Sasha, my ghost cat

I'm hopeful my ghost cat has moved in again.

I suppose I should explain my ghost cat. Some thirty-two years ago, when I was a graduate student, I owned a small, feisty black cat named Sasha.

I lived in a second floor, one-room apartment in an old house, with the porch roof just outside one window and access to the wooden fire escape out the side window. In the Illinois summers I had no air conditioning, so I tried to keep cool with a box fan and open windows.

I wanted to keep Sasha an indoor cat because I lived on a relatively busy thoroughfare in Champaign. Sasha had her own agenda. She found a way to pop the screen out of the front window, stroll across the porch roof to the fire escape, then bound down the stairs. She would eventually sneak upstairs with one of the other residents and sit outside my apartment door until I returned home.

Until the time she didn't. Tommy, the alcoholic hippie down the hall, strolled upstairs that evening to announce that he put a dead cat in the dumpster and figured it was mine. My friend down the hall and I raided that dumpster at 10:30 that night to find the reeking garbage bag that contained the remains of my Sasha, and buried her on university farm property late at night.

Soon, another cat found me, a grey and white polydactyl I named Kismet, who followed me halfway across town to become my cat. It was fall by then, and I no longer needed to keep my windows open. Kismet, like all young cats, would go into a chasing-nothing sort of frenzy, running around the small apartment, bouncing off the walls.

Except. Except that he would stop at the window, the window that Sasha used to break out of, and peer around the corner to the side of the porch, then run around to the side window as if watching something go down the stairs. And then friends would come and ask me if I had a cat, and I explained that Kismet was out somewhere, and they would ask, "What about the black cat?"

Eventually I moved, and moved again, and moved halfway across the country and back again, and I forgot about Sasha. But then, day before yesterday, my cat Chuckie started chasing around the living room. I thought nothing of it because cats do that. But then he turned a hard right and slammed into the French doors to the dining room. He stared into the dark room as if he saw something we didn't, something that crept away from him.

If Sasha has found me again, I welcome her with open arms.