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rolled up within herself, lying on a circle rug just off my bed. As I placed the cut of beef under her nose, she sniffed it as she usually does, and in one sorrowful moment, she opened her mouth and a discolored, infirm tongue rolled out and against the beef. She wept silently in her feline way—unseen yet felt—she wept at my charity and how far she had fallen.
    I wept too. I didn’t know what else to do. Soon after, we both slept. In my dreams, she came to me.
    “I am dying,” she told me, as we walked through a familiar golden field. She continued, “I have been cut off from my family. What I speak of is not something you are familiar with. As I can communicate with you now, I had been able to do with my kin. Only now, I have been forbidden such spiritual connection with them. I no longer have it. It is a balance within my kind. One cannot live long without it. It is a source of life that all of my kind feed from. I cannot bear the silence. I hear nothing of them. It is as though I am blindfolded. My young are so distant. I cannot sense them. I have never had such feelings of hopelessness. I am not allowed to come near them or smell them, touch them.” This was news to me. I hadn’t realized that she was a mother. But as I thought about it, of course, she would be. “I know why I have been shunned,” she continued. “They tell me that our worlds cannot blend, as I know yours has told you. But they are wrong—we know this to be true. But their ways are ancient and solid. Much like yours.”
    I woke up to her voice still in my mind. “I’m alone,” she said as I caught her silhouette in front of me. I wept, still lying in bed as I reached for her. She turned before I could feel her coat. Even in the limited light, I could see her handicapped body as she hobbled away from me and through the front door. The screen slapping the frame like a cat of nine tails against innocent flesh.
    I feared that night was going to be the last time I would see her. Like this was good-bye for the last time. Luckily, not so. We spent many more months together. Even without her spiritual connection she most avidly needed, she was getting by, somehow. She was far from optimum indeed but had recovered from her hopeless depth to something livable. Mostly, I provided for her, and she stayed within the meadow’s edges, with me. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was frightened beyond the meadow. I was too.
    Absko and Sanura—she now many months pregnant—were used to Malaika. Although Absko and the cat did not wrestle anymore, occasionally she’d throw in a head-butt or two to keep him on his toes.
    One morning in June, I sat in my chair, rolling my tobacco, sifting out stems as usual, when Malaika raised her head at once and turned her ears toward the meadow. She trotted as quickly as her legs would allow. She wasn’t much for running, for she did not have the strength. At the meadow’s edge stood The Three. I quickly made my way to our old exchange spot and found them all affectionately rubbing each other’s coats and sniffing each other’s faces. When she gazed back at me, I could see that glint again. That life! Her link was no longer severed. It appeared her sentence had been fulfilled.

 
     
    Absko had been coming over more often. I got the feeling it was mainly for my benefit, rather than his. I hadn’t seen Malaika since she had gone back, a good two months ago. I’d stopped putting out the coconut milk. I was frustrated and hurt, but past my selfishness I saw and understood the hell she had gone through—why would she want to come back? I just wished she’d at least visit me in my dreams. Even this was out of bounds apparently.
    I handed Absko a beer. He had graduated to this level of late. You’re old enough to have a baby, you can handle a beer, and it helped that his father didn’t seem to mind.
    “I have a concern,” he stated abruptly. I only looked at him, expectantly. “Sanura is very pregnant, and in