Eden Onpeng

Month: September 2025

  • We Were Bold, We Were Six

    We Were Bold, We Were Six

    The apex of the tall metal slide towered over our heads as it breached the clouds. It took forever to climb the stairs to get to the top, and by the time I made it, I looked down at the ground, now comprised of a smattering of colors and moving shapes. I trembled. If I fall…

    I spent the first six years of my life in inland Northern California. During the winter it would rain and then the puddles in the soccer fields would freeze over, creating a smooth, matte surface. My first-grade classmates and I would take turns jumping on the ice until the top layer cracked like a the surface of a creme brulee, soaking our shoes and socks with icy, brown water.

    School rules forbade us from going to the end of the field, where the fence overlooked a large swimming pool with multiple lanes. Whenever the teachers on duty caught us venturing towards the fence, they would grab a megaphone to call us back with threats of yellow cards or (gasp!) red cards.

    On some mornings a thick coat of fog would wrap itself across the field and we kids would mistakenly think it would disguise our presence as we hurried toward the fence, only to hear a teacher’s voice sputter angrily from the megaphone.

    At six years of age, I had already experienced moments of terror and tension at home–getting beaten by my mother, and watching her beat and scream at my dad and grandma. My father groped me but at the time it seemed like a normal thing within the family, under the banner of playful affection from a Chinese father. The weight of this experience wouldn’t catch up to me until later, as I underwent puberty.

    At school, away from hitting hands and groping hands, I was able to enjoy the moment with my friends, exploring the forbidden edges of the world, and pressing our feet on ice to see how much it could hold before cracking. We were bold, we were six.

  • Cool Asian Americans: on double eyelids, belonging, and learning not to measure worth by beauty

    Cool Asian Americans: on double eyelids, belonging, and learning not to measure worth by beauty

    While my body fights off this uncomfortable cold, I will share a little something with you that I scribbled down recently after reviewing Kaila Yu’s memoir, Fetishized. This is a vulnerable reflection about my own personal relationship with feeling beautiful as an Asian American.

    ***

    Cool Asian Americans. Import cars, pinup models, house parties, clubbing, and raves…This was a scene I never belonged to as a young Chinese American, partly because my family lived far from other Asians.

    I grew up near the border. The only times I saw other Chinese Americans was during the weekends, when my parents would make the long drive to the Chinese-Vietnamese supermarket in City Heights, and drop me and my brother off at Chinese school held on the second floor of a Buddhist temple.

    The other reason was because I was fat, ugly, and socially awkward. Of course, it didn’t help that my home environment was stifling and oppressive.

    Kaila Yu’s memoir stirred up old pain and feelings of envy in me, and I am ashamed to admit this. I found myself envying her freedom to sneak out at night and party with friends (clearly her parents weren’t as scary as mine), her beauty, and especially her outgoingness and success with making friends with the cool Asian crowd–the very types of people that excluded and made fun of me in Chinese school.

    But despite these differences between us, I found her inner experience very relatable because of how she used beauty as a tool or standard by which she could obtain that external validation she craved, in order to fill the void of self love within her.

    I found myself comparing us in our respective journeys toward self-love and acceptance, and decided to use her life story as a launching pad from which I could explore my own. 

    She and I were opposite sides of the same coin – deep down we both yearned to belong, to find social approval, and to be loved.

    While Kaila was slim, beautiful, and roamed San Gabriel with the cool party Asians, I was an obese, pimply teenager saddled by heavy AP textbooks, stuck inside my parents’ house because they wouldn’t let me go out. Where her father ignored her, my lecherous father paid me too much attention. Where her mom seemed supportive of some of her choices, even recommending plastic surgeons for her, I endured my mom’s rages, unable to hide because I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a chaperone.

    The brief experiences with cool Asian Americans that I met at Chinese school and while volunteering in Taiwan (AID Taiwan 2007) were laced with pain and exclusion. As I mentioned earlier, I was overweight and riddled with acne, I didn’t wear the cool shoes or the cool brands, and I didn’t have the charm or social skills to navigate through social situations with unspoken rules. 

