The Wound in the Alley

The alley after rain is always filthy. It reeks of sewer water, rotting cigarette butts, and some metallic, fishy smell you can’t quite place. I was on my way back to the boarding house after my part-time shift. Third-year mechanical engineering, midterms just around the corner, and the group project was already falling apart. My head was a mess over the dynamics report due tomorrow.

Then I saw movement at the corner of the alley.

At first I thought it was a trash bag. No—trash bags don’t breathe. When I got closer, two eyes flashed out of the shadows. No, one pair of eyes. A cat.

A mackerel tabby. The usual coat of a stray, gray and black stripes tangled together. But one ear was wrong. The tip of its left ear was torn, and dried blood had clotted into its fur. The wound looked a few days old. The early signs of infection—fever, swelling, pus—weren’t obvious yet, but left untreated, it would only get worse.

The cat didn’t meow. It didn’t run. It only looked up at me. Its eyes were a deep amber, the pupils wide open to the alley’s darkness.

I set my bag down. Inside were my dynamics textbook, my laptop, and a first-aid kit. Why would a mechanical engineering student carry a first-aid kit? Last semester, a bearing had burst in the lab, and since then I’d started keeping bandages for finger cuts and antiseptic on hand. It wasn’t ideal for a cat wound, but it was enough to disinfect it.

“Come here.”

I held out my hand. The cat flinched, but didn’t bolt. I moved in slowly, carefully, the way I’d handle a machine tool. With my left hand I brushed over the cat’s head, and with my right I dampened a cotton pad with antiseptic. The cat’s ear stood rigid.

“This’ll hurt, but just for a second.”

When the antiseptic touched the wound, the cat’s body gave a small tremor. But it didn’t bite. It didn’t scratch. It only bared its teeth and let out a low, strained sound. I finished cleaning as quickly as I could, pressed clean gauze to the ear, and wrapped it loosely. It wasn’t perfect. But it was better than letting the wound rub against the filthy alley floor.

I left the cat and stood up. After a few steps, I heard light footsteps behind me.

I turned around. The cat was following me. The gauze was still on its torn ear, and though it wasn’t limping, it simply trailed after me in silence.

“You should go home.”

I said it to the cat. The cat didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t. It was a cat. That was obvious.

I looked back again in front of the boarding house door. The cat was sitting at the alley entrance. Still looking up at me. Under the streetlight, its shadow stretched long, and in that shadow the gauze on its left ear glowed faintly white.

I stood there for a moment. From a mechanical engineering student’s way of thinking, it was just a matter of probabilities. The probability of finding a wounded stray in an alley, the probability of that cat following me, and the probability of me caring. The intersection of those probabilities was small. But the event had already happened.

Before opening the front door, I looked back one last time.

The cat was still there.

The next morning, the moment I opened the front door, I saw it. Something small placed right outside. A metal bolt about the size of a coin. It was rusted, and one side had been oddly melted. There were signs it had been heated on purpose. And beside the bolt, the cat was sitting there. The gauze was already gone. Its wounded ear was still red, but no longer bleeding.

The cat looked up at me. Then, slowly, it pushed the bolt toward me with its left front paw.

At that moment, I heard a machine sound in the distance. From the direction of campus, a high-pitched motor whine cut through the air. I lifted my head. The ventilation fan on the boarding house roof was spinning faster than usual. And the cat’s ear—not the injured one, the right ear—twitched precisely toward that sound.

It was a strange morning. But the dynamics report still wasn’t done. I put the bolt in my pocket, set out a bowl of water for the cat, and hurried off toward campus.