We have a cat who has kept watch at the window for sixty years. Her name is Goma.
She’s not an ordinary cat, mind you — not from this world. She has four ears, and her back gives off a faint glow after dark. Around here, they say it’s nothing unusual for a watching-cat to live a hundred years. Nobody has ever actually confirmed it, though.
Morning, noon, and night, Goma stares at a pale blue star hanging low in the western sky. The children in town call it the Blinking Star — a star that blinks, they say, exactly once in its life. Goma never leaves her cushion by the window, not for meals, not through thunderstorms. Sixty years wore the cushion thin and pressed it into the shape of her body. Along the window frame, claw marks line up in neat little rows.
“Goma’s such a silly cat,” my granddaughter Hana likes to say. “Staring at the same spot forever. There’s nothing even there.”
Grandma Towa just smiles and says nothing. Truth is, she isn’t sure Goma is really watching the star at all — Goma’s eyes clouded over long ago, filmed with something like thin steam.
Sixty years ago, a young man named Jun left this house by ship. He said he was going to work on a distant star and never came back. On the morning he left, crouched in the entryway retying his boot laces, Goma pressed up against him, and he said this, or so the story goes:
“Hey, Goma. Where I’m headed is too far — you’ll never lay eyes on it. It’s like a tiny companion riding along beside that star, invisible most of the time, no shape, no shadow. But once — just once — the place where I’m standing will pass in front of that light. And when it does, the light will dim, just for a moment. When it dims—”
Towa doesn’t remember what came after that. She was still a child then, and she must have only half-listened. A person passing in front of a star, dimming its light — how could that ever really happen?
But tonight, it did.
It was after supper. Hana suddenly pointed out the window. “The star — it’s going out.” Sure enough, the pale blue light was thinning, little by little, the way a candle flame narrows when you pinch the wick between your fingers. It dimmed to about half its brightness, then hung there, flickering uncertainly.
Goma moved.
For sixty years she had never once left the worn hollow of that cushion. Now she rose, smooth and sure. Clouded eyes and all, she padded straight down into the entryway without hesitation and sat, neat and upright, facing the door. The tip of her tail swept once, slowly, through the air.
Towa set down her teacup and couldn’t quite bring her hand back. When it dims — call everyone to the door. The rest of that forgotten sentence rose up from somewhere deep in her chest.
Outside, the Blinking Star was easing back toward its old brightness. How many decades had that light taken to reach here? There was no way now to know where Jun was, or what had become of him.
Towa stood and put her hand on the door. “Hana. Come here.”
The door swung open, and cold night air poured into the entryway. For the first time in sixty years, Goma crossed the threshold and walked slowly out toward the star, still trembling faintly in the sky. Towa and Hana stood together in the dark doorway and watched her small back come to a stop in the middle of the yard, watched her lift her face, straight and steady, toward the west.