    Volunteering for a month in Taiwan to teach a English to kids in disadvantaged towns was a nightmare for the overly sheltered introvert I was, who went from spending most of my time studying and reading at home after school to being surrounded by hundreds of outgoing and outspoken Taiwanese- and Chinese-American teenagers with practically zero time to myself. I felt like I had to be “on” all the time. It was exhausting. I ended up dissociating a lot, even on stage when I was supposed to speak. 

    I was sitting alone in between activities one day during volunteer training when I overheard another volunteer say to his friend, “She doesn’t know how to suck up to people. That‘s why she has no friends.” 

    That line cut me deeply, because it felt true, I was shy and had a hard time talking to people, let alone flattering them. It was so painful to have my very insecurity identified and voiced by someone else. 

    I tried to be nice to him nonetheless, to turn the other cheek, to prove him wrong about not being able to suck up to people. We made eye contact through the bus window at some point. I waved at him. He just stared back at me coldly, like I was nothing more than a pimple, unworthy of his friendship.

    Sometimes when I’m laying in bed at night, that volunteer’s words haunt me and I feel like hurling myself down a deep chasm in the ground and staying there forever.

    While training and volunteering, I saw how the little kids at the schools and other volunteers admired the prettier girls who had the slim bodies and big eyes. They were treated with a sort of kindness and interest that I envied. I wanted to be liked that way, to navigate the world with beauty and ease. 

    From those experiences I came to the same conclusion as Kaila: that beauty and status are important and must be chased. Kaila was much more successful at being beautiful, and much more adept at navigating social situations.

    The silver lining of being fat is that the extra fat gave me some decent B cups, so I didn’t stress as much about my breasts, except for when my dad would leer at them and ask me if I was wearing a bra. He did this into my early 30s, until I estranged myself from my parents for other reasons. 

    My Obsession with Double Eyelids

    After that volunteer trip, I became obsessed with double eyelids and the fact that I did not have them. It didn’t help that I was told I had small, slanted eyes my whole life, from both racist kids at school and also well-meaning friends (“your eyes are so chinky!” a Filipino friend had exclaimed to me back in middle school). I looked at the kids at my Chinese school who had bigger eyes, and told myself, If only you had bigger eyes. You wouldn’t have gone through all that bullying about having small, slanted eyes. You would have been accepted by the other Chinese Americans at Chinese School. People would have treated you better. You would have been beautiful.

    I became obsessed with getting larger eyes. I repeated to myself my conclusions that if I had prettier eyes via a crease on my eyelids, maybe my life would be different. Maybe I would be treated better by other Chinese people. Maybe I wouldn’t have been bullied as much for the shape and size of my eyes as a kid. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. 

    I learned how to use double eyelid tapes and glue to temporarily achieve that crease on my eyelids, and once had a terrible experience when I tried using Nexcare, a liquid antiseptic bandage instead of eyelid glue, figuring that an even stronger glue would lead to stronger results (and totally ignoring the label warning to KEEP OUT OF EYE AREA). The burning in my eyes was a temporary trip to beauty hell, a painful punishment for my vanity. I was spared a trip to the ER by rinsing my eyes with lots of water.

    I never ended up getting the double eyelid surgery, partly because of the cost and the recovery time (I have a lot of fat in the eyelid so an incision would likely be necessary), and partly because of the principle. A small, morally defiant part of me felt that if I got the surgery after all the fuss I’ve made about Asian beauty standards, then all the people who made me feel like shit for the way I looked would win.

    It’s weird: I felt more self-conscious about my monolids around other East Asians than I did around non-Asian people, who didn’t seem to understand the concept of a crease or double-eyelid unless the surgery was very drastic. Since I didn’t hang out with a lot of East Asians, I wasn’t as frequently triggered.

