Chapter 3: C Is For Cat.

Welcome to the third installment of my novel Fawn, a bite-sized, alphabetically serialized book made for modern readers and their extremely short attention spans.

If you are new to this series, start here with Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

The salami spirals were a hit. The problem was that eating them quickly turned into an elaborate performance art project—salami skirts, salami sunglasses. Each girl rolled a salami around her left ring finger and pretended she was getting married to a pig farmer, which somehow led to me quoting Charlotte’s Web: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both,” and Ruby, overcome with emotion, started to cry, making Violet storm upstairs, claiming that the sound of Ruby’s tears leaving her body made her nauseous.

I was left alone downstairs with the sink. Inside it: the carnage of the chicken that never came to be. Olive oil and bones and scraps of fat. Mustard sauce caked onto the tongs and congealed thickly around the ceramic plates. Warm cans of Coca-Cola going flat. The smell was sweet and rotten at once—sugar and vinegar. Salami, mustard, pickles, Coca-Cola.Sean never left dishes overnight. He considered it a moral failing. If I did, he’d get angry—not loudly, but with a quiet intensity that somehow made me feel like I was literally the dirtiest person in the world.

Now I stood alone with the kitchen detritus, dysregulated and resentful that I hadn’t made enough mom-blogger money in my heyday to afford a full-time, live-in butler.

“Mom!” Ruby called out. “There’s a fox!”

I ran upstairs and looked out the window. She was right. There was a rabid fox limping down the lane, foaming and patchy.

“Where’s Fat Boy?” Violet asked, clutching her octopus stuffy, and suddenly we all realized that Fat Boy had not come inside for dinner.

Within minutes we were fumbling through the darkened cemetery in our pajamas, shouting his name into the night. Ruby sobbed, rattling a spoon against an open can of tuna. There was a tombstone I’d noticed earlier that week. Hudson Jones. I had Googled him because he was the youngest person buried there. His gravestone read 1988–2016. His grave was always covered in crystals, polished stones, fake flowers. The obituary photo showed a smirking, handsome man in a grey T-shirt. Widow’s peak. Goatee. He was described as a rock hound who loved minerals from North Carolina, gardening, daylilies. It said he’d lived with Crohn’s disease and other devastating illnesses.

Fentanyl, I thought.

That night, as we stumbled toward his plot, I saw her.

An older woman, with big brittle hair and haunting eyes. She stood stiff and straight, backlit by the silhouette of the mountain. A windbreaker zipped to her throat. Her posture was military—watchful, as if she were guarding something.

Photo by Annie Smurova on Unsplash

“Have you seen an orange cat?” I asked, breathless.

She didn’t answer right away. She stared beyond me, at nothing, or everything. Then, flatly: “No. I’m not in charge of cats.” It was a strange answer. Her tone didn’t match the script I’d imagined for an older woman confronted with two pajama-clad girls and their worried mother. Most people soften in the face of that kind of Norman Rockwell tableau. She didn’t. She didn’t look at the girls. Her detachment was clinical. Witchy.

“He was your son,” I said, noticing how close she stood to the headstone. “You’re the one who leaves the treasures.”

“I am,” she said, still looking at the mountain.

“I walk past this grave every day,” I told her. “I looked him up. He seemed very special.”

Photo by Aubrey Odom on Unsplash

Suddenly I’d completely forgotten about Fat Boy. I wanted to know everything about Hudson Jones. I wanted one of those moments—mother to mother, beneath the moon—something that would siphon meaning into the night, give my panic a shape. Behind me, Violet rolled her eyes. Ruby sighed. I knew this habit embarrassed them—the way I absorbed other people’s sadness, the way I pressed. How I might, anywhere—Target, a grocery line—dive roll into intimacy. Ask the question I’d once wished someone had asked me: Who did you lose? What did you love?

My little witches. They found my curiosity irritating. Self-serving.

