Noah Put the Cat Out

In a crooked New England port, fog curls like cigar smoke around a row house whose clapboards remember the salt of 1812. Noah, a laconic sailor with a chronometer instead of a pulse, returns from a seven-year absence clutching a ship’s cat named Jonah, a tabby whose fur crackles with static whenever a lie is spoken. The town, once whaling, now traffics in gossip; every shutter is a peephole, every church bell a subpoena. Noah’s wife, Hester—half–mermaid, half–Puritan—has been renting his sea-chest as a cradle for her lover’s child, a fact she confesses only to the cat, who blinks like a conscience. When a nor’easter flings the pet through a stained-glass rose, the shards spell “RETURN” on the floorboards, and Noah understands the animal must be evicted before the house itself slips anchor. Over one lunar night, he chases the feline through moonlit attics, across a graveyard where marble angels hiss, into a tannery whose vats bubble with indigo that stains his hands the color of guilt. Each time he opens a door, another decade of his life falls out: a billet-doux from Tahiti, a dried placenta mistaken for ginger, a logbook doctored to hide a mutiny whose sole witness was Jonah. By dawn, the cat has multiplied into a squall of silhouettes on the wall; Noah realizes he is not trying to expel the beast but the part of himself that refuses to stay ashore. He nails his boots to the pier, slits the throat of his compass, and sails down Main Street on a skiff of moonlight, leaving Hester to rock an empty cradle. The cat sits on the roof, tail curled like a question mark, watching the house slowly sink into its own cellar as if the earth were a whale swallowing a pebble.