I’m gonna kill these goddamn cats, I typed into the title section of a Craigslist ad in the Pets section as I sat in my backyard. I am not really going to kill the cats. But if you’ve gotten this far, please consider adopting one of my 25 cats.
As a gentle breeze blew the faint ammoniac odor of cat piss across my face, tufts of cat hair floated in the July sun like pollen, I hung my head and sobbed. I wished I really could kill the cats, vaporize them or launch them into outer space. Instead, I sentenced myself to a Sisyphean mission: in a city so overrun with cats they seemed an invasive species, I wanted to ensure each one was adopted into a doting and affectionate home.
I took three pictures of my big plastic picnic table, swarmed with cats gorging themselves on the wet brown lumps of food soaking through white paper plates. I took the pictures from afar, to render invisible the army of flies humming around my crude feeding station. I uploaded the pictures to my post and published my ad.
The following morning, I saw three responses in my inbox. Smiling, I clicked the first email.
How about if I come over there and fucking kill you?? It read. Quicky, I closed it out and read another from someone who somehow obtained my full name and address: I’m coming over to teach you a lesson.
Hands sweating, I drilled my fingers into the phone screen like tiny hammers: Please, come over and kill me.
The last response seemed to provide hope, but very little else: Hilarious ad! I feel so bad for you; good luck!
With every day that passed without a response I grew more fraught. I called every animal sanctuary in a 100 mile radius, and spoke to similarly hyper fixated women obsessed with the same Sisyphean task of ‘saving them all.’ Every voice sounded brittle and drained, and a little like they were rolling their eyes at me, like didn’t I realize I’d condemned myself to cat servitude, too? They suggested I bring the cats to the shelter, where they’d be given three days to get adopted before they were euthanized.
A week after receiving the email wishing me good luck, I opened an email from someone who wanted my one-eyed cat for her father. He’s so quirky! She wrote. Waiting for her to come to my house to pick the cat up, I was suspicious that she’d arrive, regret her decision and abruptly leave. But she just thanked me and took the cat in a crate she’d brought herself -- which I found responsible, a good omen that the cat would be safe with her. A few hours later, she texted me an image of the cat sleeping in her father’s lap, probably just as relieved as me.
But two months later, in September, I had only found homes for five cats, with twenty remaining. At the rate of 2-3 cats a month, it would take another 9-10 months before I might be able to live cat free, and for my garden to smell rosemary and lavender again.
Because they were destroying the inside of the house, I’d forced all the cats to live in the yard. When they weren’t lounging peacefully in the sun, they dug holes around the herbs I’d planted and shit on the lilies and clematis. I feared I might die too, surrounded by a herd of cats and buried under mountains of shit. I hoped that by getting these cats adopted, I could focus on repairing my own disordered life.
In a moment of desperation, an idea struck: if I left the door from the yard to the street ajar overnight, the cats would leave on their own. This simple plan would exonerate me from the responsibility of cat care while assuaging my guilt; I could tell myself the cats had agency and chose to leave. To bolster my audacity, I got drunk, propped the door open with a brick, and went to bed.
The next morning, I woke up excited to take stock of my reduced herd of cats. I opened the door to the yard and faced twenty cats sitting on the deck, staring at me. I immediately turned and went back inside. Clawing at the window, screaming, was Millie–a typically independent cat who caused the least amount of problems. When I let her in, she screamed to be let back out.
After recognizing that these cats weren’t going to leave on their own, I went hard reposting the ad.
In October, I received an email from a woman who was interested in a scrawny red demon who yowled and fought with the other cats all night, keeping me awake. Thrilled by her choice, I put the crate in the back of my car. I drove the cat to the woman’s apartment in Queens, an hour away from me.
Fifteen minutes away from her apartment, in standstill traffic, I smelled the scent of my nightmares. As soon as I got off the BQE, I pulled over. Peering into the crate, I saw the cat had shit in its crate and stepped in it.
I didn’t know where the nearest store was, and worried that if I were late, this woman would change her mind. Because I was desperate for her to take him, I didn’t think to text her. Had I thought to, I wouldn’t have done what I did.
I searched my glove compartment and center console for a towel or wet wipes. I found only a handful of diner napkins and a two day old cup of black coffee in my cup holder. I dipped the napkins in old coffee and sponge bathed the cat.
When I was done, I rushed the remaining blocks to her apartment. She opened her door and blocked the entrance with her body. My husband is asleep, she said without greeting me. It was 2pm and dark inside except for the television spilling into the hall; I heard a true crime docuseries blaring at high volume. Had I come at a bad time? We stared at one another for a moment, like standing in front of a mirror. I was a distraught, awkward lady who didn’t want a cat and she was a flustered, awkward lady who did. I didn’t know what she wanted from me. But then she asked: can you just let it out?
