The Wound

His dirty fingernails made flakes of the raw skin surrounding the puss-filled crater above his ankle. Like a bitch in heat dragging her backside across the yard, he scratched the itch. His fingers became wet with a viscous mixture of blood and puss. He was sure that the antibiotics to cure his staph infection hadn't worked; the bowl-shaped depression was becoming larger, and the swelling of his chaffed skin around the wound would soon burst like a volcanic fissure and consume more of his leg. Don't lose sight of the long game by reveling in quick wins; his words as the marketing leader at Willow during their Series A celebration. The long game was IPO. If he'd taken his own advice, he wouldn't be living under the 680 overpass on Monument Boulevard, picking at an abscess, and yelling at a black Maine Coon.

The cat was the size of a baby panther. It appeared three nights ago, talking to him like they knew each other. He screamed, spit, and threw glass bottles at it, but it never left. Nor did it come close enough for him to touch. Instead, it circled his camp, talking to him, looking at him, then the street, beckoning him to follow. The man heard the other bums under the overpass call the beast Domino. Disoriented from sleepless nights, withdrawals, and the horrendous weight of his shameful past, the man rose on the fourth day to kill the cat. Hot puss oozed from his abscess, soaking his socks as he limped toward Domino. The squelch from his heel touching the blood and puss that had seeped down to his boot punctuated his shrieks of pain as he hobbled like a mutilated wolf.

The cat knew it was the bait and moved like a hundred-dollar bill attached to an invisible string, starting and stopping, never putting enough distance between the man and it to make him hopeless. He lured the man from underneath the overpass to a gas station two traffic lights away. The lust for revenge pushed the man through the burning pain of his wound. Revenge for what? The cat caused him sleepless nights, but this was more than that. He wanted to unleash violence on Domino to get revenge on the world that wronged him; on Willow for firing him; on Sara for reporting him; on his family for believing the accusations; on opiates for turning him into a monster.

The shine of the gas station's lights whipped the man out of a hunter's trance. It was dark out, maybe dinner time, but he couldn't guess the day. Civilians filling up their tanks dared not look in the man's direction for fear their curiosity may be mistaken as an offering for help. The man ignored everything but the cat, which had transported itself atop the roof of a five-series BMW and was about to descend the windshield. The vehicle's owner startled at the cat, then looked beyond it to see the homeless man peering in his direction. He thought the cat and bum must have made a team, the bum using the animal to guilt-trip people into giving him money. The car owner didn't have time for this, "Is this your cat," he shouted, "Can you get him off my beamer?"

The homeless man heard the words like he was watching a play from a theater's rafters. From that vantage point, he watched himself shuffle under the lights to the man and watched the cat leap from the car's hood and scurry to the gas station's store doors. He watched the beamer's owner hand him a ten-dollar bill, then back away. Suddenly, he was staring at the crisp bill in his filthy hands through his own eyes. He couldn't remember the last time someone gave him that much money, and he was grateful for how the play had unfolded. And for the cat: it was Domino who brought him this fortune.

The man bought malt liquor and cigarettes. When he exited the store, he smiled at the cat with his dead gray teeth, put a smoke to his mouth, and inhaled, ”Things are looking up now, Domino," he coughed, unscrewing his bottle cap.

The cashier yelled from inside, "You can't drink that here. Go away."

The man grunted and took a swig. Domino nodded in a direction away from the man’s camp. The man took another drag of his cigarette, wondering who was in control of anything, and when he exhaled, the cat was across the street staring at him and meowing. His abscess was leaking like a stab wound from all the walking. There was little doubt in his mind that he had caught the superbug - MRSA. He thought he’d probably lose his leg. He put the bottle to his mouth and took a long pull as the cashier called the cops.

The cat led the man down Gregory Lane to a quiet neighborhood with freshly paved asphalt so smooth it felt like he was skating. The buzz helped. The houses had manicured lawns that, in the evening light, glistened from just being watered. On a driveway belonging to a two-story million-dollar home, the cat rolled on its back like a beetle, flipped over, and purred. The man was three houses away, half-a-bottle-gone, bleary-eyed, and panting. He was too far from the overpass to make it back, but that didn't matter much anyway; he'd given his fate to the cat. Also, didn't he belong on this million-dollar street? If only his life hadn't been ripped away by that bitch and his company. They forgot that under his guidance Willow went viral, igniting a flurry of sign-ups, which caught the eye of those investors. You can lose everything at any time.

