Comfort Animals

By Pascha Sotolongo •

The cat on the proposed book cover—a white-whiskered piebald—shouldn’t have surprised me. My debut story collection is full of furry mammals, birds, insects, and at least two lizards. A handful of these (often fantastical) creatures have agency and personality, dreams and dreads. Most receive only a passing glance. Though not particularly intentional or even conscious at the time of writing, the fictional worlds of my collection are alert to the many nonhuman bodies living alongside us. As I wrote, they simply nosed, crawled, and flew their way in, seeming to say, “Hey, make room for me!” So I did.

Until editors began remarking upon the human-animal relationships in my writing, I had neither noted this pattern nor considered how often writers populate their stories with living creatures other than humans. And then the designers presented me with that beautiful book cover, that glimpse of a leaping cat, and I was stunned.

Why did all those critters make their way onto my pages?

My parents and I made a tiny family, just the three of us. We were often poor, always nomadic, piloted by a Latino father who bristled at (especially white) male bosses and quit as many jobs as he landed. With each move, each uprooting and precarious new start, familiar people and landscapes receded into a hazy oblivion, my young face pressed against the window of a car or U-Haul truck, friends and family looking on, their eyes solemn, hands gently waving. In those moments, I tried to look cheerful but always felt stupid afterward for having smiled.

Because of our transience, I learned to count upon certain constants, the few facets of my life unlikely to change from place to place, one of which was our cat, Charlie. She was half feral—a wild thing found in the yard of a house we rented for several months. Throughout her life, she considered my ankles her rightful prey. I still have scars. But I was an only child, and, as I saw it, she was the closest I had to an equal.

When we moved, she rode with us in the cab of the moving truck, pupils dilated, mouth open and panting, or sometimes yowling. She was scared, angry, confused. Often, so was I. And I made it my job to keep her hydrated (cats riding in the cabs of U-Hauls never drink enough), to keep her calm, to comfort her, and in comforting her, I comforted myself. Giving solace to a body smaller than mine, to a mind less capable of comprehension, to something more vulnerable than my little girl self, helped fortify me against my own distress at so much upheaval. I had to be strong for her. For Charlie.

At sixteen, Charlie died of natural causes. She had moved dozens of times: all over Florida, twice to Arizona, twice to Missouri, but she survived them all, never grew dehydrated, never escaped at the rest stops where I walked her on a leash, never jumped out of the truck at Burger King. Whatever this uncertain, nomadic life did to us, it would not end in tragedy for our cat.

Writing animals into my stories now, looking after them, shepherding them from here to there, comforts me, helps steel me for the hardships about which I write and through which I live. When I sit down to resume work on a project, the presence of an animal in the story palpably draws me to it, makes me long to spend time there observing the creature, watching it move about, the sun dancing along its back, and do the things such creatures do. Imagine sitting in a quiet room having an awkward conversation with a stranger. It’s painful. Now imagine that a cat, an equable interlocutor, wanders in, lies down on the rug, and licks its belly, fur floating around it. See how the tension eases? Writing feels intense to me, seems to rouse the “voices of anxiety, judgment, [and] doom” that the perspicacious Anne Lamott describes in Bird by Bird. But an animal on the page syphons some of that tension away, enough that my fingers keep tapping the keys and words keep forming.

I am not the only writer who takes comfort in the animals roaming her pages. In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl says, “I am beguiled by the promise of a year watched over by this bold, problem-solving bird—the playful prankster, the curious collector, the tender parent, humankind’s steadfast companion. Even if the terrible time comes when all the other songbirds are gone, lost to the fiery world, crows will remain among us, living on what we leave behind.” I hear in Renkl’s loving list of crows’ attributes how forcefully they charm her. I hear too the personal solace she takes in knowing this creature will endure, even if others cannot.

For Annie Hartnett (who became a vegetarian at age seven), animals are a self-described “obsession.” In her Unlikely Animals, the stray dog who comes to be called Moses thinks “friend” when he looks at Emma, the story’s protagonist and his rescuer, but when she looks at him, she thinks “savior.” Moving toward a confrontation with her father’s looming death, it’s possible that Emma needs Moses the dog more than Moses the dog needs Emma the human.

