There was a woman not long ago who lived in a small farmhouse in the valley. Though she lived alone she was mostly happy, with her chickens—all of them named Jolene—and her two goats and the sun-jostled strawberry patch to keep her busy. And she had a little black and white cat, spotted like the splatter of a busted pen, who lived in the barn and kept things in order vis-à-vis managing the mouse population. The cat had no name. It was just a barn cat of no special consequence who appeared in the hay one afternoon and never bothered to leave. The woman liked the look of her with her marble-green eyes, so she left a bowl of milk out in the evenings to keep her around. 

           One spring the woman found that each time she stood a spattering of pain flickered across her torso. She looked up a phone number and called one of her twin daughters—this daughter lived in the city and had a medical degree, as well as a law degree, and was two semesters away from a doctorate in history. The daughter told her mother “Go to the doctor in town to see about getting a CT scan,” so the woman went and was told that she had cancer all across her lungs and would need intensive treatment, which she could not afford. The woman called her daughter to tell her the news, and her daughter told her “You probably got lung cancer from living with Dad. All those years of cigarette smoke. We could sue him and use the money for the bills. I can represent you.” But the woman had no desire to see her ex-husband, even if it was to bring him to court, so she refused. “Well, I finish my semester in a month. Can you hold off on dying until then? I can try to come down to see what we can do,” said the daughter.

           The woman went home and sat out in the sun-jostled strawberry patch, and picked and ate one off the bush even though it was not fully swollen ripe. The warm black tarp was nice on her aging knees, and she felt a swell of something she could not quite name, and then her little black and white cat ambled out into the yard, stretching long-legged in the sun. The woman watched for a moment, then hurled a strawberry at the cat, who would have a nice long life eating mice and drinking her milk. It skittered back into the barn, marble-green eyes peering out from the shadows. 

           In the morning, the woman rose to find that the pain in her torso was lessened. She wiggled around to be sure, and felt her muscles soften at the movement as they had when she was a much younger woman, still spry and flexible. The woman, pleased, put on her boots and went out to the barn to begin her chores. There on the hay sat two black and white cats. They both looked like her barn cat, with their splatter-spots and marble-green eyes. She scratched her head. She could not tell which was her barn cat, and which was some new, matching cat—perhaps the original had a sister. Whatever the case, there were no mice to be seen in the barn and the woman felt bad about acting out yesterday, so she put out a larger bowl of milk with a sprinkle of cinnamon and drove into town for her follow-up appointment. 

           “One of the most malignant tumors has entirely disappeared,” said the doctor, shaking her head. She ran two more scans to be sure. “Maybe the machine had a smudge,” she finally concluded. “Anyway, this is good news. This is a much more operable situation.” The woman did not quite know what to make of all this, so she shuffled around in her purse for a phone number and called her other daughter. This daughter lived on the coast and did psychic readings for tourists. The daughter told her mother “Sometimes the universe grants us miracles. Maybe it’s a sign, a second chance to change something.” The woman did not feel much like changing anything just then and so she went home to feed the animals and decided to think about changing something tomorrow. 

           In the morning, the woman felt even better than she had the day before. She hopped around from one foot to another while she dressed, feeling agile for the first time in many years. She went into the barn to begin her day and sitting on the hay were four black and white cats. All spotted and splattered. Well now, she thought, they’ve brought the whole litter to my barn. She considered that four barn cats might be too many cats, but she was in a good mood and they looked very pretty sitting on the hay, and even if she wanted to clear out the extras, it was impossible to tell which was the original barn cat she so liked. So she left them a full pail of milk and went out to paint the fence. 

           That evening, the woman sat on the front porch and admired the clean white fence and the barn and the Jolens pecking around in the dirt. Her twin daughters always loved the barn and the hay and all of the animals. She remembered how excited she had been to raise them here, out in the countryside with her then-husband. The woman was thrilled to have twins. When she was pregnant, she imagined them growing together, and though she saw the ultrasounds of dual embryos and knew they would each become their own person, she could only picture them as one unit within her, one daughter splitting into two just at the moment they were born. That night when she went back inside, the woman could not sleep for a long time and the farmhouse felt very quiet. 

           Over the next week, the woman woke every day to find that she felt a little better than the day before. And every morning she went out to the hay and found that the black and white cats had again doubled in number. This was certainly becoming too many cats, but her old body felt so young that she could not be bothered to care—there was so much else to do, so much running and dancing, and the strawberry plants needing tending to before the harvest season. She hauled out the old pig trough, filled it up with milk, and went about her day. 

