The fish market keeps its own weather under the awnings, and the cat keeps the market. She is gray going on iron, narrow, exact, and she does everything better than everyone in it. She takes what she hunts on the first pass — a rat nearly her own length, done in the time it takes to say so, eaten from the head, in front of whoever is watching, without ceremony. She reads the scale before the needle settles and is right; the stallholder recalibrates; she is right again. She is right about the rain before it is bought — the fishermen have learned to watch her, not the forecast, and on the mornings she sits facing the hill they keep the boats in, whatever has been paid for. The cameras cannot hold her. In the footage she is a gray smear the corrections decline to fix.
She talks. Not often, not warmly, and never to the ones who want it. The other cats do not sit with her. They keep to the roofs and the crates and watch her the way you watch a debt. Whatever she gave for the words, they saw her pay it, and they are not saying either.
She challenges. The man who kept his wife’s voice on the evening plan buys sardines on Fridays, and she takes the head he owes her and says, not unkindly, “You kept the voice. Whose sleep does it help?” He stops coming on Fridays. He comes on Tuesdays, and she asks him nothing, and that is worse. To the woman who photographs her lunch for the profile before eating it she says, “It was fresher before the picture.” To the man whose earpiece answers before he does she says, “Does it eat for you too?” — and he takes the earpiece out to reply, and cannot find a sentence of his own in time, and stands there, unassisted, newly born. To the gulls she says one word, once, and the gulls move to the next roof and stay moved. Nobody has heard her flatter anything.
When the ice-man’s widow misquotes the ice-man, the cat gives the sentence back whole, from nine winters ago, tone and all. The widow cries into the herring and buys nothing, and the cat waits it out, and finishes her fish. Nobody licensed that sentence. Nobody could.
The counterparty of record registered an interest in her within the year. The interest found nothing to attach to. She has no birth entry, no license, no continuation plan, no renewal date, no sample to ration. The men in clean shoes came to the market and itemized, and left with the list they came with. They photographed her. The photographs need correcting, and the corrections decline.
Then the record found its answer, and the answer was not her; it never is. Recordings of her play back as room-tone — the awnings, the water, the gulls, and where her voice stood, a patch of clean nothing. Every phone in the market has tried. So the market memorizes her instead, the old way, by mouth, and her sayings cross the neighborhood at the speed of errand boys. The city answered in its own grammar — unlicensed speech, broadcast, commercial zone — and the fines fell on whoever listened. For a month the stalls turned their backs when she opened her mouth, weighing fish carefully, and she watched them do it without blame, the way she watches weather. Children are unbillable. She talks to children.
The girl who sweeps the harbor stairs asked her the question everyone had been keeping: what the words had cost. The cat looked at her for the length of a wave coming in.
“I remember you without being paid,” she said. “That is why they are afraid. Learn it before it goes.”
On a Thursday, with the rain as purchased, she crossed the square once, at her own pace, and took the steps that go up and kept taking them. The cameras filed her departure as weather. The other cats came down from the roofs one by one and sat in the places she had sat, not talking, in the old way, and the market weighed its fish and said her sayings to itself, checking them against nothing, keeping them the way you keep what has no copy.
The girl sweeps the stairs and says her sayings to the water, one a day, unpaid. On the hill, the gate stays open.