I’m in the process of moving (again), which is a somewhat heartbreaking process (Big Orange has been moved eight times in the two years of my life, and it kills me each time because she turns into a trauma floof for at least a week each time), but the new place is, I hope, going to be the last place we go for a while. She’s ruthlessly disinclined towards sharing food with Big Orange, however, and will go to great lengths to literally snatch meals out of her sister’s mouth but who is perfect in this imperfect world? Who dispenses good night kisses and tells me when she’s leaving the bedroom to pay.

Surprising no one, I have occasionally stood up to eat my meals - and have sometimes regretted this because the Tortie can apparently levitate four feet in the air when she feels like it. If I do not immediately give her a corner of something (and often I don’t because my food is frequently saturated in alliums), she will then paw at my hand with growing concern, or circle around to try to poke at my plate with a paw. No matter the meal, no matter the content of the meal, she inevitably materializes at my shoulder with a bright expectant look. If we can make this one thing better, there might be hope for fixing the rest) Or it could just be that I enjoy having one thing kept from the panopticon of the public eye.Īnyway, I’m ruining some of that today by telling you that the Tortie has developed Expectations.

(I suspect some of that has to do with how we’re come to feel so helpless in the wake of the climate emergency, how we know the world is falling apart and there’s nothing we can do except maybe scream at this one person because it’s some form of control, isn’t it? Some way of making the way of correcting this freefall, this misery of apocalypses we’re facing. I think at least some of it has to do with my growing disenchantment with social media, and how it constantly bays for the next Main Character. But I’ve made a habit of keeping their lives private although god knows they don’t care about the Internet and what the general public might think of them.

Some Breakable Things by Cassandra Khaw