Ray woke up. The trailer was dark. The light came through a crack in the blinds and fell on the floor in a thin yellow line. He lay there for a while, looking at the line, then got up and opened a beer.

The beer was cold enough. It was always cold enough in the trailer because the heater did not work and the windows did not seal, and in summer it was hot enough to cook an egg on the dashboard but in winter it was just cold, a damp cold that settled into the walls and the furniture and Ray's bones and stayed there.

He drank the beer standing up, in the kitchen area, which was a counter with a hot plate and a mini fridge that smelled of old tofu. He ate tofu from a plastic container, the kind from the Asian market three towns over, the one that stayed open late because the owner did not care enough to close. He ate it with his fingers, dipping it into a small packet of soy sauce.

Then he sat down on the couch, which was a thing that had been a couch once but was now more of a suggestion of a couch, with springs poking through the fabric and a stain on the left armrest that he did not know the origin of and did not care to find out.

He opened another beer.

The cat appeared at the edge of the trailer park, which was a collection of maybe forty trailers on a patch of dirt outside a town that had no name on most maps. The factory had closed five years ago. The population was declining. The main street had three open businesses: a dollar store, a bar, and a post office. The cat sat on the edge of the dirt, watching the trailers, watching Ray, with its three tails curled around its body like a question mark.

Ray threw it a piece of fish from the container. The cat ate it. Ray went back to drinking.

This was the routine. Day after day. Week after week. The cat came and went. Sometimes it stayed for an hour, sitting on the edge of the trailer park, watching Ray drink his beers and eat his tofu and stare at the wall. Sometimes it disappeared for days. Ray did not look for it. He did not call its name. He did not have a name for it.

One morning in late November, the cat did not show up. Ray noticed this because he was looking out the window, which was what he did most mornings, watching the light move across the dirt, watching the trailers sit in their rows like teeth in a gum that had given up.

He looked at the edge of the trailer park. The cat was not there. He looked again. It was not there. He walked to the edge of the park, which was a dirt path between two rows of trailers, and called out, though he did not know what he was calling. A sound, maybe. A noise. Something.

The trailer park was empty. It was always empty at this hour, before the people who still had jobs left for work, before the people who did not have jobs got up and pretended to. The sky was gray. The wind blew dust across the dirt. Ray went back inside.

He opened a beer. He sat on the couch. He looked at the wall.

The cat never came back. Ray did not look for it again. He drank. He ate. He sat. He slept. The trailer got dirtier. The beer cans piled up on the counter, in the sink, on the floor beside the couch. The tofu containers multiplied, stacked in the corner of the kitchen like a small tower of forgotten things.

He did not think about the cat much. He thought about other things, sometimes. The factory, mostly. The men he had worked with, most of whom had moved away or disappeared into other towns or other lives. He thought about his ex-wife, who had left him eight years ago and called once a year on his birthday and never called on any other day. He thought about the beer and the tofu and the cat and the gray sky and the way the light came through the crack in the blinds and fell on the floor in a thin yellow line.

Then he did not think about it. He opened a beer. He drank it. He opened another.

The story ends with Ray sitting on the couch, looking out the window at the gray sky, drinking a beer. The cat is gone. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change.

---

OTMES-v2-2A1B08-016-M0-180-9R1560-4E7D E_total: 6.2 dominant_mode: 0 (Tragedy, strength 3.0) dominant_angle: 180.0 (Zero-Degree Realism) rank: 9 dominance_ratio: 0.48 irreversibility: 0.1 M_vector: [3.0, 2.0, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 2.5, 0.5] N_vector: [0.1, 0.9] K_vector: [0.9, 0.1] TI: 15.6 (T5 苦难级) Variant: V-05 Dirty Realism