Fire Kittens by Viola Ragonese

“Hey there, I’m home!”

I enter my childhood house after being away for a long time. My parents are not here, which is weird, because I’m sure I told them I would visit.

I get to the couch, but it is not the couch they have now, it is the one we used to own when I was a kid. For some reason this weird detail fails to surprise me. Without questioning its mutated appearance, I abandon myself on the couch. Suddenly, I hear it: a faint “meow”.

I move the couch to investigate, and I find a tiny kitten with bright orange fur. I get immediately suspicious, because my parents don’t own a kitten, so I start looking around until I hear another meow near the door, where I find another orange kitten. Then, a multitude of meows near the bottom of the stairs. I follow the noise, and I see them: at least ten more orange kittens.

Now that I look at them properly, I notice that they’re not really orange, but bright red, like a lively flame, and that their long fluffy fur goes upwards like it’s made of fire, unaffected by gravity. These are not regular kittens, I realise, there is something magical about them: they are fire kittens.

This realisation is immediately followed by various worries: how am I going to look after this multitude of fire kittens? Moreover, how am I going to explain to my parents that I have adopted all these fire kittens, and that their wellbeing now depends on us? How am I going to communicate that they are the purest, most innocent creatures in existence, that they are made buy nothing but goodness and magic, and that we need to protect them? I feel a wave of terror running through my spine. How many kittens are there? There is no way of counting them, or of keeping track of them, because they keep moving around, and I keep noticing new ones. How can I look after them, if I can’t even count how many there are?

I start running up and down the stairs, trying to gather all the kittens in one spot so I can count them, but it’s no use, because new ones keep popping up, or maybe it’s just the same ones that I had gathered already that have walked back away from the gathering spot: I have no way of knowing.

At some point, I see a patch of red fur near the stairs that is laying still, too still. I realise in complete horror that this red kitten is dead, I got here too late. I start crying uncontrollably, unable to contain my overwhelming feelings of failure and loss, I cry really hard until I notice that no tears are coming out anymore, no tears have ever come out, and I look down at my hands to see tiny red paws, I inspect my skin to find it covered in soft red fur that rises like it’s made of flames. A crowd of kittens like myself is running up and down the stairs.

I hear the noise of keys unlocking the main door. My parents must be getting back. How will I explain now? We all crawl under the stairs simultaneously, and my worries don’t belong to me anymore, because my identity is no longer distinct, just like the identity of one flame cannot be separate from that of the fire it belongs to. We are many, but we are one, and we rejoice in our synchronous multitude: the fire kittens.