What do a feline vanishing act, a carbonized breakfast, and submissions to literary magazines have in common?
A few years ago my husband Pat and I lost our cat. In a hotel room. She was in the bed with us when we went to sleep but gone when we woke up the next morning. By the time we’d searched our room a second time, I was certain she’d somehow escaped. Which meant she was dead. She was smushed under a car tire in the parking lot or her throat had been torn out by a rabid dog behind the hotel dumpster. I began to yank at my fingers, tremble, and gasp for breath. No, no, my husband insisted, impossible. She has to be in this room. While Pat did another slow search, the solution to our problem came to me. Fine, Pat could be useless and bewildered—I would act! I raced to the bed and gathered the bedspread in my arms, then ran to the bathroom, where I stuffed it into the tub. See, it was clear she wasn’t in the bathroom. Back for the suitcase, which I threw onto the bedspread. But to be absolutely sure she wasn’t somewhere in that hotel room I had to empty the room of everything. Of course, right
