Katie curls up next to me on her parents’ loveseat, acrylics picking nervously at a torn seam in the fabric. “I have something strange to tell you.”
I smile and take her other hand in mine. “I doubt it’s as strange as you think.” Katie and I have been seeing one another for almost a year, and I know I’ll marry her. We prefer poetry to people, have the same taste in music and in black-and-white horror. I’ve opened up to Katie about my family troubles, my deadbeat parents, my addict grandfather, and she’s opened up to me about insecurities with her body, binging and purging.
She fixes me in the magnetic pull of her eyes, unblinking. “I’m a cat-person,” she says.
“I had a dog at my grandfather’s, but the thing hated me. I can adjust.”
“No,” she says. “Not like that. Like this.” And slowly she pushes the tips of her fingernails into her jaw and pulls off her own face.
+
It surprised me how quickly the Perdys adjusted to me, how much they seemed to like me even. Not that I’ve ever met any of my past partners’ families nor been allowed to get that close.
Katie’s dad, Tommy, and her teenage brother, Ari, invited me out wall-climbing the second time I came around their house, and I’ve since experienced the two of them hurling themselves from plastic boulder to plastic boulder while I struggle and wheeze below on at least nine other occasions. We sometimes watch competitive climbing on the big-screen in their living room on Saturdays, trays of pepperoni sticks and cold cuts laid out on the coffee table, the three of us shouting in horror and excitement at the skill demonstrated on-screen. Calliope, Katie’s mom, taught me how to play ping-pong on the table in their game room with Katie watching. After she beat me, she came over and cupped my face beneath the jaw. “You’ll do well in this family,” she said. I almost felt like purring.
+
With her people face on, Katie is pretty. Not in a classical sense, not like a Simone Simon, but almost sneakily: curly brown hair, dark eyes, a pair of freckles on her left cheek. When she smiles, she shows all her teeth.
+
Katie’s cat face looks like a brown tabby: two large wishbone-shaped markings on her forehead, a sweet pink nose. Her pointy ears stick slightly out to either side. Her eyes become large and green and slit-pupiled. Still pretty, just different. Still smiles with every fang.
+
Family game night with the Perdys can get intense. They’re a competitive family, and proud, so I’ve learned to be a gracious loser. One night, during Monopoly, I was managing a hotel on Marvin Gardens when Tommy happened to land there and pretended not to notice.
“You owe me $1200.00,” I said, maybe a little smugly. And Tommy, he looked me dead in the eye, his body suddenly rigid, and swear-to-god hissed at me.
“Daddy,” Katie scolded.
The feral look in his eyes faded as quickly as it had appeared and he grinned good-naturedly at his children, his wife. “Son,” he said to me, “how do you feel about cutting a deal?”
+
“We’ve been around for a long time,” Katie shared with me, riding up to the top of the Ferris wheel at our town’s pop-up carnival (she loves being up high). “Cat people, I mean. Of course, people know about the reliefs carved by the Ancient Egyptians. Bastet, Sekhmet, Tefnut. But we go even farther back than that. Sabre-toothed tiger people once hunted mammoths in the Ice Age.” She touches her lips self-consciously as the Ferris wheel rocks to a halt at the apex. “I’d hate to have fangs that long,” she says. “I would cut myself.”
“I think your fangs are lovely,” I say, “just the way they are.”
+
Katie’s favourite movie is Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. We’ve watched it a total of nine times throughout our relationship.
+
Katie’s family are all carnivores. They disguise it in public by ordering side salads with their steaks and hiding the leaves in their napkins when they think no one is paying attention. My grandfather used to do something similar with alcohol on the rare occasion we went out at all.
+
I had my head in Katie’s lap one night, Tippi Hedren cowering beneath a legion of seagulls on the screen of her laptop. I asked, “Katie, do cat people always know they’re cat people?”
She was distracted, a pepperoni stick disappearing slowly and methodically between her lips. “Most of the time, yes.”
“How did you know?”
“Mom and dad told me when I was five. Sat me down, showed me how to remove my people face.”
“But what if you didn’t have parents? Or your parents were ashamed?”
Katie ignored me. A seagull had broken its body against phone booth glass.
+
“I’m sorry we get so rowdy at family suppers. Mom, Dad, Ari… They have a lot of opinions that need to be shared, immediately.”
“It’s more than fine. I promise.”
“Were your folks like that? Before everything bad, I mean?”
I give Katie’s hand a squeeze. “Before doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m perfect right now.”
+
I accidentally summoned the entire Perdy clan one time by opening a tin of tuna for lunch. The can opener whirred. I was fiddling with the jagged edge of the lid, when suddenly there were Katie and Calliope, standing at the kitchen island. Tommy rounded the corner, brow furrowed. Ari skidded across the hardwood floor in his socks. “What’s for lunch?” he asked.
I laughed in spite of myself and in spite of the annoyed looks from Katie and her parents. Ari was the only Perdy who laughed along. “Yeah, I guess that is pretty funny,” he admitted.
+
I rub at my incisor in the bathroom mirror. My tooth is sharp, like a cat’s.
