Sweet Romance15 min read
The Cherry Watch and the Cat Who Kept Time
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I first saw him as a white blur under a string of red lanterns, six years old and wild with curiosity.
"Look, Mom," I said, tugging her sleeve. "Can I go see that cat?"
"You can't," she said. "That's the village madwoman's cat."
"It isn't mad," I whispered. "It looked at me like it was waiting."
That night, the lantern light painted the old well orange. An old woman sat there as she always had, a cat in her lap, a flag-like qipao on her thin shoulders. Everyone in our town called her the old madwoman. I called her Grandmother, though I did not know her before then. She hugged the cat and watched the sky with the patient sadness of someone who had set an appointment with the stars.
A white light came out of the darkness between the rice paddies and the old woman lifted her face to it. A soldier in a faded uniform stood there, handsome like a photograph. He bowed, saluted. The old woman smiled and wept at once.
"North—" the old woman said, and her voice broke.
"Shh," I heard the soldier say, as if he were protecting her from the distant fireworks. He handed her a bundle of small white daisies and they collapsed into each other's arms.
I blinked and the soldier was gone. The old woman smiled, went back to her stool, and the cat—snow white, with blue eyes like small sapphires—rolled down and vanished between her slippers.
When fireworks popped and the world made a new year, Grandmother was gone. The cat stayed.
"She was waiting for a husband who never came back," my father said later, as if the story explained everything. "He died in the war."
But small things do not fit so neatly into grown-up sentences.
Years passed, and the village grew a tourist path, then a red-brick manor. I returned as an adult with a heavy bag and a light jaw, the city dust still in my hair. My name is Marie Chen. I edit and chase small miracles for a living. I did not expect miracles to come home.
"Grandfather left the manor to someone else's grandson," a man at the gate complained. "We should turn this into a guesthouse!"
"Not if the place itself will eat us with ghosts," his friend muttered.
I pushed my luggage across a creaking threshold and stood inside a house that folded light into corners like a secret. An old mechanical doorbell made a brief, earnest "ding-dong" sound. The air smelled like dust and possibility.
"Marie!" Halo Benton hugged me like a windstorm. "You're back. You timed your return to be the most inconvenient and the most fortunate thing in the neighborhood."
"You're loud," I said, laughing. "And that keeps you useful."
"You're modest."
Another man, still half sleep, emerged from a doorway with a camera bag. Marcel Lundberg. He smiled like the kind of person who keeps kindness in his pockets.
"You moved into this place?" I said.
"Sort of," Marcel said. "It belonged to my grandfather's friend. I agreed to keep an eye on it. And because I'm magnanimous, I volunteered half the third floor."
Marcel twitched. "And I brought a cat."
He held out a snow-white cat. I knew it from the moment the blue eyes met mine. The cat looked at me like he knew me. "Edward," Marcel said, and the name landed on my ears like something that had been measured to fit.
"Edward?" I asked. "That name suits him."
"He suits the name," Marcel replied, and pushed a grin at me. "Edward Church. Nice to meet you. You can call him Ed."
"Marie," I said, because introductions are the smallest form of truth-telling. "I don't believe in ghosts, but I believe in the way the world arranges accidents."
Edward blinked slowly, like an agreement.
Halo rented us out of the first days with an ease that felt like luck. "You fit this place," she said, as if the manor had hired me by accident.
I started at a small local newsroom the next week. Halo runs a little editorial office called Lingxi. She calls the group the Lingxi team like it's an island she keeps together with coffee and stubbornness. I was a hopeful intern with a camera and two open palms. The sky over the city made headlines: a white light flashed across the clouds, then a ribbon of red, and the whole town asked the same kind of frightened question—what happened?
"Did you see it?" Halo asked one morning. "The sky looked like it was on fire."
"I saw the light," I said. "And then I said something stupid in five different interviews."
"What did you say?" Halo leaned forward.
"That the cat lord had returned."
Halo blinked. "You said 'cat lord' in an interview?"
"It's not an interview if you can't embarrass yourself at least once a week." I tried to laugh it off. Then the white light came again in the evening and Edward, calm as a pocketwatch, turned and mewed as if something ancient had remembered him.
