Goodnight Little King

It started slowly, the way most heartbreaks do — with things I could explain away.

King was sixteen, after all, and I told myself the changes were just age. He slept more. He lost some weight. Sometimes his back legs wobbled when he jumped. But then came the nights.

He started to howl — long, hollow yowls that split the silence around two in the morning. I’d wake up and find him standing by his food bowl, howling like something was wrong. The bowl would be full. I’d try a different flavor, or a softer mix, and he’d eat like nothing was ever wrong. For a few days, it would be fine. Then the howling would start again.

His litter box habits also turned unpredictable — violent even. I was lucky if half of it landed where it was supposed to. I started to dread cleaning it because it reminded me how off things had become.

The vet said it was his thyroid, not his hypothalamus like I first thought, and sent us home with pills. That’s when the real nightmare began. King had never taken medication before, and I didn’t know how to make him understand I was trying to help. Every attempt turned into a small war. I’d wrap him in a towel, try to slip the pill between his teeth, and he’d claw, spit, or vomit it out. Afterward, he’d look at me like he didn’t recognize me — like the one person who had never hurt him suddenly had.

The vet gave me a syringe for mixing the pill into soft food. I tried everything: chicken, gravy, tuna, anything I could mash the powder into. He knew. The second he saw me crushing something, he’d walk away. Sometimes, I’d think I’d fooled him, only for him to take one bite, lick his lips, and turn his back. He was too smart for my desperation.

Two weeks later, I woke up to the sound of him screaming. It wasn’t a yowl. It was a sound that stopped everything in me. He couldn’t stand on his back legs and kept moving in tight circles, panicked, confused, trying to find ground that would hold him. I scooped him up, shaking, shoved him in his carrier, and called a cab to the animal hospital. By the time we arrived, he could walk again — tender, hesitant, but walking. The vet said it might have been a spinal issue, maybe a slipped disc, but it seemed to have corrected itself. His x-rays showed swelling. They gave me a muscle relaxer. Another pill.

So now it wasn’t just one medication, but two. And every attempt made both of us smaller. I’d sit on the kitchen floor, weak with exhaustion, holding the pills in my palm like a prayer, trying to convince him, trying to convince myself. His eyes looked heavy, distant. He didn’t understand why love hurt now.

The nights got louder. His fur turned patchy. I knew cats stopped grooming themselves when things got bad, and he had stopped completely. His coat dulled, his spine sharpened, and the howls came every night.

Then came the night I’ll never forget. I’d ordered canned food for him, but the delivery was late. I had nothing else. The stores were closed, and I didn’t have a car. For two hours, he stood in the kitchen, crying. I opened everything I could find — beef stew, a pot pie, leftover London broil. I scraped sauces off, tried to make it safe. I opened every can, every possibility. I even found one place that could deliver tuna and paid whatever it cost. Nothing worked.

At one point, there were twenty plates on the kitchen floor. He’d rush to each one, sniff, take a few licks, and then start crying again. I couldn’t take it. I locked myself in my room, sat on the bed, and just listened to him yowl through the door. After a while, he came and pushed at it, wanting to be near me, and when I finally let him in, he quieted down.

He’d always been that kind of cat. He didn’t need much — food, toys, nothing. He just needed attention. Love was the thing he fed on. And that night, I held him close in his favorite way and he begin to purr gently as usual but all the love in the world couldn’t touch whatever was wrong inside him.

The next morning, I took him back to the vet. They told me it was too late. His thyroid levels were dangerously high again. His heart had a murmur. The weight loss wasn’t stopping. He wasn’t absorbing food anymore. The vet told me, gently, that even if I managed to get his medication right, this was just the start of something worse. I knew what she was saying before she said it.

I called Javier. Technically, King had been his cat once — a gift from me, back in 2007. Two little black kittens, brothers, named Elvis and King. Elvis had run away after a year, but King stayed. He’d traveled with me back and forth across states, through moves, breakups, apartments. He’d grown up with me. Outlived relationships, outlasted jobs. He’d been there in every version of me, sitting in the window like he was watching over all of it.

I told my family. My sister, Nicole, said she’d take me. My dad and stepmom had both loved him too — my dad had even taken care of him for a year. Everyone understood what he meant. But understanding didn’t make it easier.

That night, I didn’t sleep. Around six, I started to get ready. King followed me like he always did, his tail brushing against my leg. The howling came again, but softer this time. Almost like he was comforting me. Part of me wanted to believe maybe he was getting better, maybe this wasn’t the day. But by seven-thirty, I had packed his carrier. Nicole came, and we drove in silence while he meowed the whole way, his voice steady, like he was still alive in the world.

At the clinic, they gave us a small room. I wrapped him in his towel — the one he always slept on — and held him. We called Javier, and I let him talk through the speaker while I stroked King’s head. It was so fast. One second he was there, blinking, breathing, still trying to understand why I was crying, and then the next — gone. His eyes turned to glass, and the room went quiet.

I stayed until they took him. Then I walked back into an empty apartment that didn’t feel like mine anymore.

The next morning, I woke up to silence — not the kind that rests, but the kind that weighs. The power was out. It was early September, the first break in the summer heat, but Charlotte without air conditioning is still unbearable. Within an hour and a half, the apartment climbed from seventy-one degrees to eighty-six. The air thickened. I felt like the walls were closing in.

Nicole called and said the power had gone out on her side too, then told me to come stay with her until it came back. I packed a bag without thinking, called an Uber, and sat in the back seat staring out at a city that looked fine, unchanged.

At her place, I lay down in the guest room, staring up at the ceiling fan that wasn’t spinning. Everything felt still and wrong. The heat, the quiet, the blank ceiling — it was all too on-the-nose. I remember thinking, What am I supposed to do now? Like life had just tilted and I couldn’t find a way to stand.

I whispered it out loud at one point — When does it get better?

And for the first time, I didn’t have an answer.
All I knew was that I couldn’t stay there anymore