KITTENS FOR SALE

The carnival came to town the first week of August every year. It was the last week that felt like summer could be sipped and not yet greedily devoured; it wasn’t yet a countdown to fall to the first day of class. Sales of school supplies at Nelson’s Convenience still seemed too early, crowding the sunscreen, beach chairs, and coolers. It was the kind of shop that had to have everything. Small towns had to get creative like that. It was so intimate that when one person coughed at church on Sunday, the whole of the community would have a cold by Wednesday. 

And nothing united the people there in this seaside village like the carnival taking over the large parking lot by the wharf. 

For the girl, it was always a week she observed with equal parts excitement and unease. It was the kind of frivolity that had teeth; the kind with wild eyes that snarled. Adults acted like children and children tried on adulthood; things like that should be met with apprehension, the girl thought. She never said this out loud, though; she didn’t want to be known as someone who would ruin the fun. 

But the summer she turned fourteen was different. She had started spending time with a new friend, a girl a year older who was pretty and popular but shedding her own group rather rapidly. They found themselves friendless and bored in the small town at the same time, with the girl’s friends all at camp and her new friend tiring of her own cohort. 

Afternoons were spent lazily. From Nelson’s, they’d rent videos and pick up a gallon of ice cream. The movies were always raunchy and the ice cream always strawberry. They ate it, sharing spoons interchangeably, in the friend’s living room on her dad’s chair that was stained with cigarette smoke. The polyurethane leather was cracked like earth desperate for rain. 

The girl was glad when they hung out in the living room. Her friend’s parents were never home, and the friend shared a room with her older brother, who was supposed to be taking classes at the community college but was always home when they were at her house, the blue light of his video games creeping from beneath the tapestry that divided their room. 

At night they walked to the end of the breakwater and talked about everything and nothing. About where they’d go once they got their driver’s licenses, where they wanted to go to college, how they’d both live in the big city one day. They discussed whether Cucumber Melon really smelled better than Sweet Pea or if it was just more popular. They talked about their parents, the usual and unusual complaints. 

The girl carefully avoided asking her new friend what had happened with her old social group, but she supported her silently, looking the other direction when the other girls stared at her friend across the street and whispered. 

By August, they found strands of each other’s hair on their clothes. They shared shoes. Plans didn’t need to be made in advance.

Except when the friend suggested they go to the carnival. 

“Let’s go Thursday night. That’s the night of the fireworks, the best time to go,” the friend said. Her certainty was contagious. Of course, Thursday was the night they would go.

When they walked to the wharf, the blue and red lights from the recently constructed, precarious-looking rides hit the nearby houses and the water ahead. It reminded the girl of a police car. 

People walked openly with bottles, and no one seemed to care. Their principal took a swig and a hit off something that smelled like earth. When he saw them, he just smiled, caught but not ashamed. 

“Oh my gosh, look!” The friend pulled the girl toward an alleyway, tugging her arm and moving quickly through a cloud of smoke from the tent selling sausage and hot dogs. The girl had driven by the alley many times. She had passed it on foot whenever her dad took her for fish and chips at the Porthole. She had seen it hundreds of times but never noticed it and certainly never thought to walk down there. 

And then she saw it. The sign, in garish red paint, read: Kittens for Sale. The two men standing over a box were laughing in a way that knotted a pit in the girl’s stomach. They saw the girls and smiled, revealing missing teeth and rancid breath. They spoke too close. One of them had a snake tattoo on his neck that curved alongside his cross necklace. 

“How much?” 

“For you two beauties? We’ll do a two-for-one. Real cheap,” the man with the snake said.

The girl investigated the box, which did indeed have kittens. They were cute and tiny. The girls’ hands were sticky with cotton candy, and she didn’t know if she should touch one, but they looked up at her and purred. They didn’t look real, so the girl reached in and brought her hand back quickly; one had scratched her and hissed. They were soft and sharp. She knew her parents wouldn’t let her have one, and she seethed with anger at the conversation she had with them in her head. She was jealous and knew her friend’s parents wouldn’t notice her new cat. 

