The creek ran murky the day Susan met Siggy, and she hit a cat near the elementary school. Those were probably omens, and they shouldn’t have been ignored.

Like all omens, the circumstances were not in Susan’s control. Her house is situated in the biggest bend of a year-round Berkeley creek, about midway between the eastern hills and the tidal flatlands at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. It is masonry-lined where the stone still stands and it wends most of its western course underground, but it is available to pedestrian eyes and ears in Codornices Park, the Rose Garden, Live Oak Park, and along select yards in a few pocket neighborhoods, like Susan’s. It rises quickly under hard rain, swelling with the runoff from the streets. Its course from the hills to the shore is so steep that it subsides just as readily. But most of the time the creek runs shallow and burbling. Most of the time the water is clear. Now and then it appears cloudy, like someone upstream dumped a load of white paint in it or spilled a quantity of milk. It takes then the colors of mud and slime. It gives opaquely all the hues of army camouflage.

On the day she met Siggy the creek was grayish brown. Susan noticed its opacity when she got into her car to visit her parents. The sight of that burbling murk muddied her spirits. She wanted to stay home. She didn’t want to see her folks. She didn’t want to drive. She certainly didn’t want to go to her friends’ house that night for dinner, to meet some newly-divorced man they thought she’d like. But she felt like she didn’t have the strength to fight the agenda. She got in her car.

She was about a mile north of her house when she hit the cat. She couldn’t have avoided it. She was driving by a school and the creature darted in front of her rear wheel from between parked cars. She felt the impact like a flat tire. Her mirror showed her the gray-black cat scurrying lopsidedly across the street and out of sight. It made no sound.

Susan figured there was no point in stopping. There was no place to park and the street wasn’t wide enough for her to pull over. She wouldn’t be able to find the animal. She continued to drive. But she thought about cats. How beautiful and mysterious they are. How their faces are too small. She had a horrifying dream once, when she was about eleven years old. For some reason she was bathing a small kitten in the bathroom sink, and she accidentally pushed the lever that opened the drain. The kitten was so small it started to be sucked down, so Susan pulled the drain up. In that dream her action decapitated the kitten, so its body was swallowed by the plumbing and only its face remained, flattening and becoming the chrome disk of that retractable drain.

Murk and mangle. Susan was not in a good mood when she pulled into her parents’ driveway. She made her visit as short as she could. She has a good relationship with them, although she’s quick to despise her mother’s impatience and her father’s pomposity. She’s usually chatty around them, talking about her day, her thoughts and feelings, but she didn’t discuss the cat. She didn’t mention the blind-date dinner. She didn’t want to hear (and hear again) what they had to say.

Returning home two hours later, she kept thinking about the cat. Susan tries not to hurt animals. She hesitates even to kill insects, and she apologizes to snails as she steps on them. She spent a few months on a kibbutz when she was 22, and it’s true that she despised the chickens (she found them stupider than plants; she thinks folks who choose what they eat based on kindness-to-the-eaten ought to ingest lots of chicken and spare the lovely green things). She hated those bigoted birds so much that she relished eating fresh-slaughtered chicken after working with the crew to ship the beasts (alive, pecking and defecating) to market. But she was never deliberately cruel or harsh in the way she handled the birds while they were alive.

And she has never been injured by an animal. She has fallen off a horse or two, but she wasn’t damaged. She once had a thumbnail smashed by a new-born calf as she was training him to take milk from a bucket, but it was her own fault for letting her thumb move to his molar area instead of keeping it at the front of his velvety snout. Even the one time she was stung by a bee was her own doing; she was about six years old then and sitting in her back yard on a bench, and it was her idea to try to capture the bug so she could examine it. Unfortunately she trapped it with a wrinkled white paper napkin, against her own bare thigh. The poor bee died without even leaving its stinger in her flesh.