Perched upon the rooftop sat a cat bathed in silver starlight, green eyes glinting toward the cloudy, moonless sky. The blare of a bus horn drew their attention to the shiny, shifting city below. The wind picked up, carrying cigarette smoke and smog with it. The cat’s tail twitched in passive acceptance.

In truth, the black cat reveled in the street-light strewn, steely and alive asphalt jungle they were all too attached to, the way their short fur was rustled by the crisp breeze, and the cool sting of the building’s shingles on their paws. And the way their body would morph into a small, inky and indiscernible void… it wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough. There was nothing left here to quell the wailing wishes caught in their head.

Why’d it have to go and be this way? was all they could wonder when the wistful winter nights became too picture-perfect. When the sun peeked over the horizon, it would cease to be. It always will, they assured themself with a resigned huff. That was the one certainty for the human turned cat. It would go back, back to a body less suited for them, trailed shoe-backs and being trampled into the linoleum of high school hallways, and they’d find themselves lost in comfortable pain at home.

Home was a bittercold apartment that bred isolation far too unlike the frostbitten alleyways they knew fondly by heart. It was a loud, one-floor existence with carpets to dull the banging of plywood doors and clattering of cracked dollar-store dishes. There was no carpet or antidote potent enough to remedy the screaming matches in the dining room and dreary, flicker-lit kitchen. The only weak, watery painkiller was the noisy neighbor’s bass-filled music blasting almost nightly across the way, bright neons filtered through the greasy windowpane that could have shook and danced with the rest of it.

And on the other side, across the way, the cat turned human couldn’t help their wandering, wondering mind. What must it be like, their mind ailed them, to be just across the way? It was one measly, simple street lamp away. They thought about if the people across the way wondered back at their noise. The cat hoped they did not. They only hoped that one day, they would be forever further across the way.

The sun gleamed over the shimmering, skyscraper-littered horizon, promising school and choice words in the morning if the cat turned human didn’t react correctly and accordingly. With one last longing stare, they turned and leaped from roof to awning to an eventual particular street light, next to neighbors and loud music and maybe even love.

And so, the cat jumped across the way to a purposefully screenless, ajar window to a bittercold room, trading their tail and warm fur for a body just too curved and delicate to be theirs.

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