Oct. 15—Our dead cat, Mr. Bradbury, was staring intensely into one empty corner of our living room. His yellow eyes were as wide as I'd ever seen them, fixed upward at the spot where two walls met both each other and the ceiling.

To be clear, Mr. Bradbury wasn't dead at the time. This was in 2007 or 2008, long before I'd accidentally killed him.

"What are you looking at, boy?" I recall asking the cat, or something similar. But whatever had captured his attention so fascinated him, he didn't seem to hear me ... didn't even appear to realize I was there.

From my usual seat across the room, I tried to see whatever had so transfixed our cat. I assumed, if I squinted hard enough, that I'd spot some cobwebs billowing in the air-conditioned breeze. Or maybe there'd be some near-microscopic critter scaling the wall.

But there didn't seem to be anything there. I found this unsettlingly unsettling.

"Dang it, Bradbury," I said, raising my voice to ensure he heard me. "There's nothing there. Stop it."

Mr. Bradbury did not, however, stop it. Quite the opposite. He stood, the little red bell below his chin jingling as he rose, took a few cautious steps forward, then sat again. His gaze never left the corner of the room.

I huffed and pushed up from my chair.

"There's nothing there, dude," I said as I stomped across the hardwood to the corner, unreasonably agitated. I stood on my toes and reached up toward the ceiling, waving my hand through the space just to be certain. Nothing.

"See," I said as I turned back to my cat. "There's ..."

Mr. Bradbury was gone. For the briefest moment, I feared he'd never been there at all.

The words "where'd" and "you" had just slipped from my mouth when I heard the tinkle of a tiny bell directly below me. Mr. Bradbury was seated at my feet, his head cranked upward at a near 90-degree angle as he glared at some unseen dimension beyond my raised hand.

I wiggled my fingers through the air in a way cats always find fascinating. But if Mr. Bradbury noticed, he didn't let on.

I turned back. The corner was still empty. At least, from what my eyes could see.

For a moment, I felt very cold.

"Fine," I told the cat. "You just keep doing what you're doing. Spend hours staring at nothing for all I care. If that's how you want to live your life, who am I to stop you? You just go right ahead and stare a hole through that wall and then do us all a favor and crawl out of it so we don't have to be bothered by your nonsense ever again."

I stomped back across the hardwood and dropped into my chair, returning to whatever it was I was doing there before my cat had distracted me.

Mr. Bradbury didn't spend hours staring at that corner of the living room. Not long after I'd sat down, he stood — eyes still upward — and walked away, the jingling of the tiny bell on his neck growing fainter as he vanished to elsewhere in the house.

Although I knew what I'd find, I gave the corner a last look.

Many years later, I walked into the living room and found one of our other cats — Flannery — staring into that same corner of the living room.

My thoughts immediately turned to Mr. Bradbury, long dead at this point.

The corner of the room was, as you probably have guessed, empty.

"What do you see, girl?" I asked Flannery, who's deaf now but wasn't then. Like her late housemate, she didn't answer. When I reached down to scratch her head, the cat jumped in surprise. I don't think she'd known I was there.

Flannery meowed at me and rubbed her chin against my hand, the tiny bell on her neck sounding as it grazed my fingertips. Her eyes never left the corner of the room.

"Sure wish I could see whatever it is you cats see," I told her as I followed her gaze. I waited for some unseen creature to reveal itself.

When I heard the tinkle of a cat bell, I half-expected to look down and find Mr. Bradbury sitting next to my feet.

Of course, he wasn't. He was gone, and so too was Flannery.

I was alone. At least, I hoped I was.

ADAM ARMOUR is the news editor for the Daily Journal and former general manager of The Itawamba County Times. You may reach him via his Twitter handle, @admarmr.

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