I positioned the crate facing into her apartment and opened the door. The cat shot out and disappeared down her flickering blue hallway.
Five minutes after I left, she texted me a picture of the cat from the back, facing the wall with the caption, beautiful cat.
The following month, after adopting out four more cats without incident (leaving 15), I received an email from a man who wanted to adopt a cat for his girlfriend. He chose a territorial cat who I witnessed pissing on my stove, on the walls of my apartment. I knew that once this cat was the only cat in someone’s home, it would stop marking its territory. But in my apartment, this cat looked me in the eye and sprayed a steaming hot stream of piss onto a pile of my clean laundry. I was thrilled at the prospect of unloading him.
The cat had long, fluffy orange hair, now coarse and matted from living in the yard. His cat dreadlocks were invisible from the distant images I’d posted, but I couldn’t bring the cat to this guy reeking of pee and coated in grime. I couldn’t lose time -- what if the guy found another cat while I waited for a grooming appointment? I drove to Pet Smart and bought a $30 buzzer. Leaving the cat’s fluffy tail and head intact, I buzzed its rest hair off. He looked like he’d been singed in a fire; his hair was patchy and uneven like a desert landscape seen from an airplane, the pink skin showing through in random areas.
After driving two hours to the man’s apartment in New Jersey, I arrived. His shelves were decorated with picture frames, the stock pictures of model couples still in them, as if pictures of himself and his girlfriend somehow couldn’t live up to the bliss and perfection depicted in fake matrimonies. I opened the door to the crate and released the cat. Bald and frightened, it darted under the man’s couch. Oh, he’s different than the pictures, the man said, he’s ugly. My girlfriend won’t like it, he said quickly, I don’t want him. I tried to think of a good sales pitch, something to make him change his mind. The hair will grow back, I pleaded.
As much as I didn’t want the cat, my concern for its safety overpowered my hatred. I stuck my arm under the couch to grab the cat and it shot out in a blur, hiding beneath another piece of furniture. I hunted the cat in his apartment, flushed with anger and sweating. The cat ran from beneath one item to another and back again. Um, the guy said as he watched me lunge after it, arms dangling at his sides, I’m sorry?
I didn’t respond. I snuck up sideways and shot my arm out under the couch. I seized the cat by the scruff of its neck. As I stuffed the clawing animal back into the crate, he stood over me and watched. Before the cat struggled out again, I slammed the hatch door shut and stormed out of his apartment, the crate shaking in my hands as the cat slammed itself against the walls, howling.
As fall turned to winter, I imagined the cat shit in the yard would freeze, canceling the stench. I prepared a plywood cat hotel for the remaining 15 cats, outfitted with fifteen cubbyholes and each hole fitted with an electric heating pad. The cats shit on the heating pads inside their cat mansion and then shit on the shit of the other cats. It baked gently atop the pads, and the smell wafted through barren frost covered yard.
By spring, I’d made progress and had five cats left. No one had expressed interest in Millie who, by now, figured out how to scale the side of the house using an elaborate series of agile leaps from one tiny ledge to another, and to escape into the street even when the door was closed. I found her lack of need for me endearing and liberating; she returned on her own accord.
I thought Millie was overlooked because of her generic tabby cat appearance; after the NJ incident, the shaved cat was quickly adopted by a family who found his bald ugliness cute. My cats with unique, dopey faces were adopted by people who believed they had ‘character.’ I accepted that Millie had not been voted off the island. She moved carelessly through the morning glory vines and lie squinting in the sun.
In April the following year, The ice lying over the wet brown dirt in the yard thawed and revealed a million tiny mountains of cat shit. I peeled them up from the earth like mollusks, stuck there, making little wet sucking noises as they came loose from the ground. I dropped them in a garbage bag like coins; the bag grew heavy with the shit of twenty adopted cats.
A few weeks before I was able to get the last few adopted, a neighbor knocked on my door and told me one of my cats had been hit by a car. Someone on the block called sanitation to come peel them off the pavement and toss them into the garbage truck, they said, but maybe I wanted to bury them in the yard instead.
I walked outside, hoping it wasn’t Millie. I saw her striped body lying sideways on the pavement. She appeared asleep, stretched out and content. I approached and lifted her into my hands, still warm, limp and vacant. I carried her inside and placed her down on the dirt. By then the yard smelled of clematis and hibiscus. I could smell the lilies–flowers my mother hated because, ironically, she said they smelled like cat pee. I dug a hole four times deeper than it needed to be, and buried her beside the raised flower bed I’d built, beneath a jacob’s ladder with tiny blue flowers. I placed a heavy stone atop the spot where her body lay, the scent of life marking her little grave.
RIP Millie 🤘🏼🐈
Another masterpiece