Brutus (Marcus Junius Brutus, if we’re being formal)

While I love all of my cats equally, this Stripeesaurus Rex is named Brutus — Marcus Junius Brutus, to be exact. He is the kind of pet you love in a particular way, and the reason is obvious.

When he was a kitten, he was found badly beaten, missing patches of hair, with open sores along the right side of his body and across the top of his head. He was small, fragile, and clearly had not been treated with much care. And yet — he survived.

That’s part of why he holds such a distinct place in my memory.

An amazing, anonymous rescue worker found him and arranged for him to be transported north so he wouldn’t be euthanized. Brutus — whose “prison name” was Bruce — came to us from North Carolina by way of what feels, honestly, like an underground pet railroad. A loose network of volunteers, drivers, foster homes, and rescue organizations coordinated to move him from danger into safety.

If you’re ever interested in helping animals like him, I encourage you to look into local and regional rescue networks, foster programs, and transport volunteer groups. They do extraordinary work with very little recognition, and they rely on ordinary people deciding to participate.

I don’t tell this story to turn him into some sacred household icon or to romanticize suffering. He’s a cat. A loud one. A demanding one. A magnificently striped tyrant.

But he is also a small, furry reminder that there is a great deal of quiet human goodness operating beneath the noise of the world. In a time when so much public discourse works to convince us that we are isolated, selfish, or irredeemable, it matters to remember that entire chains of strangers coordinated to save a half-broken kitten they would never meet again.

I love this cat more than anything in the world. And his existence reminds me that thriving — for him, for any of us — depends on building systems of care that extend beyond our own immediate circles.

He is proof of the interconnectedness of the affective to the infrastructural.

And he naps in the sun like a king.