I turn onto Navasota and my headlights reflect back the blue-green lights that are a neighborhood cat's eyes looking my way as he scurries to the side of the road, to the cement embankment around a yard, outside of a chain link fence. Two dots, there then gone, there again. He is mostly black, I can tell only by the white spots on his right front leg and on one side. That's all I see in the pitch blackness, that and the two marbles in the middle of his head.It reminds me of a game we used to play when I was in the eighth grade, at the front end of Donovan Street where it met up in a T with Nolan. There were ditches on either side of the streets, we hovered near them and dove to the depths when a car tuned our way. We did this after dark, at the end of the play day, on our ways back home. I continued the game even when I was alone and I doubt my friends did. I had a vivid imagination, I blamed it on that. Before the lights of the car hit us, we dove to the bottom of the ditch screaming "Cat eye!" and lay there suppressing laughs but giggling anyway, excited by the suppression, excited by youth, by night time, by the frogs in a puddle unseen behind a house.
I didn't scream the name of the game when I was alone, and I didn't giggle so much when I was alone, but still I dove into the ditch, avoided the headlights all the same, my heart racing, my head buried in my arms, covered in darkness, like a younger child playing peekaboo and believing he can't be seen because he can't see anything. To that young child it is fun but serious, and it was the same for me alone with my game of cat eye all the way to the dead end of Donovan, to my house, last on the left, with the two windows on the front, one on either side of the door, lit from within like two eyes, like the eyes of a cat struck by the lights of a car.
My house was a big head with the different slopes of the roof making a sort of set of ears. I lived in that big head. I lived in my head. I talked to myself constantly, felt like I was being watched, not in a horror movie kind of way, more like I had an audience. And I welcomed my audience, talked to them silently, narrated my day, my life, said goodnight to them as I lay in bed with the covers pulled to my chin.
