The store wasn’t grand. It lived on eBay, out there in the electric wild. A place where a simple cat could take a thing he knew had real worth—boots from the Pacific Northwest, Pulp Fiction from the 1980s, cameras that still remembered light—and if the price was right and the truth was told, someone would come along and buy it.
Sometimes the sales were good. Other times not. But those cats stayed at it. Because all of us must stay at something. And in the doing of it— the listing, wrapping, answering, hunting, shipping there was the quiet rhythm of building something.
And every time they sold something, they smiled and purred. Not for the money. For the proof that even now, a cat could try their luck and make something honest in this strange new world.