Melon’s Odyssey On The Black Market For Life-Saving Cat Medicine

For a month this spring, Melon was truly living up to her name. She had always been a round cat but never quite this gourd-like—small neck billowing out to a majestic corpulence. This sudden plump came with an attitude. She had abandoned her sweet old habits: sitting on the toilet seat to watch me shower, running back and forth across my apartment until she panted, and leaping on my back to scope out unreachable shelves. I chalked this up to the fact that Melon, now 4 years old, was growing up. Maybe our close bond, which had always felt ineffable to me in ways I cannot articulate without sounding like a TikTok cat mystic, was not actually special, but rather the relationship of a child who needed her parent until, one day, she didn’t.

There were other warning signs. Melon had become less and less interested in eating. But she’d always been picky, and I had gone through some drastic life changes—a breakup that came with a division of our two cats—to which I assumed she was still adjusting. Her mane looked terrible, limp and stringy and unkempt, but Melon had never been fastidious about her personal grooming. She’d gotten her annual checkup a few months earlier and left with a clean bill of health. Besides, I was busy, distracted by said life changes and preparing for a vacation and a month off work to write a book. I dropped Melon off at my ex’s place, splashed around in Puerto Rico, then came home and picked her up. Neither of us had any idea that anything was wrong. Later that week, my friend Elaine, a fellow cat freak, watched as Melon turned her nose up from a fresh can of wet food. “You know,” she said, “we learned Hamlet had cancer when he stopped eating.”

My mind began to spin. Hamlet was older when he got cancer, I told myself. Maybe her hunger strike was her acting out for me going on vacation. Friday night, Melon wobbled onto the bed with me and narrowed her eyes into slits. I lay down next to her and studied her face. I tossed, turned, and then spirited us to the emergency animal hospital, empty at 1 a.m. They whisked Melon to the back and I read a book, anticipating the relief I would feel when they would send us home soon with an expensive but clean bill of health. But then I finished my book, and started another. By 3 a.m., I had become too worried to read. I paced my waiting-room cell, decorated only with an ominous daguerreotype of a tuxedo cat.