    But sometimes I do wonder what my life would have been like if I’d gotten it. Maybe it would have made me finally confident, like the way post-surgery people sound in their testimonials (“I feel so confident now!”). Or maybe not. Maybe I would’ve continued being the same person with the same insecure struggles, only with a line on my eyelids and $3,000-$5,000 poorer. Maybe I would want to fix my nose or jawline next.

    The Fleeting Nature of Beauty and Social Approval

    Kaila’s book reflects how popularity, status, and social approval is fragile, fleeting, and hard to maintain, no matter how successful we’ve been at obtaining them. When Kaila’s sex video (the one for which she was coerced into) went viral, her guy friends not only watched it as a group but then some of them defriended her afterward—a huge WTF for me. Being beautiful didn’t make her immune to experiencing trauma or a social fallout.

    Throughout my young adult and new adult years, I flagellated myself for not being pretty enough, for not being charming enough, for not having the social skills to navigate social situations. Deep inside I was telling myself that my life would have been less shitty if I were prettier.

    I was spending too much time on social media, too much time gazing at doe-eyed actors on Taiwanese soap operas, and too much time contemplating perfection as depicted in magazines. I was yearning for acceptance from the wrong type of people, people I likely wouldn’t click with anyway, where even if I did manage to grab ahold on some clout for a little while, it wouldn’t last. It would feel hollow because I would be trying to mold myself into an image of beauty rather than being a self I was comfortable in. 

    Part of my self-dissatisfaction was from wanting to be the type of person that enjoyed certain things. I didn’t really enjoy crowded environments (unless my senses were numbed by alcohol or drugs) but wanted to be the type of person who enjoyed those glamorous events, from EDC to raves. When my current partner didn’t want to go to EDC or a rave with me (he’d done so in his youth and was over that phase), I told myself it was because I was too ugly for him to take to EDC or raves, and that if I were prettier, he would be more down to go with me.

    With each rebellion and plastic surgery, Kaila slowly distanced herself from her old self (Elaine Yang) whom she described as shy and nerdy–the one her father didn’t pay attention to. And yet, over time, her new persona (born from people’s expectations due to her success as a sexualized and fetishized pinup model) became exhausting to maintain. She struggled with trying to manufacture a sense of sexual ease she didn’t naturally possess. And after some traumatic experiences, she’d had a hard time getting back in touch with her own body and enjoying her sexuality on her own terms. The latter part of her memoir is about exploring what she can do outside of the context of her looks, and sometimes being pulled back into that old context anyway because of her past, and also because of how popular fetishization is with audiences.

    With my current partner I very briefly explored a fun, party-girl side of myself with the fake lashes, the cocaine, and the parties, but have since mostly gone back to my introspective, creative, and bookish roots, partly due to being in my thirties, working through trauma, my sister’s suicide, and being pregnant and shifting into a new phase of my life.

    But every now and then I would come across something that brings me back to those self-resentful feelings of not being enough–pretty, smart, charming, etc. Unlike Kaila, I got to the point where I could make a living based on my looks. I yearned so much to be beautiful enough to be paid for my looks, like stripper-hot or Cafe Lu-hot, the kind of beauty that guys admire or revere when they talk to each other about the girls they’ve known.

    At this point it is just a form of self-torment, but it has gotten easier now that I am in my mid-thirties. I don’t relate to the grief that some feel when their pretty privilege fades and they can no longer charm themselves out of a driving ticket, skip the line to enter an exclusive club, or make every man’s head swivel whenever they enter a room. The silver lining to being plain for all of my life is that since I never had these privileges, I cannot lose them.

    I wish there was a special word I could use to end this spiral and insecurity forever. Like, “Abracadabra! Now you won’t give a shit about this stuff anymore!” (I’ve tried it, but it didn’t work.)

