She was lazy. The files accumulated on her desk, she scratched her belly and her index finger adventured into her belly button, removing a stinky crust. She ate the half sandwich forgotten on her desk for days and tossed both human and cat files on her desk.
“CDS working again!” She stapled the files together, rolled them in a cylinder shape and threw them in the destination pneumatic tubes. The CDS coordinator continued matching humans and cats until the bell rang, it was time to go home, the operation would continue tomorrow.
Before leaving, she checked the old files, when the faded print, before jet black, would wear off to gray, the cat in question was in suffering, forgotten on the poll. Sometimes it was not even worth matching it, some cats were just unlucky. Life was not fair and the CDS could not operate miracles. For each file bleached by time, a cat would return to the center of souls and rebirth, perhaps, already in a safe environment, or just return to the wild, waiting for pairing.
The center of souls purified their little feline souls from all the mortal suffering, when the caldron was full of souls it spilled over and the souls dripped on the Earth again, and new files would show up on the CDS coordinator’s desk. It was an endless job. A file in particular called her attention, the paper was yellow and the print, brownish gray, was fading in the corners. Her stomach was not complaining yet, even this close to dinner time, and she knew the pneumatic tubes worked still for ten minutes after the clock. She stapled the file together and sent it away. The mission was accomplished.
*
The old calico was hidden between the tall grass, meowing desperately, the maggots eating her flesh, she was giving up, only skin and bones, her advanced age did not allow her to hunt, not even small insects, she was dying of inanition. A skinny and long-legged man, visiting his just purchased old house, almost stepped on her.
“You came with the house. God.” He said, horrified by the almost corpse of a cat he found. The long fur calico was matted, the flies knew her time was approaching, they were eating the dead tissue when he began the ungrateful task of removing the eggs and maggots. “Are you lost?” But the calico did not answer, she refrained from meowing as the removal of the maggots eating her entrails relaxed her. He wasn’t bad like the other ones. She was cleaned and fed. He noticed her front legs were thick and muscular and the hips and hind legs were thin and underdeveloped, and instead of jumping, she would hop. The calico found home.
*
Before sitting at her huge and clumped desk, the CDS coordinator did polish her name on the desk name plate. Maria von Miimii-Fofo Rossi Li Hernandez Singh Krause Sato Silva. It took Maria precious thirty minutes of her day to make her name plate shiny. From the window, she could hear the cauldron spilling cat souls onto the Earth. Maria could hear the barks from the DDS and felt relief, felines were far superior to canine, and less noisy.
Nobody would check on her, Maria pulled a blanket from her lowest drawer, microwaved a bag of popcorn and decided to watch a movie while she bonded files, it did not matter if the human was from Scotland and the cat from Greece, CDS would hit people anywhere in the world. A bond made by the CDS could never be broken.
Something important to note, the human chosen for the CDS were previously scanned by the social workers, it was easy to spot a potential candidate. Before internet, the social workers would observe people in their daily lives, it was hard field work, thousands of CDS fairies did the job. With the arrival of internet and phones they set up a multitude of pages across multiple platforms with cute cat videos. Each like, comment, and share counted points, once the candidate reached a certain amount of points, a designated fairy would briefly visit the candidate and formalize their application.
Many people were contemplated more than once, they used the method of simple random sampling with replacement, where individuals would return to the poll after receiving a cat. Of course they had a buffering zone, which the first cat would be interviewed, and the CDS fairies would deem the person worth and apt of rejoining the poll.
The coordinator would not think of such things, the fairies in the lower levels knew the coordinator did nothing besides gluing files together. Her aunt, the previous coordinator, had gotten Maria the job. Of course it was easy for her, the fairies collected the souls, put them into the cauldron, and listened to the incessant meow meow. The social workers would monitor their pages and get interviews, the administrative workers would redact cat and human files and her work was to roll paper.
They could feel the smell of buttery microwaved popcorn and a soda popping from her upper office. Maria, however, knew they were jealous, pairing cats and people was difficult. The old calico, paired with the long-legged man was pure mastery. She ordered the social worker fairies to check on them, and found the calico commanding the house, as it should be. He was a known face, being contemplated with cats multiple times. If other humans were as good as him, she would have placed every cat into a house.
