That very first night he crawled into our bed, a futon that doubled as our couch, and nestled between us. It was not exactly a kitten, or not as much of a kitten as we had hoped, but certainly much more of a kitten than our old guy, who, when we’d got him, was so small we brought him home in a shoebox. “We’ve had a run on cats recently,” she said. And a little older than usual for the shelter staff. The woman before us-Sarah, according to her name tag-wore a nose ring and big circular glasses and did look kind of judgmental. “You left him alone when he’s sick?” she said. Then I said, “On that note, we have to get home to give the cat his meds.” Stacy downed her wine. “It’s crazy,” she said, “but I think she’s beginning to look like me.” A moment passed we all stared into the infant’s blank and baffled, sticky face we all smiled, though she didn’t smile back. For ages Stacy had been the last of our friends without children. “It was harder to adopt my poodle than my fucking kid,” Stacy, a friend of ours, had said recently when, over drinks, we admitted that we were beginning, in the most hypothetical of ways, to discuss our next cat. I remembered that from the last time, and from the horror stories of friends. It’s important to make a good impression during the rescue process. “Slim pickings in the cat department,” said the woman who helped us. So we went to the shelter that was attached to the animal hospital where we had recently spent a lot of time and basically all of our disposable income-fifteen years earlier, at twenty-two, we had not considered pet insurance, or anything else-to find his replacement. After months of his decrepitude and vomit and wild shitting, of screaming in confusion at the ceiling, and then settling down to purr in the bathtub or behind the toilet or headfirst like a doltish sphinx against the bare wall, in places that would have been funny if they weren’t a sign of some kind of feline dementia, we acknowledged that our old friend, the glue-“Don’t say glue,” my wife wept-that held our marriage together, was failing. Other fiction and poetry has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Subtropics, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Chattahoochee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Iron Horse Review, and The Florida Review among others. Collins’s first novel, Horse Latitudes, was published by Dzanc Books in January 2019. Henry Prize Winners, chosen by guest editor Amor Towles and series editor Jenny Minton Quigley. The following is a story from The Best Short Stories 2024: The O.

Old stacks of books leather tied