The woman said nothing. She walked to her beat-up, wood-paneled Volvo station wagon, which looked like it had been dredged from a lake. Virginia plates. A cracked rear window. A bumper sticker read: AFGHANISTAN — I SERVED.

The trunk was open. Inside was a plastic tub filled with jagged orange rocks.

“You can look,” she told the girls. “Don’t touch.”

“What are they?” Ruby asked.

“Limonite,” she said. “He mined it. Hudson. Said it kept him grounded.”

Then she added, “But that was a joke. Mining isn’t grounding. It’s burrowing. He was good at that.” She adjusted the plastic flowers on the grave. One drooped to the side. Ruby’s sticky fingers found mine. I could feel the heat of her, the worry still trembling under her skin. Violet approached the station wagon with wide, solemn eyes.

“There’s a fox,” Violet said. “It’s rabid. We think it got our cat.”

The woman finally looked at them. Really looked.

Her eyes—glass-green, startling—flickered with something.

She reached into the tub and handed Violet a stone the size of a mango. “You can have this,” she said.

We stood there—the three of us, the strange woman in the windbreaker, and the grave—surrounded by a silence heavy enough to bruise.

“My name is Dorothy,” she said.

Then she turned away.

We found Fat Boy at sunrise, yowling from a high branch in the oak behind our new house. The light was already sharp and summery, too bright, cicadas rattling somewhere out of sight. I stood in the wet grass, craning my neck, shading my eyes, watching his orange body sway slightly with the branch every time he cried out, furious and betrayed.

I called the fire department and asked for a ladder.

“That’s an urban legend, ma’am,” said a cigarette-burned voice on the other end of the line, already bored with me. I hung up and kept staring upward, wondering how long Fat Boy could survive in a tree before he starved to death.

That was when my neighbor appeared, as if he’d been there the whole time. He stood a few yards away, barefoot, holding two books against his chest.

“I saw you from the window last night,” he said. “Looking for your cat.”

He handed me two limp, dusty comic books. “Give these to your daughters.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “My daughters don’t read. RIght now they’re hate-watching Barbie on my phone.”

“Then just burn them,” he said. “On that naughty stove of yours.”

He turned and walked back toward the red barn.

_____________________________________________________________________

When I wanted people to feel sorry for me, I told them we had to move upstate because I couldn’t afford Brooklyn anymore. But that wasn’t the whole truth.

We moved because of Fat Boy.

The pandemic rearranged everything so completely that it felt less like change than oblivion. One day I was the mayor of the mom-blogger industrial complex—hosting crib, high-chair, and baby-food activations across the internet, working every day out of a Soho coworking space with pink-painted walls and air plants, managing seven brand partnerships, and writing a quirky advice column about motherhood for Vogue. The next day I was trapped in my apartment with two children, an unopened mail pile, and a Raya account I never matched on, watching the city become abstract—sirens without destinations, neighbors without faces. The only thing that made sense to me then was a lemon tree a plant publicist sent me. It arrived in an Amazon box as a pale, brittle branch, barely alive. Six months later it produced a single lemon in the middle of an IKEA Pax wardrobe, glowing improbably against folded sweatpants and abandoned bras. That lemon may have been the most life-affirming accomplishment of my adult life.

Photo by Nataliya Melnychuk on Unsplash

Fat Boy came after.

Time lost its structure. My work evaporated. The apartment turned feral. The girls ate only Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Loops, and Frosted Flakes. Violet plowed through my shelf of sex-and-addiction bestsellers—Go Ask Alice, Scar Tissue, Flowers in the Attic—books I hadn’t offered her, but hadn’t intervened on either.

On Instagram, I performed desperate, gasping mom-blogger whimsy—cooking tutorials, DIY wallpaper trends, make your own paper flowers. Off camera I sexted with Ben Affleck on Raya while the girls watched Little House on the Prairie in mud masks. We never even joined a pod.

