Longlist – 2026 Gooseberry Pie Annual Writing Competition
by Brett Summers
My sleek beauty of an Abyssinian cat had to have his leg amputated because he’d been hit by a car, so my friend brought me to the vet to pick him up, because I was scared of his three-legged, Frankenstein look. When she dropped me back at the teacher’s lot at school to fetch my car, I saw the yellow police tape around the student lot, where a red, sporty car sat alone there with its door open, a limp arm flopped out, hand upturned on the pavement, while uniformed officers stood far off in a semi-circle. Back at home, I got the call that it had been my student, the boy with wide-set eyes and an uncool haircut who had a habit of tenting his hands as though in perpetual contemplation. He’d finally decided. And I was home alone looking at the bare, unearthly skin of my cat, which I’d never before seen, and hoping the thick black stitches where his leg used to be would hold, because the rest of the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. My eyes were filling, but then my cat did his stuttering, riveted, hunting me-ee-ee-ee-ow-ow out the window, and I saw what he saw: the first goldfinch of the year splashed lemon yellow, ready for a mate.
Brett W. Summers lives in a purple house in Providence, except for the sixth of the year when she lives off-grid. She’s coaxing her mind to spend more time off-grid than that, but mostly it just goes off the rails.
Photo by Andrey Stakhovskiy on Unsplash
