Blue Cat
Date
Category
Stories
by Joel Waldrep
The city keeps a different kind of time after midnight.
Rain came down softly, almost politely, gathering in the gutters and running silver along the curb. The streetlights trembled in the puddles. Somewhere behind the brick, a radio played low enough to be mistaken for plumbing. Cars passed in slow bursts of white and red, carrying pieces of other lives through the wet dark. Above it all, the blue cat burned quietly from the wall, watching everything and nothing.
There are hours when a city seems to belong to nobody. The storefronts are dark. The offices have gone black floor by floor. A man disappears beneath an awning. A woman crosses the street with her coat pulled tight. Somewhere a bottle breaks, somewhere a door opens, somewhere a train moves through the distance with that long metallic sigh. The rain keeps falling. The blue cat keeps watching. For a moment, the whole city feels suspended between one thing and the next.
Then the night begins to loosen. Not enough to call it morning. Just enough for the shadows to change their shape. The blue light stretches across the pavement and breaks apart beneath your feet. You follow it down the block, past the dark windows and the sleeping buildings, with no particular place to go. Behind you, the cat remains glowing in the rain. Ahead, the street disappears into blue.