I often wonder what goes on in my apartment whenever I leave it.
My name is Amy and I live in Amsterdam with an orange cat. Let’s call him Rusty, because he’s not really orange, he’s more the colour bikes turn when they’ve sat under too much rain. I’m sure he’s responsible for some of the mischief while I am away, like my dwindling collection of pens. On a given day I might reach out for a new purple fineliner to write down my grocery list, and discover it missing. Then, several months later on a Saturday morning I will finally pull the sofa out from the wall to vacuum underneath it and find it resting there among tendrils of dust, along with the matching blue fineliner, a black fountain pen I took from the NH hotel in Brussels last winter and the eraser that I’ve been looking for. Not to mention four soft toys, a plastic ball with a bell inside and a weird looking frog that, when squeezed, uncurls its long plastic tongue.
I ponder it all over a cup of mint tea. I was pretty sure I had a pumpkin on the countertop waiting to be hacked into pieces and made into soup. I know for a fact that I put the extra set of keys in the cupboard under the bookshelf, but when the catsitter comes by to pick them up and we search and search and find them hanging on the hook by the front door, I am stumped. Images of Fantasia swirl in my mind, silent immovable objects coming to life and dancing around the room once I have closed the door behind me. It must scare the hell out of Rusty; no wonder he chases pens under the sofa.
