Cat Love

Cat Love by Tomás Q. Morín, a strange and depressing tale, offers low opinions of humans and portends a troubled future due to their disregard for the planet.  

Written from a cat's point of view, the compact novel is a reflection on maintaining sanity and dignity during an unjust death. The cat offers blunt advice: Humans should appreciate the world and life they have been given. “Cats don’t believe in heaven, because we don’t need to,” the narrator suggests. “Human heaven is for suckers who look around at this gorgeous world we live in and think, ‘There’s got to be something better than this.’” 

Rather than long for some unknown future, cats go about “living their best lives.”  

The tortoiseshell cat does not reveal her name, explaining that detail does not matter after experiencing multiple names and owners over the years. Most humans don’t realize how traumatic dislocation is for intelligent territorial creatures, instead rationalizing and inventing stories, dismissing the challenges of making one's way in strange new surroundings. 

Along the way, some humans are kind and thoughtful and others are downright cruel. The cat's early years are spent underneath a coffeeshop, whose owner provides water and food. Soon after the cat had her own kittens, a developer purchased the property, planning demolition and an apartment complex. “I was still new to learning about how humans will so easily throw things and people aside when they have no more use for them. It was like someone had decided that our home, and everything in it, including us and the trees and the building, were trash.” 

The novel is set in a future with people increasingly competing for pointless jobs in a society that employs extreme measures to resolve minor infractions. For example, workers are paid to ram cars of other drivers who try to beat a red light at intersections. The result is an increasingly dysfunctional society, depressed and accustomed to regular insincerity and punishment. 

The book begins with a cat-napping while the beloved owner, known as the Mustache, is visiting his mother. Sold to a caregiver, the cat is kept in a sealed box without food or water for a class that trains emotional support humans. 

Angry, alone, starving, the cat narrator poses questions about her : “can I return,” “am I still a cat,” “will I forget the wind” while embracing the best memories from a brief life and worrying about the Mustache left alone. 

Eventually, the cat's spirit finds the Mustache in prison, serving time for attacking the cat-napper, and sleeps next to his bed until his release. Memories, and making the best of the present, are lifesavers for both cat and Mustache. 

Only a few of the human characters recognize the flawed thinking and cruelty rampant throughout  both cat and Mustache.  society, and at one point, the cat observes, “Maybe this is what the class is about, living with yourself when you see people do messed-up things. No cat ever needed to take a class to learn how to do that. Cruelty happens all the time, and sometimes you’re the one doing it.”  

By the end, the narrator points out that cat love, so mysterious and never fully complete, is imperfect. One never sees or feels all of the love, but recipients cherish the tiniest bits that are shared.