"Who is this?" the editor asked. "A researcher? A professor?"
"Franklin Wood," I said, because I was learning names, and Dr. Wood had a tendency to appear with a bag of books and the air of someone who liked the world to arrange itself in drawers.
Edward slept on my workdesk sometimes, curled like a comma. Around him the staffless hours were softer. One night, after a long day, a white flash lit the room and something like a clock swallowed the air.
"Ah!" came a sound. Edward rolled, his form changing in a motion so small I thought I had imagined it. Where the cat had been sat a man in a white coat, very thin, very pale, very old in the sure way of people who carry other people's secrets.
"Edward?" I asked, even though the name felt too small for the person standing in front of me.
He blinked in the worst possible way—like someone who had been asked to do arithmetic with memories. He called himself North, but in my head he fit into a shape I couldn't name without being sentimental. He had suffered and survived more than the century promised him. He smelled faintly of medicinal herbs and of the sweetness of cherries.
Our lives braided. He taught me to listen for the way people paused when they hid things. I taught him the little habits of city life: how to cross a street without being noticed, how to use a subway card, how to pretend you understand smartphones.
"Why do you become a cat?" I asked one rain-heavy afternoon while we made tea.
"Because it's safer," Edward said. "It lets me be with someone without being—" He stopped. His blue eyes turned soft and careful. "Because someone once told me to wait. And I kept my promise."
"You kept a promise to a war that ended more than a century ago?" I said. I didn't know why I expected sense from a man who became a cat.
Edward smiled like a person holding a precious ruin. "I kept a promise to a smile."
"Which smile?"
"Marie," he said, and because of course he said my name in a way that made my chest tighten, I walked away.
Halo announced one day that we would cover a medical lecture. "It's safe," she said. "Franklin will be there. Also, we might get a star picture."
We went. The auditorium filled, the professor spoke in the delightful way professors do—long sentences with many commas. He introduced a young researcher, a man in a white coat who turned the lights into a stage.
"That's him," I breathed.
Edward stood at the front and gave a talk about the chemistry of care that made people in the back row lean in. A sunbeam found him and held him like a halo. My chest did a messy little flip. Halo caught my face in her hands like a guilty champion. "Tell me you can still be a sensible adult."
"I can be sensible later," I said.
The sky decided to be strange that day. As people spilled out into the evening, the sky became a wound of red. A sharp light flashed. Edward folded like tissue and became a cat on the pavement.
"Edward!" Marcel sobbed. He scooped the cat up like a lifeboat.
"He's fine," I said, but my voice was paper.
"Don't be dramatic," Halo said, and there was humor in her eyes. She didn't believe in miracles, but she believed in the comfort of people who do.
We learned more of his story in fragments. In another life he had been a man in a uniform who carried letters and promises. He had loved a young woman who smelled of cherry trees and small daisies. She had waited at a well every morning and sat with a cat and a patient hope that made the villagers call her foolish. He never came back from the war. The man who once loved her came to her in a white flash one New Year's night and held her like someone giving someone else's grief back.
"They are buried under a cherry tree," Edward told me once. "She wanted him to be warm."
"So when you become a cat?" I asked, because the rules of things both annoyed and comforted me.
"When the moon and the medicine say it's time," he said. "When I need to be small enough to sit in a lap and remember."
We kept living together. I learned every small fault of him: the way his hand curled around a pen, the way he looked at damaged things. He had a chest of recipes and medicines that smelled of iron and blossom. He had a watch he touched sometimes and put back in his pocket like a lit candle.
Then the town became unreasonably noisy. Halo was right there with her microphone when a grandman decided that my orphaned house was the perfect place to host a birthday banquet. Flags, drums, and a man who wore his power like a coat: High Commander.
"Make it bright, make it big," the High Commander said in a voice the public could not afford. "My son should be first in everything."
"Do you really have to be so loud about it?" someone muttered. The son smiled like a man who had been trained to think smiles were currency.
