This is Sally Cookie's Paw

This is the paw Sally Cookie touched me with when I was on my way out of the no-kill animal shelter. I was looking for a cat just like Izzy, he of the heart shaped face and the kindly nature. I looked in vain. I paused before leaving, lost in the past, when she poked me. I turned, she kept her paw firmly on my arm. I was selected. She is the karma that I earned over past lifetimes spent moving furniture around perpetually aesthetically unsatisfied… Perhaps my bedroom should be a living room, perhaps a too small closet could be a full bathroom, perhaps the whole apartment should be moved closer to a coffee shop. Sally destroyed it all, one piece at a time and she did it without claws. Everything had to be recovered in naugahyde or hauled away. At best my home looks like a dental office designed by a child, at worst like Gene Hackman’s in the final scene of “The Conversation.”