Under the Piano

My cat sits and listens to me under the piano. By the pedals, curled up and tail moving happily about, not to the rhythm but never quite against it. It's taken her months to get here. She started out on the carpet behind me, magically appearing when I'd get to the thirteenth bar. She does not recognize herself in the mirror. She will not recognize the radio or the television, but she recognizes me. She can comprehend the feeling, what's moving through me is moving through her. And I never pulled her tail but once it got caught beneath the damper pedal, and I pressed down, and I expected her to cry out with that sustained chord. But there she stayed. And I was as convinced them as I am now, that she knew it was an accident, and that that's how the music needed to sound, and that it was within her so profoundly that she couldn't feel pain. Which is a lot to put on a cat, I know. But it's happened to me, and it's a lot to put on a human being.