    I still avoid watching East Asian soap operas like K-dramas and Taiwanese soap operas because my mind gets pulled back into that idealized world where the main character (the special one!) is always the one with the big, beautiful, double-eyelids, the 100-pound frame, and the delicate, v-shaped jawline. I wish I were strong enough to resist being triggered but the fact is that East Asian pop culture is a trigger for me, so I do other things to pass my time.

    These days, to cut myself out of this thought-spiral of beauty-is-everything, I get off of social media, and go to Walmart or the park to look at regular, everyday people going about their lives, without the glamorous filters skewing things. Yeah, there are some good-looking people and some not-so-good-looking people. And in my life there are people I love and cherish who don’t fit in that stripper-hot box either, like my grandma–are they less valuable as human beings because they are not sexy? Of course not. So why am I using that standard to hurt myself?

  • Books I’ve Been Reading: Fetishized by Kaila Yu

    Books I’ve Been Reading: Fetishized by Kaila Yu

    Fetishized by Kaila Yu

    Reading Kaila Yu’s memoir reopened some old wounds I’d been carrying for decades. Like Kaila, I had internalized a lot of messages about the value of beauty and external validation in an attempt to fill the void of self-hatred inside. But unlike Kaila, who was attractive much more successful at romping with the cool Asians, I was a fat, pimply, socially awkward teenager, which really hurt my budding Asian American modeling career (just kidding – I ended up going into more boring pursuits).

    During the first part of the book I found myself feeling resentful of myself for not being prettier. The chapter about her getting double eyelid surgery sent me down a spiral in revisiting my young adult years, making me wonder if I should have just gotten the surgery to “fix” my insecurity, and been done with all the anguish.

    What I learned from her book is that even if you are able to capture that intoxicating and validating external approval and admiration with your looks, the nature of that accomplishment is so fickle that it is hard to hang on to it—as audiences change their tastes, another new model becomes more popular, or your own looks change or age. Your success and popularity is at the mercy of mostly male consumers, who use you (or the idea/image of you) and then discard you, after their needs have been met or when the next new shiny model comes onto the scene. There is a pressure to chase that admiration, and when you lose it, whether to age, market conditions, or other factors, it is only natural to grieve what you once had.

    And also that sometimes the very nature of the entertainment industry or your own success within it—can trap you. Kaila’s early success with using the Asian fetish for her own career and ego gains ended up boxing her in later in life, as she sought to escape being associated with that, but kept finding herself being pulled back in, because channeling the fetish was what garnered more success with audiences than the other type of work (less centered around Asian fetish) that she wanted to do.

    In chasing beauty, she had thought she’d be celebrated but what ended up happening was that “my true self was erased, and I existed only for the consumption of men…My body was not entirely my own. I hoped to one day reclaim it.”

    It was really interesting to read about the import model scene from Kaila Yu’s experienced and honest insider perspective. I was too young and sheltered to participate in it myself but have met Asian Americans who’d participated in that scene, who revel in their memories of the cool cars and hot import models, but they have a hard time remembering who was who. It goes with the experience of being adulated as a model and also feeling interchangeable.

    While reading about all the cool clubs and experiences that Kaila had access to due to her success and beauty, I felt really jealous and resentful at first (“dang, all of this sounds so fun and glamorous. if only I were prettier”) but this is really stemming from my own internalized messages, the root of which is the idea that maybe I would have been more accepted by my peers and especially other Chinese Americans if I had been prettier. But this is a message that comes from my low self esteem. “Asian fetish tropes reduce Asian women to flimsy caricatures,” writes Kaila, “but there is no denying the validation it satisfies for certain damaged women. Although the Asian fetish is degrading, feeling desirable when you’re vacant of self-worth is acutely compelling.”

    The parts of the book that made me change my mind about the grass being greener were the parts about the exhausting musician touring schedule, the relentlessly creepy advances from middle-aged weirdos who only saw what they wanted to see rather than the real her, the cutthroat competition between Asian Americans in the entertainment industry (modeling, acting, etc.) for the scant number of opportunities available and the backstabbing relationships that result from such a zero-sum environment. They all took a toll on her mental health.