At the banquet, silverware shivered and chandeliers swallowed conversations. Someone with a camera set up a screen to project the Commander's face to the back of the room—a smug private display of public wealth.
Halo, who never passed up a story, leaned toward me. "You stay," she said. "Get close. If there's anything to write, I'll make sure it's on the front page."
We were small that evening: a journalist, an editor, a cat in a lap who watched wires like old sailors watching storms. I held my breath for reasons I couldn't name.
Then the screen flicked.
"What's that?" the Commander asked, frowning like a man who had been told a polite lie.
The projector showed not the child's polite smile but a cascade of private messages, texts and recordings that belonged to the Commander's son. He had been using people for their names, not their faces. There were messages where he called a woman "a walking bank," where he plotted to take money and leave.
"Turn it off!" the son shouted. He stood and pulled at the projector. The room hummed and a dozen phones raised like a tide.
"Where did you get those?" the Commander said at first with cool amusement.
A video started playing. Voices from phones amplified into the hall. "She is only money," the son's voice said in a loop. "As soon as I have the papers, I'll drop her."
The Commander's face drained.
"This is a lie," he said. "These are doctored. Fabricated!"
It had that familiar rhythm: smugness, then confusion, then denial. But the facts had teeth. A messenger had delivered the files to our newsroom without a name. Halo had placed them on the screen with two taps. The room that had been warm with expectation became a field where shame would be harvested.
"You can't show this," the Commander barked. "You will ruin me!"
"Maybe you should have thought about that before you tore a life into pieces," Halo said. Her voice had the precise coldness of someone who knew the law of how small things become evidence.
"The crowd erupted," I remember. "Gasps, then the faint practice-of-phones—the sound of people recording what they watch."
The Commander's boot found the carpet. He went white as paper. He held his hand in front of his face like a shield. Younger men in dark suits began to circle quietly, like moths around a dying flame.
"Stop this," he begged at first. You could see him searching for the old equation: power buys silence.
Then he shifted to rage. "This is a lie," he repeated. "You — you can't—"
"No," Halo said. "You can deny in private. In public the truth looks more like witnesses and less like tales."
"Turn it off!" he screamed, and he lunged at the projection controls. Someone grabbed him by the cuff. His son's face, white and sweating, tried to shout something that sounded like excuse and vomit at once.
Phones rose higher. "This is crazy," someone whispered. A chorus of "oh" moved along the banquet like a wave. Clips began to go live.
"Shut up!" the son pleaded. He was the first to move through the four stages the room would watch with a kind of fascinated cruelty: arrogance, puzzlement, denial, collapse.
"You're going to make me look ridiculous?" he said, voice hunting for scale. "It’s doctored—"
He slid down. "Please," he said, and the word cracked into a plea. He dropped to his knees in the center of the room. The formal wooden floor was suddenly cheap and loud beneath him.
People collected around the edge like gossips curving the rim of a crater. Someone took a slow, careful photograph. Others whispered; some laughed. A woman near the back tapped her screen, and within five minutes there were a thousand little windows showing the son on his knees, pleading in front of his father's guests.
He moved through the classic rituals of humiliation.
"Please—" he begged again, voice small and fraying at the edges.
"No," the Commander said at last, his own face a mask of impotent fury. He had clung to dignity like a garment and the storm had stripped him. Now he stood, trembling, but he didn't reach for his son. He couldn't. Not yet. The room tasted of a new law: the public deluge.
"You're pathetic," someone near the tables shouted. A dozen phones raised to capture every fragment. The son reached for any mercy—
"Stop filming!" he cried.
There were hands on the floor. Someone took hold of his collar. "Get up," the father hissed. He felt the emergency of his own name unraveling. He realized, in the awful clear way of people facing a visible loss of status, that his son was not negotiable any longer. He was a liability.
"I didn't—" the son said. Tears fell onto the polished wood. He had traveled the arc from triumph to rubble in the space it takes to say a name.
"No one helped," he said. "Please. For my family."
Clap. A woman clapped, a small, sharp sound like a knife folding laundry. Someone else began to boo. A child near the stage, thinking the world always made spectacles, laughed aloud. People filmed, people pointed, people formed rebellion in shallow, delicious waves.
