It was exasperating to think of mud. Mud drew the borders and filled in the seams of the sidewalk on the way to the mailbox. The lawn, or what had been lawn, had long ago given way to sludge. But mud wasn’t mud’s fault—mud was an effect, and its cause was rain, and the rain hadn’t stopped since November. Indoors, a human sitting by a window could determine how they wanted to be: in sympathy with rain and its generative properties, or outraged at rain’s ability to bring the world closer to its inevitable entropic state.

What about cats? There were two of them. One, the larger one, was content to be human: residential and dry. The second was where the mud came in. Through its own door (much like a mud-flap) it entered in the night. And in the morning? Like a child’s hand-drawn map to buried treasure—brown prints stepping across the white linoleum of the kitchen, down the hallway and into the white bathtub for the finest water, and lastly onto the white comforter for the finest sleep. This is where sympathy fell away, and the hand reached for the white paper towel and white bottle of spray.

Bio: Laton Carter