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An Egyptian Goddess named Pickles

An orange tabby named Pickles started the apocalypse.

The feline was a walking disaster. She moved like a slinky with legs. Her belly bumped up, down, and then she’d tumble down every available surface like a cheerleader after one too many jello shots. Vases, mason jars filled with dank paint water, tiny glass figurines- If I could get insurance for a cat that wasn’t mine, I’d be able to move out within a fortnight.

She lounged on my ratty red sofa like an Egyptian goddess with her mismatched eyes staring dejectedly into the void as I set about making lunch.

My gaze roamed to my nails as I cut a few carrots from the Quickie Mart into gangly sticks for a side dish not covered in mayonnaise.

They were short, blunt, and devoid of anything stereotypically delicate. A working gal’s hands are what my grandmother would have said.

She had been a pianist, and my mother was an attorney.

Me? I skipped out on the family gift of skill or academic tact and dropped out of college to pursue art.

Adora Blithe, debt enshrined Millennial and starving artist. Being a part of the biggest financially slighted generation of the modern age means several things. Firstly? I was renting a spare bedroom above a Chinese restaurant.

Not an apartment.

A spare bedroom.

I showered at the YMCA, and I ate out almost every meal, alternating between the golden arches and the local pizza parlor, Castillos, where I worked.

An insistent meow echoed over the countertop as a fluffy orange paw batted over the edge.

Pickles did that sometimes.

It signaled her daily pilgrimage from the sofa by the window to my bed for a better sunning spot. You’re probably wondering why my kitchen counter was next to my bed, and I will remind you:

I was renting a bedroom.

The counter wobbled on its perch against the filing cabinet and the mini-fridge. My hand snapped out to grab the art supplies sitting too close to the edge.

The Posca pens and tubes of acrylic medium rolled into the plastic basket I used for my supplies with satisfying thunks. I dusted my hands off on my pants and moved the rest of my workspace, so I had a place to eat.

Next to the sandwich and carrot sticks, there was one large painting I’d been fussing over for weeks.

At the time, Gustav Klimt’s work had held a literal chokehold on me, and the color teal was incorporated everywhere, from my initial sketches to the little oven-bake clay sculptures on my window seal depicting odd birds in various poses.

There was an irony, perhaps, in the almost otherworldly bird tangled amongst the thorns of that canvas.

Teal was the only color I splurged on outside the standard five-color set of blue, red, yellow, white, and black. It’s not that I can’t mix my own hues. It’s just that the mica powder in that tube had the most beautiful light blue undertones.

It shimmered exactly like the birds’ plumage the color was named for.

Pickles apparently didn’t care for my brief deluge into saving my art supplies and pounced onto the hardiboard slab acting as my counter. Brushes fanned and splayed into the air, water cups spilled, and the counter toppled forward with the sudden weight shift.

My sandwich and the painting flew in opposing directions.

I’m stupid because I dove to save the painting, and Pickles? She rather triumphantly took my sandwich in her little fanged maw.

She landed on the painting first and dug her claws into the canvas to launch herself onto my head and then down my back. A gloop of bright teal paint and half dried copper foil dripped from my hair to fall just between my eyebrows.

A $5-an-hour cat had just demolished days of work in a nanosecond. My shoulders slumped dejectedly, and I chanced a glimpse at the painting.

Her claw marks had raked straight through the wolf’s eyes to give an eerie and perhaps hollow afterimage. Shredded blue lay at the bottom of the canvas like fallen leaves. It was almost otherworldly how perfectly a gluttonous cat launching herself after a tuna sandwich had orchestrated the damage.

I stared at it for a moment, disturbed and entranced.

It didn’t look like something I had painted anymore. It’s as if some unseen force had picked up a brush, tilted the canvas, and finished where I had left off with the exact opposite intentions.

The door creaking open behind me startled me from my musings. I had unlocked it that morning to grab my mail from the hallway, but Mr. Alvarez kept the downstairs door leading to the kitchen unlocked so staff and employees could get to the storage closet across from my room and-

And that is about when I realized Pickles was nowhere in sight.

Thus, a $5 problem feline was about to turn into a potential lawsuit if the elderly woman I was cat-sitting for got wind of her getting hit or catnapped.

Mrs. Mayberry had never been one for generosity, and her hourly payment for Pickles directly reflected that.

It took a few moments for my brain to process that Pickles had bolted through the gap before I was speeding to the door. I snagged my backpack from the coat rack on the way out and scrambled for the stairs. The aged cedar creaked under my sneakers, uttering harsh sighs with every footfall I made against them and their brethren. ~

Her smug tiger-striped tail turned a few feet ahead of me and sunk into the ajar gap leading to the fire exit an employee was elbowing open to carry in a crate. My fingers snapped around the handle the moment the flustered worker was through, and I swung it wide before leaping over the singular step leading into the alley. My sneakers skidded against the asphalt.

Pickles startled only a foot ahead of me, and I tripped over my shoelaces as I attempted to scruff her up by her fuchsia collar. The tags briefly jangled against my fingertips before she zipped into the street. A car zoomed past with a thunderous honk—the noise spurred Pickles into bolting further away from me.

I gave chase, but I had never exactly been a track star. I could do push-ups and sit-ups, but stamina wasn’t my strong suit. We passed four or five shops and the 7/11 tucked on the corner. I slammed into three rusted and graffiti-splattered metal garbage cans as I pulled my other backpack strap over my arm to climb the chain-link fence Pickles had slinked under.

I flopped over it and panted for a breath before looking up to spot the demented little fiend preening next to the flower shop. She licked her paw smugly, and those mismatched eyes gazed at me with what could only be described as amusement. “Okay, you Cheshire Cat wannabe. Come here.” I beckoned with both hands, practically pleading. “Come on, Pickles!”

A cyclist and a young couple looked at me like I was utterly bonkers. Given I was covered in paint, had my hair messed up in every direction possible, and was standing with both my legs spread like a Clint Eastwood cosplayer, they probably were assuming I was some sort of crack goblin that had slithered out from the alleyway.

In hindsight? The fact I was calling out for ‘Pickles’ probably wasn’t helping my case.

Pickles debated my offer, mulled it over, and then promptly turned her tail to me to barrel down the sidewalk with all the vigor of the last chase.

The scent of roses and baby’s breath followed me as I passed the flower shop in pursuit of her. “Pickles! Stop!”

She ran faster and turned another corner near an antique shop that had gone out of business two years prior. I skidded and nearly staggered into the street, trying to keep up with Pickles. I just barely made the turn-

A shout echoed above me, “WATCH OUT!”

My eyes snapped to the source and thus the two guys who had been moving a large antique mirror from the third-story balcony.

The mirror spun like a coin through the air to spray light all over the street.

My feet were frozen in place, incapable of so much as inching me away from certain doom.

I can just picture the headstone:

Adora Elaine Blithe, 1998-2024

Death by an ironic case of self-reflection and Pickles.

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