"I don't want to be reminded of this," the Commander said, his voice now wet with worry, the voice of someone who had watched the world he thought he owned rebrand itself into witness and memory.
"Then do better," Halo said. She kept her hand steady on the microphone, though her fingers trembled. "Or get out of the way."
The son crawled forward and, in a move I will always recall with an uncomfortable clarity, he bowed his head and began to cry with the sound of a man who had been taught to hide ugliness behind a smile. His voice became a small jumble of denial and supplication.
"I'll pay. I'll pay," he said. "I'll fix it. Please, don't—"
"No one rushed to take him up," I remember thinking. "The world doesn't accept a bargain from someone who refused a life before."
"The crowd started to record everything," someone said later. "They filmed him begging. They filmed the husband who had been planning to sell his countrywoman. They left with a new routine: if the powerful abuse their names, the public will manufacture a currency called shame."
He tried to stand and the room watched him fail. He tried to call for the lawyer he thought had been bought and found that the space around him had already been emptied of favors. He tried to call for his father and the man simply looked away. The circle tightened into a mirror and he couldn't find a reflection that soothed him.
People clapped and shook heads and silently spread small images of his kneeling face. Someone took a photograph that would travel the country by morning. Without violence, the man had been brought low. He dove into pleading and the crown of witnesses smiled like hungry birds.
If there was cruelty that night, it was the cruelty of final lesson: the public does not forget when you call people merchandise. The son—once arrogant—found his voice turned into something no amount of money could smother.
"Please," he begged again. "Please—"
The man at the head of the hall—his father—did nothing until the cameras found him, and then he made a face that said: I have been undone by the thing I bragged about. He went from smugness to dismay, from denial to anger, from anger to a brittle, private grief. He never knelt. He did not join in the begging. He only watched the son he had raised into this predicament fall apart as if the son had become the only clean place left to dump guilt.
It was public, it was final, and it had teeth. People recorded, they took pictures, and those pictures traveled.
A week later the son learned what it was to be untouchable in a world where screens convert scandal into forever. He had lost invitations and the warmth of the room. He had lost casual discounts and the power to be trusted in small conversations. He had been made an image that could not be unmade.
I sat there, and watched because my job is to look, and because seeing a man fall with such theatrics made me remember other things: the old woman at the well, the promise under the cherry tree, the cat who had once been a man who kept company with memory.
After that night the town felt different. People walked with smaller secrets and larger vigilance. Halo edited and we published and people read. The High Commander's son found he could not buy his way back into the world he had imagined was his.
But that night meant other things too. Grand gestures attract small futures. The white cat who was sometimes a man, Edward Church, stayed by my side. We went to lectures and borrowed daisies and took turns being brave.
One afternoon the old woman—Grandmother—died peaceful in her sleep. The cat sat in her lap like a watch on a wrist. She had waited so well that even death felt like a small kindness. People said she had been waiting for a soldier. People said she had been foolish. I said nothing. I found a small gold watch tucked under her pillow that had no photo but instead a painted scene of a cherry tree. I took it.
Edward slept on my desk after the funeral and I couldn't stop thinking about time and promises. He began to tell me more about the medicine he had learned, a concoction of bitter cherries, blue jacaranda blooms, and a water that had once come up from a mountain spring. He called it a medicine for the body and a stitch for the soul. He said it kept him upright. He said it gave him shape.
"How long will you be in this shape?" I asked one morning.
"Half a month if I don't take it," he said. "If I do, the wounds fade and I remember names."
"Names like—?"
"Like you," he said, and the word made the room small.
Days brushed themselves into months. I learned to make small compotes. I taught him to use a camera. We photographed small things—the moon in a puddle, the way a child's hair formed tiny constellations in the light. We wrote about the city and its secrets.
There were other ghosts in the old stories. A fox had once been blamed for arson, a man named Lingmon had chased shadows and then cut the people he loved. The village myths told it as simple cruelty. I heard the stories in pieces, half told by Aviana Alvarez—Grandmother's friend, the white-cat woman who had watched centuries like a book.
