When the cat dies they receive a DVD in the mail containing her memories.
The screen shows fish in a bowl, bugs running away, and a young girl practicing a dance in the living room. The speakers play chewing, scratching, scraping of nails on glass, shoes tapping on wood, and a piano and a trumpet together. There is static in the recording, from distortions of the mind: she was only a cat, after all.
The daughter takes the DVD to school the next day and shows it to her friends. They laugh because her cat had such a poor memory, and one of her friends invites her to come to her house and see her own cat’s DVD from a while ago. Her cat had almost twice as many memories, and the two girls sit together in front of the television and watch dumpsters with raccoons in them, and dirt roads outside, and other cats hissing, and the inside of a sterile car, and backyard hunting grounds with birds and mice.
The daughter asks her mother whether her cat had a worse life than her friends cat, whether she missed out by being an indoor cat, and her mother tells her that it’s true, maybe that she missed out on certain things, but that at least she watched a beautiful young girl learn to dance.