    As a result of her journey to find a sense of self worth independent of external validation, Kaila writes, “Instead of being driven by shallow, ego-based exteriors, I want to cultivate deep bonds of friendships and meaningful relationships…I’m so grateful my looks have no impact on my current career.”

    Her message to young women today is that we have a much better range of Asian American representation in popular media today, than when she was younger, where Asian female roles were limited to dragon lady or china doll stereotypes. She also acknowledges the role she herself played into these stereotypes with her career when it benefited her. “I hope young women today will make better choices and, by sharing my imperfect, damages; and yet hopeful story, more young Asian women recognize their multifaceted beauty, focusing on inner strength over physical appearance.” As someone who carried these old wounds within me for most of my adulthood, this was the message I especially needed.

    Rating: 5/5 stars

    If you are interested in checking out Fetishized by Kaila Yu, see the below links:

    Amazon

    Barnes & Noble

    Kobo

    Bookshop.org

  • Unable to Create…When I’m Happy?

    Unable to Create…When I’m Happy?

    I’ve experienced a weird mind shift this past week. I had a good time celebrating our friends’ birthdays. Saw our baby in the ultrasound. I’m still riding the high from the weekend.

    It feels as if I’ve split from the person I was just a couple weeks back. I can no longer relate to the novel I was working on. I tried reading it and it was all doom and gloom. It makes sense, in a way. I worked a lot on it right after my sister killed herself and while I was grappling with childhood trauma, and a lot of this writing reflects the dark place my mind was in at the time. At the time, I was able to relate to the sinister, oppressive elements of the world I created. But now it all feels too gloomy, or maybe I have left. The chapters I felt resonated with so much at the time now feel cringy to read through.

    The wise advice is to step away from my novel for a bit, but I feel a bit bummed out about my writing. This is my second draft novel, and it is only 40k words in. The first one is done but not yet revised. It seems that maybe a long form work like a novel might not be the right fit for me, especially with a baby on the way.

    Is all my writing fueled by unhappiness? Am I unable to create when I am happy?

    I wonder if I can channel things aside from pain in my writing. This would be interesting…

  • Goodbye to Gareth: a story about a man and his orange cat (part two & the end)

    Part 1: https://edenonpeng.com/2025/08/18/saying-goodbye-to-gareth-a-short-story-about-a-man-and-his-orange-cat/

    Anthony lost his round at the cards and dice table (and fifty dollars) so he thanked the dealer and left to the slot machines, where garish LED screens, bells, and jingles clashed discordantly with each other.

    Gareth would hate it here, he thought, thinking of his late orange cat. Too loud. Too bright. Maybe I would hate it here, too.

    A middle-aged waitress with dyed auburn hair and dark red lipstick came by with a complimentary cocktail he had ordered. The casino provided complimentary drinks to gamblers on the floor, so he had ordered the first cocktail that came to his mind, a “mojito.” It sounded good from the movies he had seen. Anthony was homeschooled and received his college degree remotely, so he skipped the whole party phase of his life, not that he thinks he would have enjoyed it, anyway.

    “Thank you,” said Anthony, handing her two dollars as a tip.

    She nodded curtly, accepting the tip while balancing the tray with the remaining drinks. Her eyes were already on the next patron she needed to serve: a balding, obese man that had been parked at the same slot machine for the past five hours, no breaks. Perhaps he wore a diaper. Or perhaps he was why the carpets smelled like citrus and ammonia.

    Alone at the slot machine with his iced mojito, Anthony took a sip and recoiled. He wasn’t a big drinker. In fact, his main drinks at the apartment were water, Mountain Dew, and almond milk. The mojito tasted like an exquisite mixture of ice, lawn clippings, and rubbing alcohol. Its only saving grace was that it was sugary, which somewhat masked the rubbing alcohol flavor of his drink.

