Aya and the Cat of Four Houses

About this story

A dignified medina cat makes her evening round of the four households that each believe she is theirs, collecting a sardine, a windowsill, a lap, and a saucer of milk in strict order. Tonight the round ends at the riad, where Scout has newly arrived with the plasterer. The two study each other across the courtyard until the fountain talks them both down into sleep.

Old routines making room for someone new.

There is room by the water for every kind of sleeper.

Read the beginning

The night market of Fez was folding itself away, lamp by lamp, when the marmalade cat did something she had never once done in her whole marmalade life: she knocked her supper right out of Aya's hand. The sardine slapped the cobbles. The cat did not even look at it. She looked up at Aya and cried, loud and ragged, like a little bell rung wrong. "Mimouna," Aya whispered, dropping to her knees, "what is it? What has happened?"

High over the twisting lanes, where the sky was going from dusk rose to deep violet, a glossy black raven crossed above the minarets, slow and calm, and turned one wide circle over the girl and the crying cat, the way it does when a story is about to begin.

Everyone in the quarter knew Mimouna, the cat of four houses. She belonged to nobody, and she supped at four doors every night, in the very same order: a sardine at the fishmonger's stall, a sip of milk on the old widow's windowsill, a warm nap on the tailor's lap, and last of all a saucer beside the fountain in Aya's own courtyard. "That cat has never asked for anything twice," said Aya's mother from the doorway, pressing the little brass lamp into her hands. "If she is asking now, child, go and see."

So Aya followed. Mimouna ran ahead with her tail low, stopping at every corner to make sure the lamp was still coming, deeper and deeper into the medina, until the market sounds died away behind them and they came to a small forgotten square where an old iron grate lay in the stones. And up from the dark beneath it rose a sound that squeezed Aya's heart: the thin, tiny crying of a kitten.

Aya knelt and held her lamp to the bars. Far below, where the old builders had made a cistern to hold the winter rain, a smoke-grey kitten with one marmalade ear stood shivering on a narrow stone ledge. The walls around it were smooth as the inside of a jug, too smooth to climb, too deep to reach. One corner of the grate was broken, a gap no wider than a loaf of bread, just big enough for a kitten to tumble through, and not nearly big enough for anyone to follow.

Aya lay flat on the cold stones and pushed her arm through the broken corner, down and down, until her shoulder ached against the iron. Her fingers waved far, far above the little ledge. So she pulled off her sash and lowered it like a rope, calling soft as a dove, "Climb, little one, climb!" But the kitten was too small and too frightened. It swiped once, and missed, and the sash slipped from Aya's cold fingers and fell, and the dark swallowed it whole.

The night grew colder. Every shutter in the medina was closed. Mimouna paced round and round the grate, calling down to her baby, and the kitten's answers grew smaller and smaller, the way a candle grows small. Aya's eyes stung and spilled over. "I am too little," she whispered. "My arms are too short, and everyone is asleep, and the night is so big."

The story goes on in the video.