The cat had herpes.

      Its snow white fur unmarred by any other colors, its blue eyes glistening with innocence, the cat had herpes. Long, thick strings of chartreuse mucus would shoot out of its little pink nose whenever it sneezed, which it did often. "I don't understand," the cat's owner had told the vet. "He's fixed, and he doesn't have any sores." The vet explained that the herpes virus was transmitted and expressed differently among species. The cat had herpes, and that was that.

The neighborhood was bad.

      During the evenings, the dissonant melodies of sirens would stumble through the air. One night, police cars pulled up to the convenience store a block away. The following day, the store had been boarded up, all of its merchandise hauled away in trucks, and the space remained unused ever since.
      Naturally, the herpetic cat was forbidden to go outside.
      The cat's owner excused the poor quality of the neighborhood because she liked her apartment. It was a spacious second-floor two bedroom with a fireplace and two balconies. Because of the seediness of the area she was able to haggle the landlord down to under $700 per month, a deal of which she was immensely proud.

The line was long.

      On a dry, frigid morning near the end of February, a line formed outside of the apartment on ground level. The line curved through the front gate, around the side of the beige apartment building to the door of Apartment No. 1. Those huddled in the line were a wrinkled and unkempt crowd, with dull, faded clothes loosely draped over their shoulders. Their faces sagged beneath the weight of their eyes, and their half-toothless mouths periodically issued forth stale breaths that froze upon leaving the body, giving shape to nights of fitful, interrupted sleep.
      The cat's owner opened the door to look at the line over the edge of the staircase. It was before seven in the morning on a Sunday, she hadn't had her coffee yet, and she wanted to know why, in the name of God, there were three dozen people in a line outside. Carelessly having left the door open, the cat's owner gave the perfect opportunity for the cat to escape, which it did readily.

The man was crying.

      The cat was intercepted by an elderly man in the front of the line. As the owner came down, she found him holding the cat in his arms, gently cooing to it and running his hand down its back.
      "This your cat, ma'am?" asked the man.
      "Yes! Thank you so much," said the owner, taking the cat back.
      "Don' mention it," murmured the old man, the lump in his throat garbling his words, sparse tears dropping down his cheeks and skirting the edges of his chapped smile.
      "Are you okay?" asked the owner.
      The old man's smile stretched further across his face. "I am now," he said. As he walked away, the cat's owner noticed a small paper bag crackling between his cracked, mossy fingernails. A trace of ammonia silently drifted by.
      The cat sneezed.

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