The Day X Got Promoted  

It was a big promotion, too. Not just up by M or the front hook of the J. This promotion put him right after D. A-B-C-D-X-E. Sounds pretty good, The Council agreed after lengthy deliberation. There hadn’t been a letter promotion in hundreds of years, since E moved up five spaces, to spread the vowels.

“X deserves this honor,” The Council read in unison from their official scroll at the Centennial Alphabet Banquet. X stood up and bowed from his intersected waist. V glared with widespread eyes from a back table. D smiled from the seat next to him, tired of having E’s back to him all the time.

“X has long lived a word-limited existence,” the eldest council member orated from the podium. “‘X-ray’ and ‘xylophone’ do not a letter make.” And so to X, as part of his promotion, The Council added the words xelargen (a person who uses a magnifying glass), Xgiving (granting Thanksgiving a shortened holiday name, like Xmas), and xestify (to impart vigorous testimony). X was proud of his new words, which The Council had shown him before the banquet, as someone powdered his points.

V and X had battled bitterly for this promotion. In the end it was decided that V really belonged next to U, with their similar shapes. But X had always held the advantage. He was a box-filler, a train’s crossing, he marked the spot.

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Domestication

The cat marched in the back door knocked up and unashamed. I knew she was knocked up even though she didn’t show her knocked-up-ness yet. It was a feeling. Her name was Tarzan.

Before she came home from that wild night – the night before the morning I found the lily bed in shreds – she’d been a cautious, futile cat with fish breath. I’d swooped her up from a box marked “free” outside the Maxi Mart and my mother had just nodded, loaded down with jug wine and soup cans.

The cat had a black leather collar with silver pointy studs because we’d bought the collar after we’d named her but before we realized she was more of a Jane. Pink salmon and 9-Lives chicken with kibbles were her favorite scores. During her pregnancy, she craved warm milk, raw hamburger, and a few odd things we couldn’t predict, like when I was flattened by bronchitis and she licked the Vick’s Vaporub off my chest where my mother had insisted I rub it, like I was six instead of seventeen. Tarzan’s tongue was like a #2 emery board. When she’d looked like she’d swallowed a keg; we knew it’d be any day now.

Tarzan was missing the morning after I was out late with Kenny. We’d been screwing in the backseat of his mom’s Pinto at our usual spot on Rocky Butte, using a condom so as not to end up like the cat. When I woke up after nine, she wasn’t curled in her usual position on the kitchen chair.

Even telling me sober the next morning, it still made sense to my mother that she’d insisted Tarzan spend the night outside. Baby kittens being born before our eyes was too graphic for her. She’d made me use the word “expecting” instead of “pregnant.” She and my father slept in twin beds before he moved to Vegas for good.

Tarzan returned three days later, slimmed down. “See!” My mother, partly sober, listing towards the right jamb of the back porch door. “Animals protect their young. She’ll show us.” She gestured wide with her left arm, like she was Marlon Perkins leading us through the animal kingdom. My mother was correct, Tarzan led us to her kittens. Still, I couldn’t help thinking the cat would have rather claimed birth in a warm house than hunkered under a box hedge at the neighbors during three days of rain.

The carton we took said “dry gin” on the sides and we lined it with a shredded doll’s blanket. In each corner, we placed a kitten and Tarzan insisted on getting in the box too. I carried the box to my room. My mother kept to her usual spot at the kitchen table, watching Jeopardy! and swilling screw-cap rosé.

When the kittens opened their eyes, I cut down the short end of the box. They squinted towards the daylight and bumped into bed and chair legs. After walking around in the morning they padded back to the pink blanket and slept together like a row of four logs. They liked the world with their eyes closed.