There was this rock that me and her used to sit on outside of our building. It wasn't really a rock, it was more of a piece of a statue that had fallen off because of weather erosion, or because the city of Atlanta decided they wanted to tear down the building, either way it was there. And we called it the rock.
On the big slab of granite, being supported by three pillars of concrete, there was a scene of a bunch of people, looking like they worked on a farm or something, judging by their clothes. They all had coffee mugs, that was where me and her would put our cigarette butts when we sat on the rock. We'd sit there in the fall, for hours at a time talking about everything.
A frequent visitor of our rock, there was a black cat that we named The Great Catsby. He was a bootlegger, and in himself a critique of the American dream. He was an alley cat that roamed Atlanta, probably had turf that was his and kept other cats off of it. He was the boss. We believed in that stupid cat, it couldn't have been more than three months old when we first saw him, then we started to bring food out and leave it for Catsby, and over the months we saw him grow.
She and I stopped talking, not just on the rock, but all together. I fucked her best friend, and she ran off with a friend of mine from high school. I still see that rock from the road when i drive by it. The thing looks like trash now, cars have wrecked into it, birds shit all over it, and it's covered in broken glass.
I used to see the cat, it looked starved. You're not supposed to feed stray animals, because they get used to it, and stop learning how to hunt or find their own food. When me and her were still friends, we'd feed that damn cat, and it forgot how to survive on it's own. And then when she and I stopped being friends, the cat stopped eating. Catsby's probably dead now, our spirit of the American dream, so thin you could see it's ribs, overcome with disease and mange.