Because of all the sugar, Ruby developed terrible insomnia. In the middle of the night we ritualistically scrolled InternationalPussydotcom, a website where you could buy grey market exotic felines from Eastern Europe. The black cats had names like Lionel Richie and Obama. The white cats were called JonBenet Ramsey and Traci Lords. Mostly we fixated on one cat named Fat Boy. On the screen, Fat Boy was electric— teeny-tiny, eyes bright, paws alive, his whole body pulsing with energy. We watched him night after night from the glow of my phone. But when we picked him up at the airport, he arrived from Ukraine in a filthy crate, greasy and lethargic, his eyes dull, nothing like the animal we thought we knew.

The International Pussy trafficker was a former model named Marianna, dressed head to toe in black Chanel. She had blonde extensions and lips so chemically swollen they bulged behind her mask, plump and labial. We stood at baggage claim at JFK as she handed over the crate with the tiny kitten inside, her handler Ivan hovering nearby, three pagers clipped to his Z Cavaricci jeans. Fat Boy came with a passport and a pedigree certificate from the Dnipro Regional Feline Center, which claimed that his great-great-grandfather had been a purebred black Maine Coon named Biggie SmalZZ.

The next morning, the vet informed us that Fat Boy had juvenile gingivitis, tangled intestines, and a leaky, rancid anus. She charged me twenty-six hundred dollars for bloodwork while I sent Marianna a pleading text asking for my money back.She replied: Return policy is 24 hours only. You must present necrotic cat in person for inspection.

But Fat Boy did not die. He gained three pounds in three weeks. He ate all his food with enthusiasm and then moved on to ours—cannolis, pizza, bagels slicked with cream cheese. By the end of the pandemic he weighed twenty-four pounds and spent most of his time staring at the dogs in McCarren Park. Goldendoodles ran themselves into happiness, barking at nothing, collapsing, reviving, doing it again. Fat Boy watched as if trying to remember a life he’d almost had.

“He doesn’t like it here,” Ruby said.

That’s when we started scrolling through real estate in the Upstate.

_______________________________________

After Fat Boy came down from the tree, the girls didn’t want to leave his side, so I let them stay home from camp. Plus, their dad was coming to pick them up shortly. They put Fat Boy in a bonnet and painted his claws with a pearl-pink Essie shimmer called Lion Around, sitting cross-legged on the floor while Barbie played on repeat in the background. Fat Boy tolerated it with the exhausted dignity of someone who had survived a traumatic event and now understood his world was permanently altered.

I sat naked on the toilet while Barbie droned on in the background, and scrolled through an Instagram reel of New York mom bloggers doing a a J.Crew collaboration shot in a pastel barbershop–laundromat hybrid, — matching blowouts, straw bags, babies arranged with professional symmetry—while simultaneously googling:
Justin Fetherston 2022
“Is it cheaper to get an umbilicoplasty in Connecticut or Brazil?”
ancestral trauma
The Row Ginza slides — eBay offer status
Hilaria Baldwin net worth

Mostly I was trying to forget the fact that as soon as my daughters left to be with their dad, I went hollow. Terror-stricken. Convinced every man in the world was lunging toward them with boners and open trench coats and candy. Cadillacs waiting to take them to darkened cabins with dirty mattresses and no Wi-Fi.

The sky hung low and curdled, the color of spoiled cream. Nothing moved—not the trees, not the deer in the cemetery, not the breath trapped in my throat. The house smelled like caulk and old water, melted crayons, maybe something electrical giving up slowly—cords, wires, old. The air was wet with plaster dust. There was a low, permanent hum, like the ceiling was trying to speak.

Sean was early. Of course he was early. The floor was a maze of calico critters and laundry and half-finished bowls of beans. I hadn’t swept. I hadn’t changed. I was still wearing a nightgown smeared with last night’s chicken juice. Larry was hammering something into the wall with the kind of improbable rhythm. There was a buzz saw on the floor, tangled in cords like a dead octopus. Robyn had written her name in plaster dust on the hallway wall and then smeared it out with her palm. Dust still clung to the air, catching the afternoon light in golden streaks. Dennis’ framed pencil sketch sat on the floor near a stack of unopened kitchenware, absurd in its elegance. Sean tilted his head, peering down the hallway lined with boxes labeled KIDS BOOKS and MISC BATHROOM.

