In a small New York City walk-up, the neighbors in the building barely knew each other’s names, but everyone knew the sound of the crying cat in 4B.
At first, it was a soft, lonely meow echoing under the door at night. Then, days passed and the crying grew desperate, scraping through the thin walls. People complained in the group chat: Whose cat is that? Why won’t they shut it up?
But nobody knocked.
The woman who had lived in 4B had left quietly in an ambulance one afternoon, taken away after collapsing in the hallway. She had no family nearby, and the landlord didn’t notice her rent was overdue until weeks later. In the meantime, her gray-and-white cat, Misty, waited behind the door that never opened.
She waited for the sound of keys, for the warm voice that always said, “Misty, I’m home.” Instead, she heard footsteps pass, keys jingling for other doors, voices laughing, crying, arguing. Her food bowl emptied. Her water dish dried up. She licked condensation off the bathroom tiles and curled on the pile of dirty laundry that still carried her human’s scent.
Finally, the landlord came with a locksmith. The smell hit them first. “God,” he muttered, “did she leave something to rot in here?” He stepped inside, saw the overturned water bowl, the shredded couch, the frantic claw marks on the doorframe.
Then Misty stumbled out from under the bed, thin as a shadow.
She didn’t hiss or run. She simply stared with hollow, glassy eyes, wobbling on trembling legs. The locksmith, uncomfortable, mumbled, “You gonna call someone? A shelter or something?”
The landlord sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll handle it.”
He didn’t. Misty spent two more days alone in the empty apartment, with the window slightly cracked, watching pigeons flutter and clouds drift.
It was the girl from 3A who finally came. She had listened to the crying at night and couldn’t shake the guilt. When she saw the half-open door of 4B, she slipped inside and found Misty curled in the bathroom sink, as if trying to hold herself like water.
“Oh,” the girl whispered. “Oh, sweetheart.”
She took Misty to a rescue clinic two blocks away. The vet shook her head after the exam. “She’s severely dehydrated, malnourished, and her kidneys…” The sentence trailed off into silence.
The girl signed the forms anyway, volunteering to foster. She brought Misty home, set up a soft blanket, and placed tiny bowls of wet food and fresh water nearby. Misty ate slowly, painfully, then dragged herself to the edge of the blanket and rested her head on the girl’s hand.
“You’re safe now,” the girl whispered.
For three days, Misty slept almost constantly, waking only to nuzzle that waiting hand. On the fourth morning, the girl woke to a terrifying stillness. Misty lay as if asleep, face peaceful, paw still resting lightly against the girl’s fingers.
The rescue clinic wrote “Passed in foster care – comfort provided.” No one knew her human’s story, or Misty’s full name. In the building’s chat, someone typed, Hey, haven’t heard that cat in 4B lately. Guess the problem got fixed.
No one replied.