           The woman was scheduled for a consultation to then schedule her surgery and determine a follow-up schedule for the treatment plan. Schedules upon schedules, she thought. She arrived just in time for her appointment and managed to hold still for all of the scans. When she emerged the doctor was puzzling over the images, shaking her head and reviewing them one by one. “I think we need to buy a new machine,” she told the woman. “You have no cancer at all showing up in your lungs, and I can’t fathom why.” The woman did not know what to make of this but she called both of her daughters and told them the good news. The first daughter congratulated her and rushed off the call to get back to her studying. The second daughter let out a long “Ahhh” as if she had known this would be the case all along and was relieved to be free of the burden of keeping it a secret. The woman hung up this second call, and though she was relieved, it was a bit disappointing that she now had nothing to call her daughters about. She had even begun to memorize their phone numbers, but now she supposed she would forget them again.

           To keep up with the milk demands of the still-multiplying cats, the woman bought a cow. She tried to keep it in the barn but it became difficult to find the cow with its black and white spots against the backdrop of the black and white cats that now saturated the hay stacks up to the ceiling. So she moved the cow to a makeshift milk shed and spent much of her time shuffling back and forth between the shed and the barn to make sure all of the cats were fed. The strawberry plants still needed tending, the Jolenes grew restless, and the goats butted angrily at her thighs. Still, she felt she could not turn out the cats, even as they grew more aggressive and would not be satiated. They huddled in clusters in the barn, rushed across the floor and darted through the rafters. Though she wore thick gloves to bring in the buckets of milk, the swatting and pinching of hundreds of little paws left scratches all over her skin. 

           At night she lay in bed and listened to the meowing rise and fall in waves from the barn. The melody of the unruly cats reminded her of her daughters’ early childhood, their dual screams that seemed to alternate so that the house was never silent. Her husband had taken the truck and a pretty blonde waitress to South Carolina by that time. Alone with the twins, the woman lost twenty-five pounds and nearly all of her sleep. She loved them, she told herself over and over again, as they drained the life from her bones and grew, absorbing her whole world into their soft limbs and hungry bellies, their pairs of green eyes following her everywhere she went. Much of that time she could only remember as a gray haze, punctuated by her desperate fits of anger. The shouting somehow confirmed to her private self that she was still alive somewhere in that dissipating body. When the twins left home at eighteen, she did not try to stop them. 

           In the second week after her diagnosis and un-diagnosis, the woman realized that she had not eaten in almost two days, and desperately needed groceries. She left at dawn, trying to ignore the mounting yowls of the hungry cats behind her. Her hands shook at the wheel from exhaustion, and the horizon shivered in the rearview mirror. The woman went to the store and hurried through the aisles, thinking all the time of the mound of cats expanding in her barn. She arrived home and ate, then rushed out to handle the milking and feeding. The cats tumbled over each other to lick at the troughs. In her pocket, the woman’s phone buzzed. She had sent a message to her daughters, asking if they still might come down to visit her even though the cancer seemed to have gone.

           Too busy this semester. Sry. 

           Can’t make it right now either, but sometime else! 

           The woman felt nauseous in the sea of black and white spots. She was suddenly panicked. Where was her little barn cat? she wondered. It had been weeks since she had actually seen her—not since that first day when the second cat appeared. She must be in here somewhere, but which one was she? The woman sifted through fur, lifting each cat by the scruff and searching its marble-green eyes, but not one was familiar to her. She checked the cats until she could not stand it anymore and had to go inside to sleep.

           In the morning the woman tried to call her daughters again. Neither of them answered. She sat at the table and looked through the window at the barn, but she could not bring herself to take the milk out. The meowing grew louder as an hour passed, swelled into thunder and threatened to break the windows, but still she did not move. She thought only of watching her daughters drive away, the backs of their heads visible through the window, the rising and falling of her life with them and without them. Behind her, she heard a meow. At the open back door sat her little barn cat. The one she had loved for so long, and never given a name. She perched on the threshold watching the woman, saucer-eyed and waiting. The woman stood, and though the barn and farmhouse rocked from the screams of the cats outside, she ignored them and began to make her way forward. The space between them multiplied as she tried to reach her little cat, who turned and trotted off toward the mountains, but still the woman moved forward. She walked and walked toward her little barn cat, and kept on walking.

^{Fiction from The Hemlock Issue 7, Spring 2025}

About the Author