He staggered onto the driveway. All the house’s lights were off. Domino meowed at him, then dashed to the sideyard over the fence. The man followed. The side gate had no lock. A pool and an outdoor island with a built-in grill and refrigerator were in the backyard. The man bent over and opened it. Two dozen Coronas glittered like gold in front of him. The giddiness he felt was almost as good as getting high. He took four and staggered to the pool's edge, where Domino stared at its reflection. The man plopped down on the stone ground a dozen yards away from the cat. It was dark except for the pool lights that bathed the man in a sapphire glow. He used his lighter to pop the cap off one of the bottles, chuckled, and coughed. He raised the beer toward the cat and thanked him. Domino stared at him and purred, its tail fluttering in the background.

The man finished his first beer in three gulps. "You get me," he said, lighting a smoke and opening another beer. The cat’s ear twitched. "You brought me here, and look at us now—a taste of paradise. The life I should've had," the cat meowed, "That's right," he said, gulping down another beer, "The life I should have. What happened to second chances, Domino? God Damn. I got me too'd. Fucking bullshit."

The man cracked open another beer and smoked another cigarette. He spewed the same remorseless, self-pitying lines at Domino that he did to the other bums and his friends and family before that, "She asked to go into my office! She knew what she was doing." The man had reached the point of drunkenness he wished he could live in forever; he wanted to bathe in it, to swim in it, to become one with the booziness and never let go.

Poof! Like a genie from a lamp, Domino appeared beside the man, meowing and purring. It was the closest he'd been to Domino, and the glow of the pool's blue turned the cat's black fur a haunting indigo color that shimmered like the North Star. He pushed himself from his reclined position and reached for the cat, his hand like a moth to a light. But the cat danced away, moving closer to the pool's edge.

The man hated being teased, so he lunged at the cat, but as soon as he moved, so did Domino, leaving the man on his stomach, empty-handed, about to fall into the pool. He felt like Humpty Dumpty; he tried to right himself, but his balance betrayed him, and he splashed into the water. The sting of the chlorine on the abscess made him squeal like a squirrel getting its back legs crushed by a car tire. He flapped his arms and scissored his feet, attempting to return to the surface. In a mad flurry, his head broke above the water, and he clutched the side of the pool. He was looking at the back of the house. The lights were on.

He lifted his water-logged body from the pool and laid on his back for several moments to recover. He tilted his head to his right and saw the cat across the pool looking past him, meowing. Turning to the left, he saw a man with a baseball bat and a woman behind him. He knew her. His heart stopped. The sight of the woman froze him like a fly trapped in the freezer. It was Sara.

She peered over her boyfriend's shoulder and recognized the man. Her hands covered her mouth, and she began crying. She never wanted to see him again and never thought she would.

"You know this bum?"

Sara nodded and then ran inside.

"Call the police," her boyfriend shouted. The man tried to limp away.

"Where do you think you're going,” the boyfriend said, his bat cocked. The man hobbled as quickly as he could, but the pain of the abscess was unbearable. The cat meowed. He saw it by the back fence in the distance, where there was a gate he hadn’t noticed before. The man groaned at the boyfriend, "I'm leaving. I'm going." But the boyfriend didn't see it that way; he thought clocking this bum with his aluminum bat would be better. He short-hopped up to the man and swung for the fences.

The man collapsed onto the stone ground, crashing into his empty beer bottles on impact. He was face down, dazed, grimacing at the pain in his body.

Sara screamed from inside the house through the open back door. "Babe! come here." The boyfriend kicked the bum, whose body was limp. He ran to Sara to see how he could help.

Domino appeared an arm's length away from the man, begging him to follow, meowing repeatedly. The man lifted his head and saw the back gate was open. The cat walked toward it, then turned around and returned to the man. Domino was showing him how to escape.

He dragged, crawled, then stumbled out the back gate after the cat and discovered the house backed up to the Contra Costa Canal Trail. He was in bad shape, but he heard Sara and the boyfriend's voices bellowing from the backyard and didn’t have time to pause to catch his breath or give his battered, leaking body a break. The man did what he'd done and followed the cat, and as he huffed and puffed and dragged his lame leg closer toward an intersection of the trail, he had the urge to cry.

Domino waited for the man atop a fence post at the crosswalk on Boyd Rd. It calmly purred as he approached, singing its praises.

"Thank you, cat. Thank you, Domino."

The man had his hands out to pet the cat, assuming it would scare and run away like it always had before, but it didn't. He touched its black fur. It was soft, almost silk-like, and warm, like bread from the toaster. The man shivered at his feeling then. He was so grateful for this cat's acceptance. Domino didn't care about his past, those accusations, or his abscess. Domino was giving him a second chance.

The cat leaped down from the post and ran across the crosswalk. The man limped in the same direction, crying, "It's you and me now."

He dragged his foot behind him down the slight slope of the sidewalk and into the street. Honk! Domino disappeared; nothing was in front of the man except the empty trail. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the brightest light he'd ever seen. Then, he was gone.