Natalie dropped her Greek yogurt on the floor, sucking her thumb as she ripped paper towels from their wooden spindle.

“God damn it, Harry!”

Harry was on the windowsill. He loved it up there, but he rarely leaped on his own, so it had caught her off-guard. The shock is why she was cleaning yogurt with Bounty.

Harry was an old cat. He was cute in a mangy sort of way, as if the world had eroded him back into a fragile, innocent spirit. At least, that’s how Natalie saw him. Most just saw his leaky eyes, croaky meow, and broken tooth and assumed he was a curmudgeon. Natalie sometimes pretended he was, but the fantasy never got far as Harry would do the least curmudgeonly thing imaginable, like curl up on her lap or rub up on her leg.

Natalie scooped up the last bit of floor yogurt and dispensed of it in the trash. She still had enough cup yogurt, so she began to eat, joining Harry at the window.

“What are we looking at today?” Natalie asked, following the cat’s gaze.

She already knew though as a pair of robins skittered back and forth from the lawn to a bush in the backyard.

Harry chittered as if to make sure the robins knew the danger they’d be in if only this thin metal screen weren’t there to protect them. They continued with their fluttering and pecking, uninterested in conversation.

Harry put his paw on the screen. His claws came out and he plucked the screen, followed by a mew.

“There’s nothing out there for you, munchkin” said Natalie, at first with a laugh before feeling something different altogether. A sadness.

Of course, it wasn’t true that there was nothing out there for him. There was everything out there. A whole world actually. A word full of birds, grass, kids, and the occasional breathtaking silence that follows the last car on an otherwise empty street. There was fresh air, sun, and pink petals that feel from trees if it was too windy.

But there was danger too. Sirens, and screeching tires, and wilting flowers that someone had forgotten to water a few days too long.

Harry was Natalie’s world and thus, this apartment was where he belonged. But that didn’t stop her thinking on what could be; what a life of outdoors might mean.

She would have to do.

Natalie scooped Harry off the window, cuddling him, and hoping more than anything that this was true.