George

George was born six days after my sixth birthday. His half-sister, Lila, was born two weeks prior. Their father apparently got around a lot, and had many litters with many females.

The day we’d went to adopt them, I hadn’t been around cats much. I didn’t know how they worked, or anything about them. Until that point, my only experience with cats was when our neighbor, who owned many cats, would call them in at the end of the night. The sound she made was quite bizarre and jarring, like an alarm blaring through the neighborhood. Having been diagnosed with Asperger’s, I was quite sensitive to sound at the time. I would sit in my bed, plugging my ears, dreading that time of night. Fortunately, I’d eventually grow used to it. Unfortunately, we lived next to the fire station.

I didn’t know what to make of them at first. All they did was sit around and sleep, and I now had to watch my step, since they were only babies. George and Lila were Siamese cats. Not long after, I learned that Siam was what Thailand was once called, and tried to talk to them in Thai, with help from the internet. George and Lila, however, had never been to Thailand.

George was what you called a seal point. He had a small, grey patch covering his nose and mouth, which looked blue in the sunlight. Lila was a lilac point, and she was covered in stripes, much like a tiger or a different kind of cat with stripes on its fur.

As a kitten, George would climb the screen door, tearing all kinds of little holes in it. Lila would sit there, staring out the window as she stared at the outside. George, however, never dreamed of venturing to the ourdoors; in fact, he was terrified of it, and ran back into the house the one time we sat him on the front steps and watched what he would do. He didn’t tear holes at the screen door with hopes of returning to his roots in the wild. He was just doing it to get us to chase him off.

As George grew older, his white fur turned beige, the skin on his belly dangled back and forth, and the small patch of grey on his face grew large and covered his entire face. His voice was shrill and whiny, and always had that same familiar note. We called him the one-note wonder. Every morning, without exception, he would come downstairs and say good morning to you with the same meow.

Lila was a cat, through and through. She would stare at you blankly and meow. She would perch in the oddest of places. She would hunt the mice in our old, drafty house, leaving them at the bottom of the stairs with their little pink innards strewn about. It was her way of telling us she loved us.

George, meanwhile, was tough to put in a box. While he was stuck in the body of a cat, he was more of a mix between a monkey and a jealous little imp from the Feywild, just without opposable thumbs. He had his quirks and curiosities, lived by his strict routines, and seemed to understand every word you said when you talked to him.

Perhaps most amusingly, George was, in no uncertain terms, a dick. Whenever Lila would get any sort of attention, he would glare and pout, and chase her away. When you would call George’s name, more often than not, he wouldn’t come. Not because he didn’t understand, by any means, since, as previously mentioned, he understood every word you said to him, but because of a lack of interest. The only way to call George was to instead call Lila’s name. He would show up, without fail, every single time.

When I would put the food out for the two of them, in the custom paisley-shaped bowls that I made for them, George would race to his food, slurping out all of the juices like a hummingbird drinking nectar. The entire time he was chewing, he would growl, and would shove her out of the way. He would do the same to her food, and later, she would come by and eat the chunky, grey remains. However, the greatest sin in the book of George was to put the same kind of food in both bowls. George liked variety. If this act was committed by whoever was tasked with feeding him, he would sit there and pout, twitching his tail with contempt as he always did, and wouldn’t eat.

As cruel as he was to his sister, he relied on her. She was two weeks older, and two weeks wiser, acting as his mother. She would groom his fur, and he would make a fuss, but it was their daily ritual. It was how they showed each other their love. Lila was constantly hocking up hairballs, from having to bathe two cats with her tongue.

Another thing George would do when he wanted attention was to chase after you, drawing out his one-note meow like a high-pitched siren. He would dramatically flop on the ground in front of you mid-meow, and if that didn’t work, he’d claw and bite at your ankles. This was especially the case if you were talking on the phone while walking. He would never draw blood, however. Lila’s back claws were sharp, like a puma. She wouldn’t let anyone cut them, and she scratched and kicked whenever anyone picked her up. She would draw blood and make a mess. George, however, always let you pick him up. You just couldn’t talk on the phone around him.

George and I had a unique relationship, having always been joined at the hip. I loved both him and Lila, but they were different animals with different needs and different behaviors. George would always follow me around, and I would jump on the couch. I would pretend that I was a pirate, and that he was a sea monster. As a rambunctious seven-year-old, I was of course a huge fan of pirates.

