Roses and Cats

The house I grew up in smelled of roses. My mom would buy them every day at the street market close by, "what a pretty sight they are," she'd say. To my mind they were only alright. I was never fond of them actually. I guess it was because I once had a cat that loved eating them and my mom made me get rid of him. Poor Frisky, never saw it coming. I didn't kill him or anything, if that's what you're thinking, but we were best buds. He waited for me to come back from school every day sitting on the window facing the street. But one day, my dad and I took him to a friend's farm and left him there. Some days later, I got a phone call saying that he tried to run away and was found dead on the road. A car or something must have run him over. Poor Frisky.

I went to College in the West Coast, which for my mom was my way of putting a knife through her heart. She wanted me to go to school in Michigan, but I was tired of that miserable Winter time. I moved to chase the Sun and Arizona was the place to be.

I remember getting off the plane and seeing that dessert landscape and thinking to myself, "I bet I won't smell roses anymore," which was a funny thing to think of.

I saved all the money I got working part-time during the Summers while I was in High School and got myself a nice one-bedroom unit in a complex. It had a pool and a small fitness studio and the neighbors seemed to be nice.

After a year or so, I decided to get myself a new cat, after all, now there were no roses to worry about. Frisky, the second, as I named him, was this beautiful black cat. My mom said that he would only bring me bad luck, but I don't believe in this kind of things. Little did I know. The cat seemed to be possessed! He ruined a whole couch in less than a month. One evening I arrived home and I saw my walls all scratched, "there goes my deposit," I murmured. The other day my boyfriend spent the night and when we woke up, one of his shoes was completely unwearable. He was nothing like Frisky, the first.

One day my boyfriend gave me 12 dozes roses, one for each month we were together and I immediately asked him, "have you forgotten about your shoe and Frisky?" He just laughed. When I got home, Frisky saw the roses and slowly crept towards them and I could already see me sweeping endless rose petals from the floor, but he simply smelled them. When I woke up, there he was, sleeping around them. I guess they made him calmer, and since that day, I always have some around the house; it's a matter of "homeland security."

____

This short story was written as part of a class I'm taking at the Writer's Program at UCLA.