The Dinner Party

By the time I had learned that I was going to have a child, my cat had grown to an enormous size. When she stood on her hind legs, which was something she did now, she was the height and width of a dinghy. Her ears would brush against my ceiling and come away grey with dust. I had never realized that I needed to dust my ceiling, and now I had a way to do so.

When I learned that I was going to have a child, my cat sat me down on the living room sofa. At first, she curled up in the opposite corner against the green cushions, but as she became more agitated, she got up and began to pace the room.

I said to her, “When the baby comes, I will have less time to spend with you. You will have to learn to entertain yourself.”

“That is not my concern,” said my cat. “How will you manage to raise a child and keep it safe? You cannot even manage your own mice. That is what you bought me for.”

I acknowledged that she was right. My apartment was on the second level of a building that was shaped like a single-family house on the outside, but divided into self-sufficient floors within. The house was built in the mid-19th century, and hosted a multi-generational extended family of mice who traced their legacy back to the construction days. They had as much of a claim to my apartment as I had, and they were resolute in their intention to show it. Two weeks ago I  bought a Carmen Miranda hat for a fancy-dress party at my workplace. The mice devoured the foam grapes, bit chucks out of the plastic bananas, and gnawed on the cloth rinds of the faux-oranges. I wore the hat to the party anyway. My boss said that it was very conceptual.

When I thought of that story my cat said, “See, this is what I was talking about. You are too acquiescent. You will allow other people to tell you how you should raise this child, and they will not have its best interests at heart.”

“Alright,” I said. “What should I do to protect my child, from the mice and from my own subservience?”

My cat stretched out her long, furry limbs. “I have a plan.”

We set the table for a lavish dinner. I bought two monkfish, and chose the larger one. I cooked it with garlic and saffron and lemon juice, and laid it out on the blue and white china. My cat sent me to the liquor store to buy a bottle of lightly oaked chardonnay. The mice were too refined to ever drink red with fish.

A shudder went down my spine as the mice began to emerge. They crept out of the walls and skittered across the table, pausing to sample the food and sip the drinks. As they ate and drank, my cat said to me, “Now is the chance to overcome your fear. See how many of them you can kill.”

I picked up the knife that I had used to cut the fish, but my cat shook its massive head. “No. Do it with your hands and teeth.”

I approached the table with my breath held tight in my chest. Five or seven mice looked up at me, with long front teeth and little, skittering paws. Once, as a child, I saw a row of mouse-prints in a spill of flour and I thought that it was something beautiful. I did not think so any more. One of the mice was larger than the others, and she was wearing a purple cape with red stitching. When I looked closely, I could see that it was made out of the ribbon from my hat, pilfered and torn.

Enraged, I leapt forward on all fours and snatched the mouse between my teeth. She kicked and squealed, and I could feel her wiry tail lashing against my cheek. My cat prowled in circles around me like a watchful mentor. She knew better than to touch me and disturb my work. I was alive in a way I had never been before because I knew that I was doubly alive, containing two lives. With a great clenching of my jaw, I bit into the mouse. Blood poured down my chin and over the fine white tablecloth. It tasted of chardonnay. As I gnawed through the mouse's stomach, I found upon my tongue another, smaller mouse. Its skin was mucilaginous and slimy. I swallowed down the baby mouse like an aspirin, and spat out the mutilated remains of its mother.

The other mice fled. The dinner was destroyed.

My cat came up behind me and touched my back. Her paw was the size of my entire head. “That was very good,” she said. “Your baby will be very lucky that it has you to defend it.”

I wiped my hands across my face. I pulled them away, red and wet. I walked to the sink to clean them. The smaller monkfish was swimming in the basin. It was tracing circles around the dirty dishes. The people in the apartment below me were playing Octopus’s Garden by the Beatles on their sound system. I could hear it filtering up through the floorboards.

“What will you do now that I can kill the mice myself?” I asked my cat. “How will you make yourself useful?”

My cat gave a splendid shrug of her broad shoulders. “Perhaps I will try to make it in the jungle, posing as a new kind of superpredator. I am far too big to pretend to be a lion.”

The smaller monkfish had eyes like a cat. They were pale and beady and embedded in its skin like splinters. I used the long nail on my thumb to pry them out, and held them up to my face like glasses. When I looked through them, the world became a slit of yellow light.

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About the Author Eleanor Polak is a senior editor at Conjunctions, and an undergraduate student at Bard College where she is studying in the Written Arts program. She has previously been published in the magazine VOLTA.