see the other inhabitants of the building, but she could hear them, and smell the sheer quantity of them. She’d been back to the shelter once, but the stay had been short, and the woman had returned. The second time at the shelter, the carrier had been taken to a new area. The air had still been filled with the sounds of distressed animals, but they were further away, and the cages had been even smaller. She’d been left there a second time, and accepted her miserable fate, as those descended from generations of domesticated animals are able to do. At some point in her short second stay, a person with white gloves had pulled her from the cage, taken her to a room that smelled sterile and unnatural, and after a sharp pain in the back of her neck from the gloves, the cat remembered nothing. When she woke, her belly was in a kind of pain she’d never felt before, and there was hair missing on the little pouch of flesh that hung between her hind legs. The woman, to her relief, had collected her once more, and the cat hadn’t seen the shelter since. The pain had gone away and the hair had grown back, but her belly would always feel different beneath her tongue during grooming. And she hadn’t howled for a single tom since. It hadn’t bothered her. She didn’t like other animals. Before the shelter, she’d lived in a crowded house with more mouths than bowls. Cats, birds, dogs, tanks enclosing creatures that usually lived outside. An entire house crammed and overflowing with unmet needs. An endless cacophony of distress calls. All bad smells and ribcages showing through fur, constant new arrivals threatening the already dismally small servings of food. The shelter had been equally miserable, even with consistent food. The overcrowding had been replaced with controlled crowding; every animal crammed into its own cage this time. No more competition for food, but hours dragging past where nothing happened but for the staring of intrusive, dumb eyes that appeared through the bars, the strange hands that offered themselves to her face. It had been just as miserable. The man at the table was rising now, and the woman led him to the door. The door was opened, the two exchanged final words, and the door closed again. The woman returned to the table to re-examine the cardboard box. The sun was sinking low in the sky and the cat looked out to the balcony once more for the shape of birds flitting past. She saw none, and when she turned back to the room, the woman was no longer visible. Creeping further inside, she saw the woman kneeling on the floor, in the corner by the vanity, nose scrunched up, arms curled around her stomach, the box on the ground beside her. The cat hopped up onto the bed, where she settled cautiously, watching the woman. The woman uncurled one arm to reach for the box, and, withdrawing a piece of folded paper, frowned at it. Then from the box she pulled out another crinkly bit of silver. There was the sound of a thin, taught surface breaking, and her hand moved to her mouth. Then she dropped the box to the ground, and sank down onto the floor, knees tucked up to her chest, head between her knees. The cat’s tail swished, back and forth. The woman was making sounds she didn’t like. She hopped off the bed and moved gingerly towards her. The woman was curled tightly into a ball and the cat slunk around her, trailing her tail lightly over her limbs, investigating with her nose. Bad smells. Warmth radiating off her. She could hear the woman’s insides. Her tail flicked. And then the woman pulled herself up and moved clumsily to the bathroom, where the cat heard her retching. Perturbed, the cat circled the entry to the room where the woman knelt with her back to her. The woman’s moans changed pitch, and her face grew wet and her eyes turned red; she smelled of salt. The night was long and the woman’s behaviour was unsettling. Painful sounds from the room with the litter, painful sounds from the ball she made of herself on the floor, back to the small room, and so on. Splashing, retching, moaning, and the smell of blood. The cat could make no sense of her sudden illness. Perhaps the man had made her ill. Perhaps she’d grown intolerant of the walls and the height at which they lived. Perhaps it was the lack of birds. The cat turned her head towards the large glass opening at the end of the apartment, and saw nothing but black expanse outside. She looked back to the woman. And then, the flap of wings. The cat’s head whipped back to the balcony. Behind her, the woman was still on the floor, caved in on herself. The cat darted to the balcony and stared from the doorway. Two huge yellow eyes stared back at her. She’d never seen a bird like this before. Brown feathers, short beak, no neck. Awake at night. The two sets of eyes stared at each other through the glass. The bird’s feathers rustled lightly in the breeze. The cat’s nose quivered. Then, as soon as it had appeared, the bird opened two huge wings, flapped, and vanished into the night. The cat stayed by the balcony, staring. When the woman finally climbed into bed, she slept curled tightly into a ball, and smelled of salt, sweat and blood. The cat hopped up and slunk along the woman’s body. The woman’s odour was unpleasant and unfamiliar; heat radiated from her belly. The cat’s nose sniffed gently over her skin, before lowering herself down beside the woman. As she slept, she dreamed of birds, flitting and dipping in some ancient pattern against a backdrop of endless blue. The patterns formed no shape she could make sense of, but she watched nonetheless, her tail twitching against the covers, making the same, inexplicable patterns.