The silence hovered, hot and intimate.

I reached into the half-stocked fridge and held up a can. “Want a seltzer?”

“Sure.”

I tossed it to him. It hit his palm with a soft clap.

He stepped over a pile of tile samples like they insulted him personally. A look passed over his face—the kind of expression people get when they see a stray animal with mange. Pity shot through with disgust. I saw him cataloging it all: the mess, the disorder, the contradictions. The Vogue magazine next to the Red Bull can. The detritus of someone trying and failing to be several people at once. It was all clocked and filed in his brain, should he need to lay it out like forensics later on: the disorder as proof of my instability, reminiscent of my mother’s mental illness. He’d explain it to some smart, witty young woman on a Feeld date. “Her house is chaos,” he’d say, then rub his chin thoughtfully. The implication, of course: she never learned to clean up her own mess. People always do it for her.

The date would nod along while picking bones out of a gleaming branzino. In his version of the story, I wasn’t a woman trying to build a home for her daughters—I was a parasite wrapped in Jenni Kayne cardigans, draining him of his dignity, his creativity, his career and his money. He would tell the story the way he always did: the blue-collar Irish Catholic working man who built everything with his own two hands versus the spoiled Jewish American Princess who never earned a thing.

“Sorry to be so annoying,” I said. “I need the forms. For school.”

He ignored me.

“And the medical forms,” I continued. “For the asthma.”

“She doesn’t have asthma.”

“The doctor said it’s asthma.”

“It’s a cough.”

“We need to give the school permission to use the inhaler.”

“Why are you wearing a nightgown?”

“Everything’s in boxes, Sean.”

Right then, Larry floated past in a tutu and bunny ears, a cigarette hanging off his lip, blasting techno from his cracked phone. He was carrying what looked like a caulking gun and a spatula.

Sean blinked. “Who the fuck is that?”

“My contractor.”

Sean laughed—not with amusement, but with contempt. “Didn’t you date him back in Brooklyn?” He bent down by the porch and picked up the comic books that the old man had given me the night before, before turning it over in his hand like it might still bite him.

“Where did these come from?” he said.

I gestured across the street, where my neighbor was trying to open one of our joint garbage cans, a rolled-up New Yorker clenched between his teeth.

“My neighbor,” I said.

I crouched to peel two tiny socks apart. Still damp.

“These are first editions,” Sean said, almost reverent. “They’re literally worth thousands of dollars.”

“Cool,” I said, barely glancing up.

“Who gave this to you?” His voice had that edge now—the one that meant you hadn’t just done something dumb, you were being dumb.

“I told you. My neighbor.”

I waved toward the garbage cans again. Sean looked out the window. Then wiped his eyes. Looked again. Then sighed slowly.

“That’s your neighbor?”

“Yes, Sean. That ugly old man. He lives across the red barn or whatever.”

Instead, Sean set the book down carefully, like it might shatter, then sat heavily on a box, Crocs and socks on full display, shaking his head.

“Do you have any idea who that is?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the laundry. When I was going to get my period again. Whether I had enough oat milk for breakfast. If Max knew to run from a predator offering Bazooka bubble gum.

Sean sighed again.

“That,” he said, tapping the cover with the flat of his hand, “is Edgar Katz. Only the most important science fiction writer of our time.”

He looked up at me, waiting.

“You really didn’t know?”

“I’m not sure where we’re going with this,” I said weakly.

He sighed.

“You live across the street from a god,” he said. “Literally, the most important science fiction writer of our time.”

“I don’t read science fiction,” I offered.

Sean’s eyes darted to the Vogue magazine slumped in the chair, its pages curled like dead leaves.

“This guy invented dystopia. Techno-fear. Questions about memory and reality and time. Without him, there’s no Matrix, no Black Mirror, no Philip K. Dick, no Neuromancer, no fucking Inception.”