+
Ari is weird. When I first met him, he was running through the sprinkler in the Perdy’s front yard, a Crazy Carpet strapped to his chest with cord. As Katie screamed and swore and made a mad dash across the yard to turn off the spigot, I watched Ari throw himself against the sopping lawn and slide four feet to rest against the sidewalk pavement.
“That looks painful,” I said as the sprinklers died.
He looked up at me, soaked fringe hiding his eyes. “Your mom looks painful.”
I learned later from Katie that Ari doesn’t have many friends at school. Even among the Perdys, he’s an oddball; the rest of them hate getting wet.
+
Both cats and cat-people can squeeze into impossibly small spaces. Katie’s comforted by cramped spots on airplanes, in elevators. She loves sleeping with her head fully beneath the covers. I try to relate, try to find comfort like her, but I can never make myself fit.
+
Before Katie, I spent a lot of time in bed. I ate taquitos from the convenience store on the corner for lunch and dinner, no breakfast. I watched TV, the same reruns over and over; black-and-white sitcoms and black-and-white movies, cut down for time. I waited for something to happen. I thought about dying.
+
“You know, cats and people have historically been enemies.”
I run my fingers through Katie’s hair. On the laptop screen, crows dive-bomb screaming schoolchildren. “People love cats. They’re man’s second-best friend.”
Katie slips a pepperoni slice from the pizza into her mouth. “It used to be common practice to burn cats for sport,” she says. “In Medieval France, cats would be bound in wicker baskets and set on fire for a crowd. People made a real show of setting their whiskers alight, tying torches to their tails. They thought of their death yowls as music.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Not many people do,” Katie says, “but the killing of cats brought rats and plague. Cats got their revenge. And cat people too. We were burned as werewolves, our faces stolen, but we learned how to borrow others’ faces to survive.”
“I’m sorry you have to hide.”
She shrugs and pats my cheek. “People suck,” she says. “But you know that already.”
+
If you want to demonstrate love for your cat-person partner, scratch them beneath the chin. Run your fingers through their hair in one direction. Stroke their back.
+
Katie is the first partner I’ve had to tell me she loves me. She’s the first to call me a pet name, the first to ask after my feelings, the first I haven’t had to beg to stop shouting. Katie is the first girlfriend to treat me like a human-person.
+
Katie once unraveled my entire sweater after becoming enthralled by a loose string.
+
Ari and Katie don’t always get along. I came over one time and heard them screaming at one another in the kitchen. Ari had said something rude, I don’t remember what, and I entered the kitchen just in time to see Katie slash her nails across Ari’s face. Fur erupted from deep scratches. Blood spattered Ari’s tattered skin. He hissed between suddenly exposed fangs and scurried away, up to his room. When next I saw him, his human face had been knitted back to normal, save for three angry red marks. “Didn’t need a replacement, fortunately,” Calliope had whispered to me after supper once Ari had slunk away and Tommy and Katie had started on the dishes. “Just a little thread.”
If your cat-person partner wants to demonstrate love to you, they will bring you small, edible presents like chocolates or fruit snacks. They will rub up against your body. They will fall asleep with their head in your lap.
+
Katie can see in the dark, but only without her people face.
+
Katie raises chickens in her backyard. She does this because she says they taste better, though I can’t tell the difference. One night, I woke to Katie’s bed empty, my body snarled up in her sheets. I rose and made my way to the bathroom, but passing the window, movement caught my eye. In the backyard, Katie crouched over a flailing chicken. The bird righted itself to run, and Katie dashed to cut it off. Her people face was a puddle of skin drooping from the railing of the deck. Her eyes shone lime-yellow in the dark. I watched silently until she had finished her game, until the chicken had grown too exhausted and wounded to continue, until she had placed its delicate neck between her teeth and snapped her jaws shut.
+
On Christmas, I learned that bells are banned in the Perdy house. “Far too distracting,” Tommy informed me.
+
“Does removing your face hurt at all?”
“Not after you get used to it. But it’s always an irritation. At least a prickle or a poke.”
+
Tommy got me alone once and asked me about my intentions with his daughter.
“I love her,” I said. “I want to marry her.”
“I think it’s only fair to warn you that cat-people rarely form pairs. Calliope and I are an exception, not a rule. I’ve never heard of a lasting partnership between a cat-person and a human-person.”
“But I’m not like other human-people. I love your daughter. And I really love cats.”
+
Katie purrs when she’s very happy, usually when I’ve done something romantic like cooked her a salmon dinner or brought her catnip in a bouquet.
+
“Do you think Katie only dates you to make mom and dad angry?” Ari asked me.
“What do you mean? Your mom and dad like me, don’t they?”
Ari shrugged and chugged his glass of milk. “I don’t know. I think you’re a freak.”
+
Cat-people hate being snuck up on. I scared Calliope one time so bad that her hair literally stood entirely on end, like she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket. I’d just been standing outside the bathroom, waiting to use the toilet.
+
Sometimes, Katie says she forgets she’s a cat-person. “It’s how I imagine wearing glasses is,” she tells me. “You know they’re there, but sometimes you forget. And you never think about how they’re helping your shitty eyes work.”
