The OCelot by Brian Gibson

The ocelots were hissing and raking their nails against their crate, exercising their acid young voices in protest. Sylvia had found them from a breeder several hours out of town, living in a trailer surrounded by cages full of squabbling ermines, spider monkeys, brackish peacocks. Inside the trailer, neon parrots puffed and squawked in argument with each other. In the midst of the clamor, the breeder held up one of the ocelot kittens, the strongest and healthiest of the bunch, and it kicked its tiny legs and mewled uselessly. Its eyes, only having opened a couple of weeks ago, were open to everything, wells of glossy ink transcribing details indiscriminately. Sylvia must have been in love. Seeing the ocelot kitten only confirmed it to her. Even at such a young age, the ocelot seemed to possess something inviolable about it, a sacred dignity that repelled its circumstances. The breeder offered her the kitten. Its fur was matted and pungent. In a cage upon the table, the ocelot’s siblings crawled over each other and sucked against the blanket laid upon the floor of the cage. 

Sylvia found that the ocelot grew to fit its enclosure. No longer penned up in a cage with its siblings, it grew wiry and athletic and mastered its once ungainly limbs to a dancer’s precision. She bought the largest cat tree available for the corner of her apartment, but her table leg was soon shredded anyway. She regretted that she could not spend more time with it but it couldn’t be helped. By way of apology, she hired a pet sitter to come by twice a day, an aging man who made a game of offering his stout fingers in a little wiggle across the carpet for the ocelot to chase and nip at. She offered him forty dollars per day. He accepted graciously, though she suspected only out of social obligation; he would have done it whether she paid him or not. 

“Ocelots aren’t meant for apartments,” the sitter said to Sylvia one day. “They aren’t meant for pets at all, really.” He shrugged, as if to say that he had not said anything at all. Playing the straight man, the advantageously rational one. So that's how this would go. Sylvia shored herself up. 

“What am I meant to do then?” Sylvia asked. “Surely you don’t expect me to just turn her loose to the first buyer. She’s attached to me. It would be cruel to abandon her now.” “It’s none of my business what you do,” he said. Sylvia saw that he was offering a compromise. How perfectly generous of him, how like a gentleman! 

“It certainly isn’t. But I know you mean well.” 

A strange night chill drained into the hall from beneath the door of her apartment, slowly flooding the air with cold. Sylvia opened the door hesitantly; the door latch clicked to life from rest in its alcove. She was in the habit of opening doors slowly, almost reverently, like every room she entered happened to be a crypt. The apartment was silent. None of the low mutters or growls that she had become accustomed to. She called the ocelot out from its hiding place, underneath the sofa, in the kitchen cabinets above the refrigerator, inside the wardrobe burrowed into fuzzy folds of clothing. But there in the bedroom, there the window stood wide open, substanceless night radiating in. Sylvia ran to the window and banged it shut before anything more could escape or enter. The fire escape coiled along the walls of the apartment, a snake’s ridged back. The ocelot was gone. 

It could only have been the sitter, that arrogant, meddling thief. She had not broken down at his feet, begging his forgiveness, and so he had opened the window and let the ocelot escape, damn the consequences, damn her very wellbeing. It was enough to punish Sylvia. Men—hypocritical sanctimonious men like him thought that they were just mouthpieces of some necessary law, some law they couldn’t even name when asked. Sylvia knocked on his door, very nearly punching through. 

“Sylvia!” said the sitter. “Is something the matter? Why, you very nearly broke down my door just there.” 

“You tell me,” Sylvia said, exhaling a long, ragged rope of venomous anger. “First you come into my house and tell me to get rid of my own pet. Then I come home and find my window open, my ocelot nowhere to be found? Does that sound like a coincidence to you?” 

The sitter gestured ridiculously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I would never do anything of the sort.” The man’s face flickered signals of desperation, frantic search for his escape route. “Whether or not I think you should own an ocelot in the first place, why would I want an ocelot running around the city? I don’t want her to be hurt any more than you do. So please, calm down and we can start looking for her before animal control finds her.” 

So logical, wasn’t it? But Sylvia knew there was another explanation, something so obvious but just not yet seen yet. And then there it was, the true horror of her situation suddenly in focus. “I know what you did. You only opened the window to make me think she escaped. Then you took her yourself. I’ll bet she’s right there, isn’t she?” A small sob escaped from Sylvia. Her ocelot was so close and yet unreachable, staring at the commotion from her hiding place in the unfamiliar landscape, eyes horribly alive. Perhaps she would recognize Sylvia’s voice and come running out to her and she could carry her back into her apartment and lock the doors and windows. 

The man stared in disbelief, finally and firmly put on the defense. Sylvia thought with gleeful spite that he must be unused to it. “I don’t know how to convince you that I didn’t do this.” 

“Let me look in your apartment,” said Sylvia. The man let go of his door and Sylvia tore in. She did not bother with care or respect. She upturned tables, sent pillows across the living room, hollowed out cabinets. The wreckage overtook the floors. Sylvia had already realized by the time she entered the bedroom that the ocelot was not here and her destruction was now truly mindless, only by habit. She was expected to finish now what she had started. How far could her ocelot have gotten? Nearly to the edge of the city if she ran, jumping across roofs and fire escapes, staying away from footpaths and from the view of animal control. She could cross through the suburbs and into rural America, vibrant with life and scurrying rodents burrowing beneath blades of wheat. She would stay out of the porchlights and away from the poisoned traps. She would hunt to eat and drink from broken hoses. Then, the houses would dissolve into nothing at all, an incomplete diffusion, and then trees would spring from the ground and multiply, foliage pressing down in shelter from all angles so that no eye could follow the ocelot any longer as she made her pilgrimage.