







































Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201947

Felis Catus: Harbinger

by Hannah Willis

 It begins, and ends, and begins again as few 
things do: with one.
 There is a pile of concrete in my backyard. 
It sits, cold and forbidden and almost certainly 
teeming with creepy-crawlies. I give it a wide berth. 
It reminds me of a castle, abandoned, decaying, a 
relic of a by-gone age. Rocks pressed into the cement 
make for jagged parapets, and I can imagine the echo 
of wind through its roughhewn halls. Alfalfa sprouts 
up through gaping holes. Within a few months of 
us moving into our new home, it’s overtaken by the 
wild.
 The first time we see her slinking her way out 
of the concrete pile is in late November. We’ve been 
taunted for weeks by little paw prints in frosted-
over grass, zig-zagging across our scraggly lawn 
with strange purpose. My mother, intrigued by the 
thought of an unknown tenant, places some cat food 
in an old enamel bowl and settles in to wait.
 My mother waits long into the night, her 
insomnia keeping her awake. In the morning she 
tells me, excited grin on her face, of how she waited 
and waited and waited. Tells me of how she waited 
and waited until there was the flash of eyes in the 
dark. Tells me of the eyes in the dark, of the skittish 
cat that carefully picked its way from the pile to the 
bowl. Tells me of the way it hugged the ground, belly 
swollen, clearly pregnant in its half-starved state.
 I bob my head along with her story, eyes drawn 
to the concrete pile, silent and dark. With great 
difficulty, I tear myself away and pack my bag for 
school.
 The cat—petite, white and gray, long-furred, 
and green-eyed—grows accustomed to us and 
our strange food. She’s given a name, which varies 
depending on whom you ask: my mother and sister 
will tell you it’s Mama Kitty, my father will insist it’s 
Echidna, Mother of All Monsters. We idly wonder 
when she disappears for a few days and then returns, 
suspiciously skinny. She eats with gusto, mangy pelt 
beginning to smooth out, dull fur giving way to a 
lustrous sheen.

 Weeks pass, and one night she brings her kittens 
with her, crawling from the alfalfa-spewing holes in 
the concrete pile. I press my face to the glass of the 
back door, eager for my first good look at the strange 
little family coming from their ramshackle stone 
castle. There are four kittens, one black, three white, a 
tiny mismatched quartet that looks at us with watery, 
luminous eyes. I stare back, eyes wide and round and 
full of wonder.

α

 There is a sign next to what feels like the busiest 
street in town. It stands in a field of reeds and 
rushes. The afternoon sun catches on pools of water, 
light sparkling prettily off ripples caused by ducks, 
seagulls, ibis, pelicans, those that visit for a much-
needed rest on their long migrations. They stand as 
shards of alabaster and pearl atop a mirror. When 
I look across this field, the air is strangely still and 
silent, despite the cars blazing across the molten 
asphalt road mere feet away. Dust motes hang in the 
air, pieces of glitter suspended in time. The sun sinks 
lower. The reeds turn to sticks of gold.
 The sign proudly declares WETLAND 
MITIGATION.

α

 I come home to wire cages filled with newspaper 
and covered with towels, a bathroom door firmly 
closed with a note proclaiming DO NOT OPEN. 
Our cats slink around, tails down, shoulders high. 
I crack the door open. Eyes flash, green-yellow and 
phosphorescent, and I’m hit with the unmistakable 
smell of cat.
 TNR, my parents call it. Catch and release, with 
a stop at the animal shelter for a quick desexing and 
snip to the ear to designate their neutered status. 
It lets us maintain a stable population, they say. It’s 
more humane than trap-and-kill. We’re doing our 
part, they tell me.



Felis Catus: Harbinger

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201948

 The cats stay in the bathroom, out of harm’s way, 
as they fight off the drugs and stress and settle quickly 
into their own skittish fear of the strangers that coo 
at them from a crack in the door. My father protests 
this coddling, my mother puts her foot down. Our 
cats slink around the house.
 Only two cats are sequestered away in the 
bathroom, huddling together behind the sink and 
toilet: two tabby-splotched white kittens, one with 
distinctive black patches around his eyes, creating 
hollows of empty shadow. My sister lovingly names 
him Ghost. Mama Kitty and her two daughters elude 
my parents’ attempts to capture them. Later I will 
learn that a female cat can be impregnated days after 
giving birth. They visit nightly for the cheap cat food 
my mother places strategically around the patio, but 
they never fall for our increasingly clever traps.