One time, I played a little too rough with him, and I picked him up and threw him. He landed on his feet, as he always did. He wasn’t hurt, but he was clearly shaken up. Another time, I chased him around with a scary mask, and scared him half to death. While we would take turns tormenting each other and roughhousing like weird brothers, with him clawing at my ankles and whining and me doing little things to test his patience, these two times were different. I think about these moments a lot, and while I still had a lot of maturing to do, seeing as I was only seven, they still are two of my biggest regrets, along with not responding to my grandmother’s final voicemail in time, and not seeing Tom Petty live. Both times, he came over and rubbed his head on my leg an hour later, as while George was fickle and contemptuous, he was forgiving and, deep down, a complete softie. In a way, despite being a cat, he taught me a thing or two about learning to forgive people and, down the road, learning to forgive myself, all with a simple, wordless gesture.

As I grew, I began to spend less time at home, and saw him less and less. I would bring over my buddy David, who lived down the street. He mowed lawns on the side, and he’d always ride his tractor lawnmower over and hang out at my house after school. David was impulsive, fast-moving, and as loud as a fire engine. George would hide upstairs whenever he was over, along with Lila, who always hid upstairs. Like many others, George didn’t quite know what to make of David.

When my mother met my stepfather, he would also bring over his little blind boston terrier. My stepdad works with computers, and named him Bodoni, after the font. When I would spend time with him, George stewed. He hated Bodoni so much, and would go out of his way to instigate things, sitting there like a trap as his vision failed and attacking him, making a big, dramatic show of it. Lila was also scared of him, and didn’t understand what a dog was. She’d never seen one before either. We eventually had to lock them in the bathroom to avoid altercations, after they left a scratch a half-inch away from his right eye.

One day, when I was 15, Bodoni was attacked by a loose dog while out for a walk. He went into surgery to treat his injuries, but later that night, he died. My stepdad was devastated. It was sudden, and my first real experience with death. I began to notice when George would frequently pee in his litterbox, as his kidneys grew older. I began to look on the cat food boxes, and realize that he was only a couple of years away from officially being labeled a senior cat. I was older than him the day I met him, and suddenly he was older than me.

As I grew into my late teens, I became wrapped up in teenage angst and melodrama. I was never really rebellious, but I carried it with me wherever I went. The world began to kick me down much harder than it ever had. George would burst into my room meowing when I most just wanted to be alone. He would sit on the couch next to me as I stewed and vented to him, and where I reeled after my first heartbreak. The stress of high school turned into the stress of work and college, and the stress of moving out of my childhood home. He would watch me, listening intently. I realized eventually that he didn’t understand what the hell I was talking about. After all, he was a cat.

But he always tried to.

During my first semester of college, one of my friends left the door open when they left. George came as we called Lila, as usual, but she was nowhere to be found. She had escaped. The following days were spent scouring the neighborhood, looking for her, as he would sit in the basement and call her, wondering why she wouldn’t come. I began to fear that I would never see her again. There were akitas in that neighborhood, just like the one that killed Bodoni.

A week later, we found Lila, taking refuge in a bush four doors down. She was sheltered in place and wouldn’t budge, hiding and running from us as if we were strangers. Eventually, my mother lured her in with a piece of rotisserie chicken and caught her. George came to the front door as we brought his sister in, sighing with relief and joy as she sat shaken, with fur sticking in every direction and covered with dirt and tiny leaves, her stomach grumbling as she ate. He sniffed her curiously, before swatting her in the face and hissing at her.

Like I said, George was a dick.

One morning, George laid on the stairs, in a sunbeam through the window screen. He had died peacefully in the night. It was strange, not hearing his usual whiny good morning and dealing with his antics. It wasn’t hard seeing him, surprisingly enough. It was hard leaving him behind at the crematorium and picking up his favorite toys.

A few weeks later, the quarantine hit, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread to our neighborhoods. We were trapped in our own house, uncertain of the future, as Lila called out constantly for George. Over the course of months, her meows became loud, shrill, and nonstop, and my stepdad wouldn’t sleep at night. We all began to argue and went stir-crazy, as did many households, without George to sit and listen as we vented.

However, Lila was a lot more resilient than we initially thought. Much to my stepdad’s bewildered amusement, Lila’s constant yowling wasn’t because she was grieving, nor because she was in any sort of pain. With old age, she had simply went deaf, and could no longer hear how loud she was. George, being a diva, had always demanded so much attention, that we simply hadn’t noticed.