    A group of non-retirees, a group of eight or so college-aged kids walked out of one of the clubs on the side of the casino floor, laughing and slapping each other on the back while balancing their drinks in their hands.

    Maybe casinos are more fun with friends, Anthony thought. Or maybe most things are.

    Suddenly he felt self-conscious of being at the casino alone, or at least a relatively young person gambling by himself.

    As someone in his thirties, Anthony wasn’t as young as these college kids, but he also wasn’t about to qualify for the senior discount at Denny’s yet. Memories of eating lunch in the boy’s restroom during elementary school, middle school, and high school flashed before his eyes.

    During college, with the varied schedules of college students, eating alone during the day was considered less strange, but he did always ache to connect with someone, not just on the surface level, but on a deeper level. But with how short semesters were, classmates always changed, and he would make acquaintanceships that would fade in subsequent semesters. It didn’t help that he was so bashful and had trouble relating to the other students. He gazed enviously at students who congregated in chatty groups. He would fake it by loitering on the outer edges of groups, but he was never one of them.

    Anthony shook his head as if to shake these memories away, but they clung to him and made him feel cold. Or maybe it was the air conditioning.

    The virtual slot machine rolled with its usual jingling sounds. Then it landed on a mismatched. Dud. Anthony’s gambling money was all done and gone.

    Anthony sighed. It was time to face it: he wasn’t having fun here. Coming to Palm Casino had seemed like a good idea when the alternative was a lonely apartment without Gareth, but Anthony felt lonely here in the casino anyway, even while surrounded by people.

    He took another sip of his grass mojito and winced again. Nope. It was time to leave. He looked around at the shops, restaurants, and bars flanking the casino floor. A Rolex store gleamed across the floor. He didn’t win enough money to buy a Rolex, nor did he have any interest. After that grassy mojito, he was in the mood for a burger but he didn’t feel like sitting down and being waited on.

    There was a drive-thru fast food restaurant along the way home, he remembered, so he dropped his drink off on a tray and left the casino, feeling empty in both his pockets and his heart.

    The burger was delicious. After going through the drive-thru, he parked in the parking lot and devoured the burger, fries, and cola. He doused his burger and fries with six packets of ketchup in total. He slurped the icy cola with relief.

    As he drove further down the road from the fast-food restaurant toward his little desert town, he saw a sign for an animal shelter with cats and dogs up for adoption. That’s how I had adopted Gareth, he thought. Was it too soon to adopt another cat?

    The draw was too strong. He took the next exit.

    The animal shelter was filled with the sound of barks and not enough visitors. He went to the counter and asked where the cats for adoption were located. Henry, the man behind the counter, was eager to show him.

    The cat section was behind a glass. He looked at the posters and pictures of each cat that was hung on the wall. They had names like “Joseph Conrad” for a black cat, “Cheeto” for an orange cat, and “Snow” for a white cat. Some were described as rambunctious, and others were described as solitary cats that would prefer to be the only furry one at home.

    “Have you ever adopted from us before?” asked Henry.

    “No,” replied Anthony. He was about to explain that he had found Gareth as a kitten abandoned in a supermarket parking lot, but was quickly distracted by  

    He stood close to the glass and looked at an eight-year-old gray cat laying on a cat shelf with it tail hanging listlessly over the edge. It looked back at him with one half-opened green eye and one healed empty socket before sinking its head onto the shelf, as if it was too exhausted to socialize.

    The poster on the glass described this gray cat as “Brian.” Immediately Anthony’s heart went out to Brian, as he thought of his own late cat who’d had the human name of Gareth.

    “Ah,” said Henry. “Brian has been with us since January. That would make it…eight months that he has been here.”

    “How long does it usually take cats to be adopted?”