I don’t wear glasses, so I can’t verify. I just know I couldn’t possibly forget being a cat.
+
I’ve never seen Tommy use a glass for water. He always drinks directly out of the tap.
+
I can tell person-Katie is upset with me because she’ll refuse to talk to me or text me back for hours. I can tell cat-Katie is upset with me because her pointy ears will flatten themselves to her scalp. I prefer cat-Katie in these situations. It’seasier to tell when I’ve done something wrong.
+
Katie and Ari and their parents still go on family vacations together: to Disney World, to Mexico, to Ypres. I’ve decided to tag along on a trip to Barcelona in the fall. I’m thinking of proposing outside the Sagrada Família.
+
“Your mom said she was able to fix Ari’s face where you scratched him.”
The screen zooms in on a man with his eyes pecked out, blood running down his cheeks.
Katie mm-hmms, eyes fixated on the gore. “He’s such a dickhead, isn’t he?”
“I was wondering, what if she couldn’t fix him? If you’d torn his face in two?”
“We’d have to find him a new one. And I’d make sure it was someone ugly.”
+
“Katie’s breaking up with you soon. I heard her talking to mom and dad. She said she met a new guy at her gym, said he’s got cute fangs. She didn’t even seem sad about it.”
+
I haven’t seen Calliope or Tommy’s cat-faces yet, but Ari tried to scare me once by caterwauling into the room and ripping his person-face away. He was an orange tabby, looked nothing like his sister. I stared him down as he quieted and slunk sulkily from the room. I’ve never been scared of cats, and I’m certainly not going to start now.
+
In the Perdys’ bathroom mirror, I press a finger to my jawline. The skin there springs back, the bone hard beneath. I give an experimental pinch. I feel a prickle, a poke.
+
Katie assures me her parents like me. “You’ve charmed them,” she tells me one night while we’re washing dishes together. “Are you sure you’re not a cat?”
+
I sanitize the Exact-O knife as best I can, searing both sides on the hot burner of the stove, waiting for it to cool before pressing the blade to my jowl.
+
I never met my parents. They were too high to care for me, as was the grandfather to whom they gave me away. I cared for myself, made my own decisions. I’ve never known how badly I’ve been in want of a family until now.
+
The tip of the blade slides smoothly through my skin. Pain shoots through my face. Up my spine, an alarm bell rings. I have to make the cut a little wider if I’m going to be able to get my finger beneath though, if I’m going to be able to pull.
+
“Can you become a cat if you’re not one already? Maybe we’re all cats underneath our people-faces. Maybe you just need the courage to cut.”
“Sweetie, I’m trying to watch the movie. Eat your popcorn.”
+
Calliope baked me a cake for my birthday. She had never baked before, and did such an awful job that the Perdys and I cried tears of laughter looking at the sagging, blackened husk of her attempt. Cats don’t have taste buds for sweetness, and evidently, neither do cat-people. We ordered KFC instead, and Ari ran to the convenience store to fetch vanilla ice cream for dessert.
+
Sometimes I catch Katie kneading the bed. She scowls when I call her out, but smiles when she thinks I can’t see. It’s my favourite thing of the many wonderful things she does.
+
I slip a finger into the cut. It stings. I give a gentle pull.
+
“We love how you take care of Katie. We like how much time you spend with the family. But son, you have to know this relationship is temporary.”
“What I think my husband is trying to say is that we’re sorry. We know you’ve had a troubled relationship with your own parents. We’re glad we’ve been able to provide you with some comfort. But rather than clinging to something fleeting, sometimes it’s best to move on. Katie will understand. We’ll all understand.”
+
Blood trickles down my neck, too much blood. Someone bangs on the bathroom door. “Whoever’s in there, are you almost finished? I have to use the litter box.”
+
Katie’s eyes are closed, but I know she’s not really asleep. Even in the dead of night, I’m sure she’s always listening to the rise and fall of my breath, to the scurrying of mice in the walls.
+
I rouse myself on the bathroom tile to find the Perdys standing over me. Tommy, Calliope, Ari, and Katie; their faces fuzz in and out of focus so that I can’t tell if they’re concerned or surprised, people or cats. I reach a hand to them, and I can see the red shimmer of my own blood on my fingers. I pass my hand over my face and my palm slides, slick, through gushing wet. I’ve cut something important. I’ve cut too deep. The white tile swims with blood and my clothes are soaked with vital fluid.
+
Cats have been known to eat their loved ones, their people-pets, after death. Not out of malice, but self-preservation. In a study of feral cats and human corpses, it was found that cats typically start by eating away the tender flesh of the human face.
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Benjamin Johnson (he/him) lives and writes on Treaty 6 Territory in the Canadian Prairies, his work focusing on queering space through magic and camp. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has had work published previously in Dark Rainbow and On the Run. If you’d like to speak with him about cats, Tyra Banks, or the politics of postmodernism, you can find him on Instagram @benja.dam or reach out through email at benjamin.adam@vcfa.edu.