The boy in the brown coat gently lifted my chin with the curled fist of his hand. His mischievous eyes locked on my own. I grinned and the boy in the brown coat grinned back. My fingers numb in the frozen air were warmed in the pockets of his patch-work jacket. Then his lips would fall on mine. Cold blue air and cold blue ice melted in warm breathe and crimson lips.
One Year Earlier
Allistair McShambles lay strewn across a dark, plaid blanket. The sunbeam once positioned above his frail body now shone above the dresser. His pale green eyes closed forever.
The impossibly old ragamuffin had obstinately let me into his home ten years earlier.
Jingling keys in hand, I had opened the door to my first apartment, alive with hope, only to have a sharp set of incisors buried in my ankle. McShambles came with the property, just like the leaking ceiling and rusted faucet.
Our cohabitation was strained at first. The lord of the manor asserted his authority. He hissed, spat, and piled the bloody corpses of his rodent foe underneath my pillow. He possessed the penetrating eyes of an owl and the sharpened fangs of a tiger with the veracity of a lion. Unfortunately, my evolutionary pathway left me void of such impressive scare tactics.
For the first few months, I prowled the apartment with a menacing water spray bottle. Then, in a strange happenstance reminiscent of a Tom & Jerry cartoon, McShambles caught himself in between a wooden stud and drywall. The tables had turned.
His mews echoed through the wall. He pleaded for the mercy that he had never shown me and yet, I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic. I took two handfuls of his mottled gray fur in my hands and tugged sharply until his head popped loose from the plaster.
McShambles was eternally grateful. He repaid me by warming my lap for years to come. I listened to his worries, he rubbed my belly, and vice versa. Our bond transcended the species gap. He became my McShambles and I his Lilly.
McShambles had died and with him the last tenable string anchoring me to Boston snapped. My roots pulled from the Earth.
With characteristic immoderation, I boarded a plane to France. I planned a start and an end. The in-between was mine.