In one of my favorite short stories, Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s “Little Bird,” the protagonist arrives at a job interview with a dying bird in her pocket, a “gift” her cat, Kokorito, left in the hallway of her home. Unwilling to simply abandon the bird to its fate, the protagonist wraps it in tissue and shelters it in her coat pocket until halfway through the interview when it revives and flies away. And here is the remarkable thing about this gorgeous narrative turn: the woman cannot imagine the interviewer holding the bird against her, though we infer that he does. She knows only that she needs to save it somehow—this yellow-breasted kjøttmeis—and even after the interview has gone poorly, she says this: “On the way home I see plenty of birds, but I’m looking for the one that kept me company during the interview. I’d like to say thank you.” Caring for the bird has comforted her by charging her life this day with the kind of meaning that transcends the outcome of a job interview.

Putting animals in our stories may do more, however, than merely (self-servingly) comfort us as writers or comfort our characters on the page. It has the potential to act as a kind of thought experiment in which humans, however briefly, cede their standard narrative centrality to nonhuman protagonists. Theoretically, this reordering complicates or even disrupts the anthropocentric assumptions that organize our lives and ultimately permit animal suffering in the context of, for one example, industrial food production. Writing an animal character that functions as more than, in David DeGrazia’s words, an “organic wind-up toy,” may help us achieve the possibility of which Hannah M. Strømmen writes, that is, to “move beyond the idea of animals as mere means to human ends.” Because it serves the narrative, an animal in a story will always function, at least partly, as a means to a human’s end, but the nature of its depiction matters. Portraying creatures as more than and different from wind-up toys, receptacles for human affection, projections of human ego, or proxies for humans themselves has a kind of moral value.

It is not, however, easy to do.

Many books seek a middle ground—imbuing their animal characters with heightened emotional and intellectual capabilities as well as animal-appropriate behaviors. Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain comes to mind as an example of this approach, as does Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Both feature pet narrators—a dog and a cat respectively—in which realistic animal traits coexist with human levels of perception and cognition. In the classic animal fantasy, Watership Down, Richard Adams’s rabbits behave remarkably like actual rabbits in their habits of eating, sleeping, eliminating, mating, hiding, fleeing, and socializing, but they do so with quite human capacities for self-awareness and moral failings such as hubris, laziness, and revenge. Only an individual reader can judge the effects of this approach, but I believe such narratives, though obviously anthropomorphic, compel us to consider animals’ emotional lives and thereby increase our empathy for them.

My current project, a book-length fable set in western Nebraska, takes for its protagonist a hen because too few animal characters are female, and hens are among the most put-upon of creatures. Over the course of writing this book, I grew attached to her to a degree that surprised me. Authors aren’t supposed to protect their characters, but, for better or worse, I grapple with protective instincts toward the animals in my stories. They strike me as uniquely vulnerable.

To be clear, I would always save a human before an animal, and I’m far from fond of them all (humans or animals). I still remember, at five years old, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s living room gently petting a dog that—whip quick—sank his teeth into my small neck. Queue the blood…and the scar. Whether from aggressive behavior or the risk of disease, most animals can be dangerous. That is part of their complexity. And while I rarely eat meat, unlike Annie Hartnett, I am not a vegetarian. But the primacy of humans is precisely what obligates us to act responsibly and compassionately toward the animals with which we share our world, and that begins with noticing them, even in our stories.

For every lamp or mailbox on the page, unwritten ghost moths and true sparrows haunt the pale margins. How many have I overlooked? As I write this essay, a juvenile fox squirrel digs a hole in my yard, drops in an acorn, and slow-motion pats the browning grass over it, front feet at right angles, like kneading dough. A little chef preparing a midwinter meal months in advance. I almost missed that. Yet there is such consolation in these moments of decentering ourselves in life and in narrative, in stepping aside, holding back, being quiet, staying still, demanding less, and observing.

In this way, our stories may help remind us that we are not—do not have to be—the perpetual center of it all, and that knowledge can be a comfort, an incalculable relief. Human characters will rush to fill our pages—but wait. Stave them off a minute. Save some words for the animals. Maybe glance up at the window. On the ledge, a house wren has alighted. Do you see it?

PASCHA SOTOLONGO is the author of the story collection The Only Sound Is the Wind (W. W. Norton, 2024) and has published short fiction in Narrative, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Pleiades, and many other venues. Writing (primarily) in the spirit of narrativa de lo inusual, she holds a PhD in Cubana literature and postcolonial theory from the University of Nebraska, where she teaches English.