He shook his head again, almost laughing at how impossible I was.

“He basically invented the language we use now to talk about living online. About living anywhere.” I nodded like I understood. Like I cared. But I didn’t. I cared about the laundry getting done before the mildew set in. Whether I’d be able to light the stove on my own. Whether Violet was too young for Pardon My Period by Jessica Biel.

“I’d be psyched if it my neighbor was Gwyneth Paltrow,” I said. Kind of joking.

Sean didn’t laugh.

“You’re a real piece of work,” he muttered.

Fifteen years ago, that phrase meant you’re the most intricate and beguiling young woman in all of Williamsburg. Now it just meant: you’re literally retarded. I pictured him later, telling a new date over sautéed tempeh: She honestly said—dead serious—that she’d only be excited if Gwyneth Paltrow was her neighbor. The date, dewy and full of collagen, nodding her head excitedly, thrilled to be involved in this exciting triangulation.

I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to say I was special. That I’d once been a very successful mom blogger. That in 2015 I’d been on the cover of a diaper trade magazine in Las Vegas for inventing a viral hashtag about placenta. That I could have been someone—truly—if I hadn’t placed myself in the crosshairs of my father’s shame or my mothers depression, or attached myself like a barnacle to men I believed were better than me.

But I didn’t say any of it.

I still wanted him to stay for dinner.

“Do you want to do the forms over dinner?” I asked. “I’m making steak.”

“I have plans.”

Of course he did. With some amazing women who was younger and much hotter than me.

“No prob,” I said, praying he didn’t see the sadness. How huge it was. How much bigger it became the longer he stood there.

Then the girls came bursting downstairs—barefoot, sweaty, loud. Rubyhad a carved stick she was calling her forest staff. Violet was screaming about a bead.

“It was green!” she howled. “Like a sad pea!”

Backpacks hit the floor like threats.

“She took my bracelet!”

“She broke it!”

“She said I look like a sandwich!”

“Can we just do one thing at a time?” I said, holding up a sock.

They didn’t hear me. They were already gone, slipping into him like a coat.

He moved quickly—found the missing shoe, zipped the backpack, tied the ribbon in their hair. Kissed their heads without being asked. He was a good dad. A terrible husband. A revolting human being. It would’ve been easier if he hit them—if there were bruises to point to, a clean line between good and evil. But no. He gave them his whole heart. And his heart, when aimed at our daughters, was big and bright as the sun.

He opened the front door. Heat rushed in again—humid, insect-thick. The girls filed out, still mid-argument.

“Mommy?” Ruby turned back, her voice small.

“Do you think Wanda knows about space?” Ruby asked. “Like… space space?”

“Probably,” I said. “She knows most things.”

The door opened wider. Gravel crunched. Sean turned to go.

“Sean—”

He didn’t stop.

“Please do the forms!”

He rolled his eyes—wide, slow—said nothing. Just left.

The door shut. The house inhaled. Larry pounded something in the other room.

Fat Boy appeared at the top of the stairs, still wearing the bonnet, his freshly lacquered claws catching the light. He paused, assessed the situation, and paddled down with purpose. I opened the door just in time to watch him bolt across the yard, single-minded, bonnet flapping, in search of a rabbit to murder.

I already pictured the Facebook Post on the Upstate Neighbor Watch Group later that night: Hello friends, this afternoon I witnessed yet another city transplant’s orange-presentingcat of Eastern European origin stalking our beloved native wildlife — this time, a delicatewoodpecker and two chipmunks. Let me remind you we are merely borrowing this Lenape land. These animals are part of our delicate ecosystem. Please, for the love of biodiversity and collective respect, keep your cats indoors or bell them. This isn’t Brooklyn. In Light and Love.

Thanks for reading! Sign up for my winter 2026 Creative Writing Workshops — Writing The Truth and How To Start A Substack with Jessica DeFino start in January. xx