Perception Spring 2023

those porch steps. Ella was sure she looked bored or distraught.
Passerbys probably thought she’d had her heart broken or her night
ruined. Ella’s nights were rarely ruined, although sometimes they
were. Normally, they weren’t terrible, only forgettable. They all looked
the same: a street of dark, sleeping houses interrupted by one
house’s enthusiasm. A blue-black sky polluted by suburban light. A
subtle escape to somewhere eerie yet placid. The moment would
cease to exist once it passed, so she tried to soak in it. There were
only a few stars out and one bright planet. She could feel the music’s
rhythmic thumping like a distant storm. It was better that way.
“Alice.”
Ella raised her eyes to the smoking boy.
“From Alice in Wonderland,” he continued, exhaling smoke.
He was looking at her now. Ella looked back but only in flickers.
Mostly, she looked at everything around him. She looked at the
smoke.
“Yes,” Ella replied and smiled, very faintly. The smile startled
her. Why did she smile? She hadn’t meant to smile. She hadn’t felt
the smile bubbling in her chest or rising up her throat. Ella realized
she was not smiling about something, but instead was smiling for
something. The smile had an agenda. It came to fill the awkward
pockets of uncertainty that fill a conversation between two people
who don’t particularly want to speak to each other. So why do they
speak to each other? Maybe he felt compelled to address her. Maybe
it was the silence. But the smile, that gesture came inadvertently but
not naturally. The smile came to accentuate her blue puffed-sleeve
dress and white pinafore, only she hadn’t realized when she was
putting it on like a performance. Although, she couldn’t really take a
performance off or put it on. It wasn’t exactly a costume, but a fact of
having a body. It was like skin. “What are you?”
“It’s up for interpretation,” he answered. He was just wearing
jeans.
“Then you’re the caterpillar,” Ella decided. “The one that’s
tripping balls.”
He almost smiled. Ella liked his almost-smile. It made him
look human.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “The one that’s tripping balls.”
The caterpillar boy put out his cigarette on the tree. He
twisted the ashy stub against the bark. He flicked it onto the porch
where it couldn’t technically qualify as litter and crossed the street.
It took another half an hour for her friends to decide it was
time to leave. On the way home, Ella sat in the very back row of the
Uber driver’s seat staring out the window. Some kids her age were
walking home. It was late and they walked in groups with their bare
skin flushed pink and their hunched shoulders quivering. By the time
Ella heaved herself through her front door, it was nearly 3 am.
Her cat sat halfway up the stairs, staring.
Ella sighed and said, “You are very lucky you aren’t human.”
The cat didn’t respond. But she knew, Ella thought. The
cat followed her up the stairs to the bedroom. Ella peeled off her
everything. She didn’t bother with putting the clothes in the hamper
so the dress sat like a puddle on the floor. Ella sunk beneath her
blankets while the cat hopped onto the bed next to her. Ella had
been waiting all night for this. She and the cat stared at one another.
The cat’s pupils were round and dark in a pool of pale green. Ella
looked closely into the darkness, searching for something. She could
only see herself. But still, if she looked past that, she imagined there
was something at the end of the darkness. How else could their
warm silence need no explanation? What else could explain how the
cat curled into the crook of Ella’s arm and fit perfectly? What led her
to rest her small head on the back of Ella’s hand, to choose Ella’s thin
bones and tendons over the plush foot of her bed?
“Please don’t die,” Ella said to the cat. The cat’s expression
did not waver.
Ella imagined, then, that there was nothing to be found
behind her feline gaze. Ella was only body heat. The cat’s voice
was only instinct. The silence was only silence. The room felt a little
emptier then, so Ella tried to stop imagining. The air in Ella’s room
was light like incense smoke. The yellow glow from her desk lamp
cast stretched-out shadows on the walls. She fell asleep with the
light on.
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