The letterbox is satisfyingly stuffed. Nic sifts through the pile as she approaches the front door: new catalogues from Target and Bunnings and Aldi, a voucher book from a local pizza shop and a couple of real estate ads. Rosa D’Angelo’s place down the street has a price guide of $2.2 million. Rosa used to wrap her torso in newspapers to keep warm during the winter. The last time Nic visited, a month or so before Rosa died, there’d been a pot of beef bones boiling on her stove. The butcher gave her the bones for free because her late husband had worked with his grandfather forty years ago.

Shouting rudely from among the real estate brochures is a page torn from a school exercise book: perfect, pale-blue lines marred by angry block letters.

PLEASE STOP FEEDING STRAY CATS!!! IT MAKES THEM GATHER IN OUR STREET AND THEY FIGHT AND CLIMB ON OUR CARS WHERE THEY LEAVE MARKS. I KNOW YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING A NICE THING BUT PLEASE THINK OF YOUR NEIGHBOURS.

THANK YOU!

Instant heat, like she’s sitting under the hairdresser’s lamp. Thought she’d seen the last of this nastiness when she quit the neighbourhood Facebook group. She reads the note over, rage rising. Anonymous, too, the coward. She returns to the letterbox, glares a challenge up and down the street. Nobody is out. Nobody watching from behind glass, either, far as she can tell. Well. When she figures out who it is she will anonymously dump a tin of Fancy Feast chicken liver on their precious car. Anonymously scatter dry kibble all over their lawn. Because if it’s someone with a car who can’t tolerate cat paw prints it will be someone who lives in one of the new places built on the blocks that used to hold two or three houses like hers. It’ll be one of them and they all have lawns—showy, tree- and shrub- and flower-less expanses of green. The buzz and whine of mowers around here on Saturday mornings is louder these days than the planes overhead.

Returning to her front porch, she slips the foul note into the middle of the stack of catalogues, smothering the nasty slip of paper with colour and gloss. Imagine being ALL CAPS angry at a sleepy, well-fed cat! Miserable fuckers.

Nic unlocks the door and turns to her side to squeeze through, careful not to catch her clothes or bag on the swinging latch. Inside, she takes a moment to adjust to the gloom. The light bulb blew weeks or months ago, and every day at this time she curses herself for not changing it, but then her eyes recover from the transition and she sidles smoothly past the newspaper stacks and into the kitchen and doesn’t think of it again until the next re-entry.