The first thing you noticed was the smell.

More about The first thing you noticed was the smell.

When I say that, the mind automatically goes to a cat box full of burning tires, or somebody’s ruined skin inside a coat that has outlived three governments.

But this was electric blue.

It smelled the way I imagined chlorine would smell if it paused before killing you to mention how beautiful you had been as a child. There were almonds in it, too, from a country where the orchards grew behind locked fences.

And grapes. The impossible purple grapes I associated with cobalt in a Delft pottery studio, where a woman painted little windmills onto things nobody would ever put in the dishwasher.

Underneath everything was wet earth.

You sometimes find that smell in the concrete stairwell of a residential tower. Between the ninth and tenth floors, the building remembers it used to be a field.

That was my favourite part.

The cat-dragon sat beneath an orange sun with its tail threaded through the skeleton of a smaller sun. Its face was turquoise. Its whiskers extended into several neighbouring disappointments.

I wanted to sniff it all day.

“People usually ask whether I bite,” it said.

“Do you?”

“Occasionally. But they’re seldom the people who ask.”

Around us stood other cats, tall and narrow, wearing the expressions of relatives who had arrived early for the reading of a will. One had a porcelain face. Another appeared to be constructed entirely from the space between branches in winter.

A small one sat on a broken chair holding a blue plate against its chest.

“What’s on the plate?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” said the dragon.

“Didn’t anybody finish it?”

The small cat looked down.

Apparently I had said something unkind.

I put my face against the dragon’s neck. It was cool and smelled of rain entering a place where rain had been forbidden for years.

There were tiny doors beneath its scales. Through one I heard a bath running. Through another, somebody was teaching my mother to pronounce my name before I existed.

I stayed there a long time.

Eventually the dragon began to purr. The sound travelled through the floor, and all the little bones in the room shifted closer together.

Outside, somebody called for a cat.

Every creature looked up.

None of them went.