“I can’t,” the girl said and looked at her hand, a slice of red deepening on her finger. It stung and she wanted to suck it but didn’t want to call attention to it. “Let’s go.”

“No. I want one.”

“You’re old enough to take care of one,” said the snake.

When they brought the kitten back to her house, it looked at them with big eyes before letting out a piercing sound. 

“It’s hungry,” whispered the friend, going to get some milk. They didn’t see the fireworks that night.

As summer progressed, the kitten grew. Faster than the girl thought a kitten would turn into a cat. Her parents didn’t seem to notice, even when the litter box overflowed and the smell turned putrid.

By autumn, school started, and the girl’s other friends returned from camp and became part of her days again. She signed up with them to do the school play. She still saw her new friend and waved to her in the hall. She looked tired, her eyes sunken in and her skin dry. 

“How is soccer?” the girl asked when they hung out one day, walking towards town. 

“I quit. The kitten…needs attention.” The girl nodded like she understood, but she didn’t; she had never had a cat. At the friend’s house, she saw the cat had grown, nearly tripling in size. It hissed at them from under the bed, occasionally whipping out an angry paw, claws extending.

When the friend went to the kitchen to get something for the cat, the brother peered from beyond his side of the room. His eyes focused on the girl. 

“Did you get one too? You two do everything together.” He stood up and got too close to the girl, so close she could feel his heartbeat, so she went to the kitchen with her friend. She didn’t go over to her friend’s house again, but they still met from time to time. Every time they saw each other after, the girl knew her friend was anxious to get home, always in a rush to get to the cat. 

She had been the exact wrong person to have this kind of pet, but the only person who would take care of it.

The bigger the cat got – larger than a dog by that Christmas – the less they could talk about it. The more physical space it took up, the less they could acknowledge it with language. 

The girl became the woman. The woman grew up, went to college, and moved to the city. She often thought of those days with her friend again because she was living the life they had talked about.

They lost touch, but she heard the friend still lived in the town, still slept in the room, and now worked at Nelson’s, a quick walk from her home. The woman ran into her there once, and she was skinny and scratchy, and not as funny as she once was, even though she laughed more.

“Do you still live in the same place?” the woman asked, while her old friend rang up the groceries she bought for her visit to her parents’ house. Her old friend’s hair was greasy down the middle part, with flecks of white like snow that wouldn’t melt.

“Yep, nowhere else to go.” They made small talk like this while the register did its thing. The kind of minor chatter you do with strangers, not with people whose hands you once held during the scary parts of movies.

“Well, take care. It was nice seeing you,” said the woman, unsure if she meant it. 

“I still have that cat, you know,” her old friend said in a quick and desperate way. Trying to continue the conversation, trying to answer an unasked question. The woman did know. 

The veins on her hand were blue and serpentine, protruding from her bones as she handed the woman her change. She left the loose coins in her friend’s tip cup, which she had decorated herself with a picture of the cat.

Years passed and then the friend called the woman out of the blue. She didn’t know how the friend had gotten her number but was relieved to hear her voice on the other end, even though it was shaky. She needed money, she said. The woman sent her a check but wondered if she should. She knew it was to feed the cat. 

She never heard from her friend again and the next time she went to the shop the new cashier said she didn’t work there anymore.

Later, when the woman went to town to visit her parents with her husband and two daughters, it was August, and the husband suggested they visit the carnival. It would be fun for the girls, he said. But the woman knew better. She didn’t want to go but couldn’t explain it to her husband. He only saw joy in the brightness of the lights, the sweet sweat of summer. But her daughters begged. They wanted to get close to whatever that was. She remembered this gravitational pull, and shuddered.

The family went during the daylight, before night fell, and the pit formed in her stomach, hard and immovable, before the scent of popcorn hit them on the wharf. 

“Look, Mom!” The woman’s daughter squeezed her hand. The woman turned, expecting to see a stand of ice cream or piss-yellow lemonade, but her daughter pointed toward the alleyway. It couldn’t be, but it was.

Kittens for Sale.

Originally published in Dualiterary Magazine, August ‘26 Issue.