"They believed what they heard," Aviana told us once in her small living room, a kettle singing like a small conscience. "They didn't want complicated truths."
"Who burned the village?" I asked.
"A man who wished himself righteous," Aviana said. "A man whose ears were full of one kind of voice. He killed what he thought he could clean with knives."
"Then who saved who?" I asked.
"A small fruit," she said simply. "A tree. A promise. And a cat who learned to make medicines."
One day, years later, when the world had rearranged itself into more practical shapes, a festival came. A scholar—Franklin Wood—published a paper on a medicine Edward had offered, only to have those same pharmaceutical interests twist the recipe into commercial versions. I watched the kitchen become a battleground where ethics and money talked all night and won small arguments with small piles of currency.
Edward fell ill once, more seriously than his other vanishings. He lay still and the cat curled on his chest and made the sound of a slow engine. I knew the medicine had been exhausted. I grabbed the jars he kept in the back cupboard and boiled them like an incantation. The steam smelled like rain in the months before harvest.
"I don't want to be a theft," Edward said when he woke, his voice cotton-soft.
"You are not a theft," I said. "You're a promise that learned how to keep itself."
He smiled, then reached into his pocket and gave me the gold watch from Grandmother's pillow. "Keep the time," he said. "When you wind it, sometimes you'll hear the tick of someone who loves you."
I learned to wind the watch. Its sound fit the kitchen and the room and even my small, uncertain love. The tick was a private proof that time is sometimes held by small people who choose to stay. We ate cherries until the last of them were gone. We made compotes and medicines and apologies.
Years passed. I published a story about a man who had been humiliated in a banquet hall and another about the secret of a white cat. They made noise, which is the journalist's weather. The town changed. People moved in and out and the manor sold kurtains and dreams.
Edward grew thinner with the years and thicker with the gentleness that all honest people gather. He once said to me, soft as a moth, "I promised to keep someone from being lonely. If I've been half good at it, then my life has been worth the trouble."
"You are not someone who can be measured," I said. "You are measured by the lives you made softer."
"Then measure me," he said, and wound the watch.
On a clear morning, with the cherries still small on the boughs and the sky polished like a coin, I carried the watch in my palm, a tiny gold heart.
"Promise me something?" he asked.
"I don't do promises," I said, because I had been in the rooms where promises were cheap and the time they cost was expensive.
"Then let this be a pledge," he said, and kissed me like a punctuation mark. "Keep this watch. When the tick catches you by surprise, that will be how you know I'm still choosing to be where you need me."
I wound the watch and the tick was so small I had to hold my breath to hear it. The sound was like a small bell in a closet. It was private and precise.
Years later, when people ask me what I learned from a man who sometimes became a cat, I tell them this: love is sturdier than schedule and stranger than reason. Some love keeps time in a pocketwatch and keeps coming back like a tide.
At the end of the day, I keep the watch in a box with a photograph. The photograph is faded; the face in it is a soldier's smile, and someone once told me his name. I wind the watch. It ticks. Edward curls at my feet.
"Do you remember her?" I asked him one night, showing him the old photograph. The shadows were long and the house smelled like damp cloth and tea.
He touched the glass lightly. "I remember the way she waited," he whispered. "She waited like a person who believes the world must pay attention if she sits still enough."
"Did she ever regret it?" I asked.
"She loved as if the world would answer," he said, and the room felt like an answer.
The cat purred and the watch said tick and I thought of small daisies and larger promises. I thought of a banquet where a man learned how small the world becomes when it records you. I thought of a village that burned and of a fox and of the kindest thing: someone who kept time for another.
I wind the watch once more. It is a private thing now. The tick is faint but it is not gone. Outside, the cherry tree throws a handful of petals into the wind like soft punctuation.
"Do you remember your name?" I asked Edward.
He lifted his head and looked at me with blue eyes like small sapphires. "Edward," he said. "And sometimes—North. And sometimes—I am just a cat who loves a woman who loved the world enough to wait."
I laughed, feeling like both thief and keeper.
"Then we'll keep each other," I said, and wound the watch.
The End
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