α

 Utah Lake is a modern-day tragedy. Once a haven 
for migratory birds and endemic fishes, it’s now 
locally viewed as little more than a puddle of mud. 
I blame the carp. They’re bottom feeders, scavengers 
that trawl the lakebed with hardly a care, stirring up 
mud and debris, clouding the lake’s shallow waters 
and inhibiting the growth of native flora and fauna.
 It’s not their fault they’re there. It’s not even 
their fault that the lake is the way it is. They were 
introduced in 1883 to lessen the strain that 
commercial fishing placed on native fish. No one 
could have foreseen how well this one species would 
take to the lake, how they would easily outcompete 
the June suckers and other native fishes. They didn’t 
“kill” the lake, as my family and I are fond of saying, 
but merely exacerbated the problems caused by the 
nearby cities dumping raw sewage into the waters of 
the lake whose banks they nestled upon. They didn’t 
kill the lake, they merely keep it in its death throes.

α

 “It seems odd that biologists would have urban 
legends, but we do,” Mark says from where he stands 
next to the crooked projector screen. I lean my chin 
on my hand and settle in for the story. It goes like 
this:

 In 1894, a lonesome lighthouse keeper lived on 
Stephens Island, fifty-five miles off the coast of New 
Zealand. Stephens Island was remote, treacherous, 
and teeming with life the likes of which humans 
could only dream of. The lighthouse keeper, David 
Lyall, was fascinated with this vibrant, strange life 
that surrounded him and set out to document it as 
well as an amateur scientist could.
 Being a lonesome man on a lonesome island, 
Lyall brought along his cat for company. Lyall craved 
intellectual stimulation and turned to an odd hobby: 
the preservation of the gifts his beloved, pregnant cat 
gave him. She brought him tasty morsels, frequently 
sampling them herself. Her gifts were small rodential 
songbirds, wings seemingly underdeveloped and 
pitifully broken. Lyall stuffed the better carcasses and 
sent them to notable ornithologists worldwide.
 The ornithologists arrived in a flurry of activity 
and excitement—the likes of this bird had never been 
seen or documented. They planned expeditions into 
the forests, hypothesized about its behavior and diet, 
dreamed of the sound of its voice. Once in the forest, 
all they heard was silence.
 A year later, the bird was declared to no longer 
exist on Stephens Island. A single cat and her kittens, 
invasive species on this island paradise, had hunted 
a flightless bird to extinction.
 I slowly turn my mouth into my palm as I listen, 
trying to cover the brewing horror and guilt I am 
sure are plain on my face. I feel sick, throat tight 
and tongue heavy in my mouth. There’s a pit in 
my stomach, a hole in the center of my chest. My 
breath seems to rattle around in my lungs. All that 
destruction, all of it attributed to a single pregnant 
cat. My lab’s PI begins to wax poetic on the virtues 
of trap-and-kill, and all I can think of is Mama Kitty 
and her kittens, plump and happy, sustained on 
cheap cat food and songbirds.

α

 In the height of summer, I ride my bike through 
a soccer park, barreling past carcasses that litter 
the trailside. Their fishy stench rises in the thin, 
shimmering air. Do fish bloat? I try not to look at the 
gaping mouths and vacant eyes that are as intelligent 
in death as they were in life. The fishermen that pulled 
these fish from the waters of Utah Lake didn’t want 



Felis Catus: Harbinger

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201949

them. The birds don’t either. They lay there in piles, 
cooking from the inside out. I should be thankful: 
carp are a catch-and-kill fish, and their high mercury 
concentrations make them unsafe to eat more than 
once a month. The fishermen are doing their civic 
duty, they’ve removed 25 million pounds of carp 
from the lake. They’re hauling out the infection that 
tears up the lakebed, turns Utah Lake into a toxic 
algal bloom, and prevents the healing of an open 
sore.
 I should be thankful. Yet, when confronted with 
these monuments of death, my mind skitters away 
from the topic like a cockroach running from harsh 
light. The carp stare at me, judgement and hatred in 
their heavy gaze and I am at war: I believe all life is 
precious. Death is required for life to continue. Some 
lives are more important than others. It weighs on 
me. The lives of the carp or the life of the lake? The 
lives of the cats or the lives of the birds and mammals 
and reptiles they hunt to extinction?
 I hold my breath and pedal harder, weaving 
between twin towers of rotting fish. Dead eyes stick 
in my mind, following me.

