wandering association

[WT]

Apocope is a cat person.

The quiet mutt tilting her head at him from across the alley doesn't seem to care.

He's seen her before, usually on his way to the woods, but she used to vanish in a flash of cream fluff as soon as she spotted him. Stray dogs move in and out all the time, and the ones who only stick around for a few heartbeats are easier to deal with than the ones who claim half a block and growl when anyone gets too close, so he didn't bother to think much of her. Lately, though, she's taken to lingering, sometimes even following him for a while with an easy gait and curious eyes. And Apocope may be a cat person, but he'll take a friend where he finds one.

Friendship, so far, has mostly consisted of him gently tossing her whatever scraps he can sneak away from dinner and grinning as she inspects them, snaps them up, and wags her tail. He thinks that counts. Moving too quickly still startles her off, but she doesn't seem to mind that he lets the food land a little closer to him every time.

This evening's smoked sausage is a winner; she grabs one piece directly out of the air and doesn't so much as flinch when he laughs out loud. That, as much as their proximity, encourages him to reach out with his free hand, holding it as still as he can as he tosses another piece of sausage closer than ever. She comes for it slowly, but she comes for it, then whuffles gently at the back of his hand. He twists the other in his sweater, fighting the instinct to wrench his arm back as her whiskers tickle him.

"I'm Apocope," he whispers for nearly the first time as she leans down to sniff at his knees, willing his voice to stay steady with his hands. "Maybe. I'm kind of thinking about it."

When she looks back up, he reaches for the edge of darker fur around her closer ear, but stills and yanks his line of sight to the side when that makes her duck back. For a long, breathless moment he's sure she's going to take off again, but she settles, and when he tries again with her shoulder she holds still. "Okay," he says even more softly, "okay. Yeah. Not the head."

They sit like that for another anxious moment, his heart pounding and her gazing at him inscrutably from the corner of his vision, before he risks looking back and sinking his hand a little further into her thick fur. Under the ragged top layer, she's both softer and more solid than he expected. "You need a brush more than free food, huh?" he asks, laughing a little. "Maybe later. If you decide you're okay with that while I'm still here."

Unconcerned, she stretches under his hand to sniff at his lap, where the last few slices of sausage are still half-wrapped in the napkin he smuggled them in. He considers, then chickens out of, offering her the next piece on his palm, setting it between them instead. She grabs it without pulling away from his hand; this time, when she wags her tail, he can feel the way it shifts her whole body.

Sal is the dog person in the family. When they were younger, roughly back when Apocope still scribbled mountain lions in the margins of his schoolwork, she begged for one constantly. (She insisted on calling it debating, because even then she cared way too much about being taken seriously, but Apocope remembers her as a child. It was begging.) Their parents always let her down as gently as they could, with talk about the money and the long hours with no one at home, and she gave up eventually, but she never stopped looking at dogs around town a little wistfully. Part of Apocope feels like he should offer to introduce her, once this one trusts him a little more. It might make her happy, and Sal isn't happy—really happy—any more often than he is, these days.

A bigger part of him wants to keep this tiny slice of life to himself, at least for now. She's not his, exactly, but she's not anyone else's, either. She's a secret he doesn't have to feel ashamed of.

"I'm gonna call you Dog, if that's okay," he says, half to distract himself. "I don't know if you already have a name, but I gotta call you something."

Dog, predictably, gives no indication whether she cares one way or another, but thumps her tail when he tries scratching her shoulder. He laughs again, and decides that's good enough.



sometimes you owe two posts, and when you sit down to write what makes it to the page is an unrelated self-indulgent oneshot in which the character you planned to someday give a cat adopts himself to a dog ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

title song is "Animal Life" by Shearwater.