*
He carried her on a blanket, alas, it was her time, the calico looked at him with only one eye opened, her vision darkening. She wished to express her happiness, and gratitude, and ask him not to choke on his phlegm and tears. But when she blinked, she was back to the CDS receiving hall. She was not the old and scruffy calico with broken hips and taken by cancer. She was back to her own beautiful self.
The hall was signalized, CDS did not send every cat and kitten to the soul caldron to drip back onto Earth, some, that had had a difficult life, could rest a moment in the cat spa and wash themselves of the pain and suffering. The calico decided to rest in between reincarnations, but to avoid collapse, the cat spa had time restrictions.
She was slowly moving to the cauldron, but from her path she noticed the upper office, CDS coordinator. On a whim, she jumped out of her path. She was only fur, a weightless calico soul. The fairies were smart, but they were not sneaky and natural hunters like cats. It was not difficult to reach the elevator and press the only button, the gray elevator doors opened to the nice carved wood double door. She jumped on the door handle and used her head to push the heavy door, to find the CDS coordinator sleeping with her mouth half opened, greasy in the corners.
“Woman!” The calico screamed without ceremony. “I have a request.”
Maria woke up and popcorn flew all over her desk, on top of her files. “You shouldn’t be here, calico.”
“I am Primrose, and I have a request.”
“Do I have a choice not to hear you? Speak up.”
“I would like to go back to my family.”
“Impossible. I can’t do that, if I do that to every cat that barges into my office my job is done!”
“Then I won’t reincarnate. I will stay until my file and his are together.” Primrose was known in her brief time with her family as extremely stubborn, it would not be different now that she was just a soul. She jumped onto the desk and before Maria could react, still wrapped in her usual green blanket, Primrose was digging up through the human files, searching for her human.
“Will you just stop? He isn’t here, it will take long until your human rejoins the poll, you need to go back to the cauldron, I can’t do it.”
Primrose then walked to the edge of the table, close to Maria and slapped her face, even with limbs made of only soul, Maria felt the impact. “I will wait here with you then, if you try to do anything… hmmm, I will bite you.”
“You can’t hurt me!” Maria screamed, still massaging her face from the cat slap. Before she could say anything else, she searched for Primrose’s file and saved it in a red folder. “This is you, it might take years for your human to have a file on my desk, are you sure you want to wait this long?”
“Yes. I can search in the humans’ files and help you. When I find my human, you pair us together and I will go back to the cauldron.”
Primrose and Maria began working together, the time inside the CDS passed differently from the time on Earth. They worked relentlessly on hundreds of thousands of files. She learned how to enjoy the scent of microwaved popcorn, as a soul, Primrose did not need anything, but Maria gave her a fluffy chair to rest her plasma self.
Years passed, almost a decade. Primrose continued resolute, until finally she saw his picture, her human was older, his hair whiter, his face wrinkled and his eyes, behind his glasses, tired. Maria was sleeping, right after lunch, she fell from the chair with the loudest meow she had ever heard. “Are you dying?”
“I am already dead.” Primrose joked. “I found my human. I am ready to go.” Primrose heard herself, and then jumped down the table to find her file in the last drawer of Maria’s desk. A long and loud silence filled the room before Primrose could speak again. “Will I be calico? How will he recognize me?”
“He won’t. And when you drip out of the cauldron, you won’t remember me as well.” Maria just stared at both files in silence. She did bind them together and rolled them for the pneumatic tube. “You need to be inside the cauldron for me to send both of your files. Good luck.” Maria held Primrose and took her to the cauldron herself and then ran up to send the files.
*
He was leaving the supermarket when a woman asked if he wanted a kitten. He looked at the still feathery and frumpy black kitten. It was clumsy with a big milk belly and few teeth. His first impulse was to say no, but the kitten looked inside his eyes, with her conceited and stubborn kitten eyes, the last one inside the cardboard box. He took the tiny kitten home.
The kitten went immediately to her favorite spot in the house and ate her favorite food and refused to use the litterbox in the presence of humans and other cats. “You are like a cat I had ten years ago.” The man patted her. “She was Primrose, you’ll be Poly, from Polyanthus.” He got himself comfy to watch a movie and Poly rested her body on his legs.
*
Maria went down to the social workers and watched Primrose in her rightful house. She knew she was born to be a CDS coordinator.
