Page 1 of Accidentally Vital

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Tabby

"There you are," I said, my voice low, the same three notes I'd been singing into the bottom of the cage for twenty minutes. "There you are, you terrible, terrible boy. Nobody's going to touch you. I promise."

The cat in the back of the cage didn't believe me.

He was a big orange tom, eleven pounds of him gone hard and flat against the steel. Every muscle he had was committed to the idea that I was the worst luck that had ever befallen him. His ears were pinned so far back they'd disappeared into his fur. His pupils had swallowed the gold of his eyes. His tail wasn't lashing anymore, which was the part that scared everyone else and reassured me. A lashing tail is a cat who's still arguing. A tail clamped tight to the body is a cat who's stopped arguing and started bargaining with death.

His chart said FRACTIOUS in red marker, underlined twice, and below that, in smaller letters, euth consult scheduled 4:30.

It was ten minutes to four.

"They wrote you off," I told him. I kept my eyes soft, kept them moving past him instead of into him, because a stare is a threat in every language a cat speaks. "I read it. I know. They think you can't be handled, so you can't be homed, so..." I let the sentence go nowhere. The words didn't matter. The cadence mattered. The promise underneath the words was that I was the most boring object in that little room and I would never, ever rush him.

His name on the intake was Mango. Somebody's surrender, three days ago, with a note that said got mean. Cats don't get mean. Cats get frightened, and then they get cornered. Then the only tool they have left is the one nature bolted into their face, and we punish them for using it. Eleven years I'd been doing this, and I had never once met a mean cat. I'd met a great many terrified ones who'd run clean out of better options.

I sat back on my heels on the clinic floor and looked at the wall instead of at him.

That was the trick nobody put on a résumé. You make yourself smaller and slower and more sideways than the scared animal expects. You wait, and you wait past the point where it feels productive. You wait past the point where the doctor sticks her head in to ask if you've gotten anywhere. And you keep waiting, until the animal's own body gets tired of being a clenched fist. Bodies can't hold red-alert forever. Not his, not mine. Biology runs out of adrenaline eventually, and somebody has to be there, calm and dull and patient, when it does.

It costs something, being that somebody. Nobody tells you that part. You spend yourself out a teaspoon at a time on creatures who will never know your name. You go home emptied, and you do it again the next day. I'd stopped keeping a cat of my own years back. I told people it was the hours. The truth was that I gave it all away at work and had none left to carry through my own front door. Somewhere in there I'd quietly decided that was a fair trade, or at least a settled one.

I blinked at the wall, slow and deliberate. Then I let my eyes drift halfway toward the cage and blinked again, slower.

It's the nearest a cat comes to saying I love you. A slow blink is one animal telling another, I trust you enough to close my eyes near you. You give it away for free, over and over. Most of the time you get nothing back, and you do it anyway because eventually—

Mango blinked.

Once. Heavy-lidded, grudging, more flinch than affection. But his second eyelid came halfway across, and his ears lifted a single degree off his skull. The win lodged somewhere behind my sternum, one more that would never go in anybody's file.

"Okay," I breathed. "Okay. Good talk."

I didn't reach for him. Reaching was twenty minutes away, minimum, and the towel was still folded on the floor where he could see it and learn it was nothing. The burrito wrap that everyone thinks looks cruel, and that every cat I'd ever wrapped went quiet inside of. Because pressure is the opposite of falling, because a snug boundary tells a panicking body where it ends and the danger stops. I would get there. I had until half past four, and I was going to get there with eighteen minutes to spare. Mango was going to ride to a foster in a carrier instead of out the back door in a bag. Nobody in the building was going to know how close it had been.

That was the job. You do the hardest work in the room, and you do it so well that it looks like nothing happened at all.

The door opened.

Not all the way — Dr. Pruitt knew better than to bang into a fear case, I'll give him that much — but enough to change the light. Mango went straight back to flat steel and pinned ears and gone-black eyes, twenty minutes of my afternoon emptying out of him in half a second.

"Tabby." Pruitt kept his voice down, which from him counted as a courtesy. "Still at it? The owner called back. Said if it's truly unmanageable, they understand, they just don't want it to suffer."

"He's not unmanageable." I didn't turn around. Turning around meant taking my body language off the cat, and the cat needed every dull, sideways inch of me I had. "He's frightened. There's a difference."

"It's been an hour."

"It's been forty minutes, and he just gave me a blink." I heard how that sounded, in the quiet behind me. How small. A blink. Eight days, once, for a blink. Last month I'd brought a feral back from the same ledge this one was standing on. The discharge notes had thanked Dr. Halloran for her exceptional patience with a difficult case. I wasn't in the notes. I was never in the notes. The patience had been mine, every cold hour of it on every cold floor. It walked out the door with somebody else's name on it. I'd smiled and restocked the suture cart.

"Listen." Pruitt's voice gentled, which was almost worse. "You've got a gift, nobody's saying you don't. But we can't bill an hour of staff time to a surrender that's getting euthanized at half past. If he comes around, great. But Dr. Halloran wants the room turned for the dental."

There it was. A gift. The word they reached for so they'd never have to reach for skill, because skill is something a person trains for years and bills by the hour. A gift is something that just falls out of you, free, no charge, no credit.

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I kept them on the wall — for the cat.

"Give me twelve more minutes," I said.

"Tabby—"