    Henry frowned. “It really depends. Some cats get adopted right away, even before their name tags and paperwork is finished. Sometimes the new owner will come and fall in love with the cat in the window. But other times…” He looked at the one-eyed gray tabby with sympathy. “It takes a while. And how long they stay with us depends on our capacity. Sometimes we run out of space and have to prioritize the cats that have the best chances of getting adopted.”

    From another glass room, two tuxedo kittens rolled with each other atop a felt blanket. A few inches away, an orange adult cat curled up with sleep.

    “What happens to the ones who don’t have a good chance?”

    Henry sighed, his shoulders sinking. “The ones who don’t have a good chance…They’re not bad cats or kittens. Many of them are just slower to warm up. They hide from potential adopters, or hiss—but that usually just means they’re scared. If we run out of space, we send them to another shelter down the freeway…”

    “Okay…” Anthony was trying to follow.

    “…Where unlike us, they are not a kill-free shelter. Let’s face it, we are a small town out in the desert. We don’t have the budget or the funds or the advocacy like the larger shelters in bigger cities do. Our space is finite.” Henry’s voice had taken on a defensive edge. “We try to save as many as we can. But in the end, we only have so much space.” The animal shelter receptionist/adoption coordinator/advocate looked off into a corner of the room, his thoughts far away.

    Anthony thought about what daily life was like for Henry and those working and volunteering at the shelter. It reminded him of a story he had read in high school, something about “cold equations,” where a girl snuck herself aboard a spaceship to visit her brother on a faraway planet, but the spaceship only has so much fuel to get to the next stop so the astronaut on board had to eject her out of the spaceship into the cold, airless, and unpressurized space, otherwise they both die and the spaceship would be lost. There was only so much weight the spaceship could carry…

    “What happened to Brian? Was he a stray?”

    “Not at all,” replied Henry. “Brian is actually from a hoarder’s house, which had a total of 18 cats. His former owner passed away. Brian didn’t get along with the other cats—we’re guessing that’s how he lost his left eye—so he had to be placed in his own room.” He smiled sadly at the cat. “We’ve had a few potential adopters look at him, but he hid under a piece of furniture the whole time. He wouldn’t come out.”

    “May I see him?” Anthony asked.

    “Of course,” said Henry, and brought Anthony to the back entrance on the opposite side of the glass wall. Brian lifted an ear toward them but did not move. Anthony went in and approached the cat with his hand extended.

    Brian reared his head and hissed. He hopped down from the shelf and went into a cat condo, looking out at Anthony and Henry from the cave-like opening of a cat condo.

    Henry didn’t look surprised. “Don’t feel bad. He’s been like that with everyone. He hates the kids especially, too much screaming. Do you have any kids?”

    Anthony shook his head.

    “Well, why don’t you try giving him a treat.” Henry reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a small handful of cat treats.

    Anthony accepted the treats and moved to the corner where Brian had hidden. He looked away, and set the small pile of treats near the cat condo.

    The gray tabby must have been hungry because he slinked out of the cat condo cautiously and took a careful bite of the treats.

    While the tabby was distracted, Anthony touched Brian’s back and ran his palm down until it reached Brian’s tail. He repeated it and felt Brian vibrate.

    “He’s purring,” whispered Henry. “He likes you.”

     That night, Anthony came home to his apartment with Brian in a box, and opened it. Brian stepped out and darted under the desk drawers.

    “It’s going to be okay,” said Anthony softly. “You’re safe now.” He set out some water, treats, and fresh litter for Brian and sat on the couch to watch television. Next to the television, Gareth’s ashes sat in an urn. Occasionally Anthony would look at the urn and feel bittersweet emotions swirling in him. He wondered if he would ever be as close to another cat as he was with Gareth.

    Brian stayed under the desk drawer, but hours later, after Anthony had yawned, stretched, and retired to bed, Brian ventured out from his little hiding spot and gracefully jumped atop the bed to peer at this strange new human with his one eye.  He then eased himself into a gray croissant next to this human’s feet and went to sleep.

    The End