α

 Mama Kitty is pregnant. Firsty and Minnie are 
pregnant. The orange tom that struts around our 
yard belongs to my neighbors. They swear that he’s 
fixed. He’s the only male around. 
 The three have their kittens. The kittens grow. 
Cats are sexually mature at four months old. There 
are between 30 and 80 million unowned cats that 
wander the US. Somehow, despite our best efforts, 
that number has increased by twenty-five. Any given 
night, at least ten pairs of eyes catch the kitchen light 
and reflect their unblinking stares back at us. In 
the light of day, the cats flick their ears: one whole, 
one trimmed at the top, little banners that twitch in 
the breeze and give us some sort of hope that we’re 
making progress. Hasa is pregnant. It’s not enough.
 We began with one. Mother of all monsters, 
indeed.

α

 The sign along what is certainly the busiest road 
in town no longer reads WETLAND MITIGATION. 
It is tri-fold, advertising to any who pass by: FOR 
SALE.

 The shallow pools have dried up, been drained, 
and become neglected. I can no longer smell the rot-
sweet scent of the mud that once stuck to the spindly 
legs of pelicans and herons. The earth is cracked, 
dried, flaky, the dead and desiccated skin on a dying 
woman’s elbow. Reeds have been replaced with 
cheatgrass, an undulating ever-yellow sea of heavy 
and ripe seed heads. Broken phragmite stems are 
shot through the sea, impaling the ground. A single, 
small meadowlark clings to the shaft of one such 
spear, the only bird to be seen in this abandoned rest 
stop. Its cheerful song is lost to the rush of wind and 
blare of car horns.
 Looking across, I bite my lip and curse the 
people who think they can claim the land and tear 
up the earth that’s been here eons before us. I curse 
my ancestors who overfished and introduced carp to 
the lake that they poisoned. I curse the lonely people 
who brought their pretty, pregnant, domesticated 
cats across the ocean to where they do not belong.
      

α

 The tension that makes the air of my home 
feel thick and dark seems to seep away when Hasa 
and her four kittens—Least, Medium, Most, and 
Stripey—are caught. She’s the last one. We’ve caught 
Mama Kitty, Minnie, Firsty, Fluffy Girl, Pretty Girl, 
Bandit, Bandito, Ghost, Glitter, Patches, Many Toes, 
Mac, George and countless others that looked too 
much alike to name and have long since disappeared. 
When we go to release this latest batch, trimmed ears 
still scabby, my father hesitates and declares we’re 
going to put the kittens up for adoption. “We have 
too many cats,” he grouses, and that’s that.
 We haven’t seen a kitten in nearly a year, and that 
is cause for a sigh of relief.  It’s stopped, we caught up. 
Ghost died a few weeks ago. My sister sobbed, but I 
can’t quite seem to care. Domestic cats have aided in 
the extinction of thirty-three animal species, and all 
I can think is that there’s one less out there, hunting 
and killing. Sometimes, when I watch them pour 
from the shadows at the edges of our porch light, I 
think that if we really cared, we’d put them all down. 
Ghost died peacefully enough, curled up in one of 
the hay-filled shelters we built under our porch. 
 We haven’t seen a kitten in nearly a year, and 
their numbers are dwindling. I let myself lean against 
the glass door and waggle my finger at Firsty, who 



Felis Catus: Harbinger

Aisthesis      Volume 10,  201950

waits patiently outside. My sister walks up next to 
me, crunching on a piece of toast. She pauses.
 “Who’s that cat?” she asks, panic clear in her 
voice. I look up. A kitten squats underneath a patio 
chair, scarfing down day-old cat food. It casts a wary 
glance at us, eyes still the watery blue of youth. Its 
ears twitch and swivel, both tips complete, intact, 
whole. That pit in my stomach reopens, a gaping, 
cavernous hole.
 It begins again.


