A Pause Between Lives
catharine j. anderson
The door had been closed for so long that the cat forgot what lay on the other side. Or maybe she just preferred the mystery to the reality.
In this life, she was a silky black Maine Coon—an otherworldly, velvet dream of a creature half-dissolved in naptime, wandering through internal landscapes only she could see. She moved like smoke between warm spots. Soft as she looked, though, there was a stubborn, subterranean streak in her. Push her off a chair? Good luck. She'd jump right back before you had a chance to sit.
She stood at the back door, screaming as if her soul was being shredded, throwing herself against the frame like getting to the garden was a matter of life or death.
Her human kicked the screen open, slapping a mosquito off her ankle while a cloud of bugs blew past into the kitchen.
The cat didn't run out. She took two unhurried steps forward, flopped directly onto the wooden door sill, and began lazily licking a paw while staring out into nowhere.
Her human stood holding the door open, annoyed, bugs buzzing around her ears. "You just wanted the option, didn't you?"
She died how she lived—indoors, warm, unimpressed. Her departure was so feather-light her human barely noticed it happen: mid-nap, her whiskers twitched once between two thoughts, weighing the air here against the air there, and she simply changed her mind mid-breath. She drifted off right on the radiator, ignoring the ninety-dollar bed her human bought three days before.
Then came the fog, the weightlessness, and finally, the Great Gate: a massive slab of weathered timber set into an infinite wall of raw stone. Beyond its frame lay the Wild, though "wild" hardly captured it. It wasn’t a landscape or a country; it was an unformed ocean of pure potentiality, a shimmering, uncarved kinetic soup where every possible type of existence churned at once.
Looking out past the threshold was like staring into a liquid mirror of raw becoming. Threads of unmanifested lives coiled and untangled in the mist—the cold, sharp adrenaline of an astronaut tethered over a neon moon, the heavy, crushing silence of a deep-sea leviathan drifting through abyss-troughs, the ink-stained heat of a 1920s Paris attic filled with cheap wine and poetry. None of these lives existed yet, but all of them were waiting, suspended like sparks in a rising draft, ready to take shape the moment a soul stepped out to claim them. It was a chaotic, beautiful ocean of endless possibilities, thick with the scent of unspent tomorrows and waiting to be lived.
Souls shuffled forward, sprinting through the gate the second they hit the front of the line.
At the threshold, the Gatekeeper stepped aside. "The gate is open. You can go on out."
She stood there, glassy-eyed, staring past him at something nobody else could see. Cosmic dust blew past her ears. She stayed put.
"You can go out now," the Gatekeeper said, checking his ledger. "You can come back anytime. The Gate doesn't close. The corral isn't locked. Go out, you can always come back in."
"Right, right, right," the cat said, looking back into the room from wherever her mind had been. She looked back at the warm holding area, then crossed her paws.
"Are you going?" the Gatekeeper asked.
"It looks a little intense out there,” the cat replied.
"I've been holding this massive cosmic gate wide open for three minutes," the Gatekeeper said.
She stretched a paw across the boundary line, felt the wild rush of raw cosmos against her claws, pulled it right back, and licked it clean. "Maybe later,” she said.
The Gatekeeper rubbed his eyes, running a finger down the parchment. "Look. Mountain climber? Baker? Deep-sea diver? 1920s Parisian poet?"
"Nah,” she replied.
"Back inside, then?" he asked.
"No. I'll just sleep on it."
The Gatekeeper stared at her ledger entry, then looked down at her. "Wait... your species is feline, and your name on the sheet is literally Cat?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, Jesus," he muttered, dropping his hands. "Isn't that funny. You're literal cat energy."
"What's that mean?" she asked.
"You never actually wanted to go out," he laughed, shaking his head. "You just wanted to make me open the door."
The cat looked at the infinite void, then back at the doorframe. Her whiskers twitched. She didn't march through, didn't step back. She just flopped right down in the center of the doorway, tail thumping lazily against the stone. A soul behind her tried to dodge around her. She let out a razor-thin hiss without bothering to unseal her eyes.
"Leave it open," she muttered, settling into the draft. "I'm thinking."