Virginia West’s Short Story, ‘The Cat Came Back’

Some surprises can be very good as in this short story by Virginia West. (ju_see/Shutterstock)

As we experience surprising moments throughout our lives, we can be delighted or just disregard them as merely annoying. Yet, these interruptions can become part of our lives.

In her short story, “The Cat Came Back,” Virginia West follows Leonard Raymond as he befriends a stray cat. Through Raymond’s friendship with the cat, West shows how the unexpected can bring the best surprises to life.

Raymond lives with his married sister in a house on Linden Avenue. Though he works as a teller in a bank, he really loves studying animals and their habits in his free time.

On a hot summer day, Raymond is sitting in the backyard. His sister and her family have left on vacation, and he is alone. While he morosely contemplates his bank job, he sees a black cat jump from the fence into the yard.

The black cat immediately heads to the trash can for food, but it’s closed, and the lid is on. Seeing that he cannot access the trash can, the cat turns, looks at Raymond, and disappears over the fence.

The next evening, the black cat comes back and searches the trash can again. The third evening, when the cat returns to search for food, Raymond tries to approach and befriend it, but it quickly flees.

On the fourth evening, Raymond brings home some meat from the market and sets it out for the cat. At the appointed time, the cat appears and quickly sets to eating the meat contentedly. As the cat finishes its meal, Raymond approaches and the cat “meets him halfway, and while Raymond rubs his fur, the cat purrs.” The cat soon settles in Raymond’s lap to take a nap. Holding the cat, Raymond realizes that the cat has just one eye, and also a tag with an address on it.

Not a Stray

After taking care of the cat for most of the summer, Raymond must decide whether to take the cat back to its home, or not. Deciding that he must return the cat, “he sadly went up Madison Avenue to return the cat to his lawful owner.”

When the door of the Madison Avenue house opens, a maid, seeing Raymond with the cat, immediately calls back into the house: “Come heah, Miss ’Liza! Bress de Lawd ef heah ain’t yo’ cat!”

In response to this call, a beautiful young lady, Miss ‘Liza, appears and receives the long lost cat. Upon finishing his business with the cat, Raymond turns homeward, wondering how “he might call on the beautiful Miss ’Liza.”

Through this charming story, West shows that the unexpected meetings and interruptions in our lives can be beautiful and beneficial. As C.S. Lewis says in “The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim’s Regress, Christian Reflections, God in the Dock,”: “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ’real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.”

When these special, stray moments visit us, we should accept them willingly, day by day. Though they seem trivial, they carry some of life’s most critical and beautiful moments with them.

Would you like to see other kinds of arts and culture articles? Please email us your story ideas or feedback at [email protected]