If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read Online Free PDF

ankles of his wife, and then hide under the couch when he came home? It was a false accusation that Tony had never been able to defend himself against. “Why does the cat hate me?” he’d asked Melody.
    “I don’t know,” she’d said dismissively. “Maybe you’re too noisy.” But that was Melody, not the cat. Melody still blamed him for the other cat, the one that had gotten out, and gotten lost, the first summer they lived together. It hadn’t even been their cat, really. It had been the neighbor’s cat, but it had preferred their apartment downstairs in the old Victorian to its owner’s upstairs. The cat had never been outside, had no claws and no clue, and had never shown any interest in the great outdoors. Then one day Tony left the front door open after hauling in a chair he’d found at the side of thestreet, near a garbage can. A chair with wings, and wooden feet—paisley, and a bit worn, but the kind of thing he was sure Melody would love.
    But what she noticed when she got home from her class that night was not the chair around which he’d rearranged their little living room, but that the door was open and the cat was gone.
    “We have to search the neighborhood!” she’d said.
    Back then, she wore her hair long and frizzy, and it was always hanging in two sexy ropes over her breasts.
    “The cat’ll come back,” he’d said, trying to take her in his arms. “Cats can smell their ways home. It’s not even our cat.”
    “I’ll go down McKinley Street. You go up Liberty, and then we’ll meet back here,” she said, pulling away.
    Tony was going to object again, but Melody was already gone.
    So, he did what she told him to do, wandered for a while up Liberty, occasionally calling out the cat’s name. Trixie. It was a night of fireflies and crickets. Someone was playing “Crimson and Clover” in an upstairs room of an old apartment house. Tony could smell pot in the air, and rotting fruit in a garbage can. When he met Melody back at the house, she was crying. No cat.
    Had he really believed, even for a second, that the cat could smell its way back?
    No. That was his guilt and selfishness talking—and she’d hammer that selfishness thing home over the years, that’s for sure—and mostly his desire to make love to Melody on their futon instead of walking around the neighborhood and then grieving the cat all night. It was his desire to get her excited approval of his paisley chair, and his need not to look at the awful truth of it. That the cat, which had slept between them every night since they’d moved into this apartment, and which had trusted them even more than the girl upstairs with whom it had lived for a year, had slipped out into the darkness because of him, and was now lost forever.
    “It wasn’t even our cat, Mel,” Tony said again, knowing how cold and defensive it sounded. She looked away from him. In the morning he agreed to help make posters and staple them to the telephonepoles in the neighborhood. He’d gone to the drugstore for staples. He put the posters on the telephone poles, but it was useless. The world was enormous. Billions of years old. It was full of holes and caves. There were swamps, forests, oceans, not to mention all the things man-made:
    Mines, wells, warehouses, malls. Hotels, motels, restaurants, amusement parks, bars.
    And then there was space, which had no boundaries at all, just an expanding emptiness embracing the earth loosely and without laws.
    And, if that weren’t enough, there was the mind . Its ten million memories. Its lists and hunches. Its illusions and facts. A man could wander around in his own mind until he died, finding nothing. How could anyone know where it would end, that searching, or if it ever would?
    The flyers blew down almost as soon as he stapled them up, and Tony didn’t bother to go back, already knowing the thing Melody would never truly believe—that once you begin to look beyond the rooms of your own home for what