In May we acquire company. Mr. Squish, as he was known at the SPCA, enters our home and our daily routine. We sit on the kitchen floor and chase crumbled balls of paper together. It is a trick we’ve been taught at other houses full of kittens. It is the season.

We nap together, him curled on my lap and me, exhausted from the cleaning and preparing, the allergies and the stress of selection, with my head against the cabinets. A little later on I move him to his bed, in the overturned cardboard carrier he came home in. I then go back to sleep against the cabinets before making it out of the kitchen.

After the lights go out he mewls, stuck in the kitchen. From the bedroom we ignore him, as old instincts and new SPCA handouts have taught us. Impatient for access to the larger world he vaults the cardboard barrier to the mudroom. Built from a diaper box I’d found in the downstairs recycling earlier that day, it had looked far taller than he could jump. In play, anyway. A bundle of fluffy nerves in the dark he clears it easily.

Lights on again and nerves of my own aflutter I re-tape it after assuring him there is nothing of interest in that direction. Some shoes. The fridge. A handful of re-usable bags for grocery runs. He seems equally surprised to find himself out of the tiny sphere of the kitchen. I pull him back with one hand and work on the barrier. The gaff tape is confusing to my half-open eyes. Eventually he is again constrained by temporary walls featuring giant babies. He mewls. I lie on my back in the dark and think of all the things in life I am not yet strong enough to survive. Eventually I sleep.

Our apartment is far vaster than his room at the SPCA. He was kept by foster folk for some weeks, but confined to a bathroom, and with other kittens. Even a dog, says the report. In the kitchen, Mr. Squish is a rampaging animal of adventure. Out of it, on his rare forays to the mudroom, the living room, the hallway, he is a jumpy creature of extreme fluff, puffed up and shell-shocked, eyes wide. He hops on all fours and ducks under the built-in cupboards.

His name, like his fur, is something of a mystery. The SPCA had several kittens, short hairs of standard nomenclature. They were called Giles and Lucy and Lulu and Hawk and Cleo and Colin and Clyde. Among them, with his long black hair and soft underfur, Mr. Squish stood alone. To find him the SPCA required precise spelling. Mr Squish produced no such cat. Neither Mister Squish. And so, in his scant days with us, he has earned the title I repeated often to politely searching volunteers: M R period Squish.

Long may he remain.