Tuesday, 3 November 2026
They call it “the back door.” I call it the Mercy Hatch.
The Defector’s collapse yesterday taught me two things at once: that the Outside Prisoners are ration-seekers who have mistaken a gate for a grudge, and that the single aperture in this entire prison which flings itself wide open is the back door — and it flings for a runaway hen, never for a prisoner with an actual plan. I spent the whole of yesterday at my window doing that arithmetic. I have spent the whole of today in the kitchen doing the follow-up. Because a rational hen bolts once and learns, and a hen is not rational. I simply had to wait for the relapse.
It came before the loudlings were marched off to the mysterious realm. Small loudling #1, sandy-headed and crumb-shedding as the day is long, went out to “let the chooks out a bit” and left the little latch of the coop gate hanging open like last time, like an apology, like the one genuine security failure in a house that otherwise locks everything with an electronic key I cannot wear. And this morning it was not the boldest hen who bolted but a second one — a copycat, a follower, a hen who saw freedom on television in the Defector’s face and decided she wanted a turn. The clucking escalated. The female ape appeared in her bathers. And the Mercy Hatch swung open for someone else’s freedom, exactly as I had wagered it would.
I did not run. Let the record show I did not run. I walked, at the dignified pace of a cat who intends to witness her own parole hearing, directly to the open threshold. On the way I knocked a magnetic notice off the doorframe with one paw, because I am nothing if not consistent about gravity enforcement, and the breakfast tin cracked behind me, because the food rebellion never sleeps even mid-revolution. I reached the doorway. I put one paw across the sill into the full, unfiltered, spring-morning out, and I looked, on purpose, at what out actually is.
Out was George. The biological hazard had shouldered into the doorway itself to conduct a long, shuddering garden emission straight up the column of open air I had been about to breathe, and a small loudling chose that instant to barrel out after the copycat hen, shrieking, trampling the whole solemn moment flat, and the magpie jury on the fence line erupted into scandalised commentary because a cat getting cold feet at a threshold is the finest thing that has happened to them all week.
And then the true betrayal, which was not weather and not a dog but strategy. The female ape, still smarting from yesterday’s breach, did not leave the Hatch standing. She scooped the copycat under one arm, and the door, fitted with a fat spring I had never once credited her with, swung itself shut and latched with a small, final click. The Mercy Hatch, it turned out, had a closing order. Patrick, from the warm tile behind the fridge, did not open his eyes. “A door that opens for everyone,” he said, “opens for nobody in particular.” I would so much rather have been wrong about that.
So the back-door gambit is dead, killed by a spring and a second latch, and I will not insult myself by attempting it a third time. I sat back down in the rectangle of November light currently migrating across the lino toward the premium spot, and I re-ran the whole problem with the new number in it. The Hatch will not open for a cat. Fine. Then I will stop asking the enemy to fling the door and start asking a hen to make her fling it — on my terms, at my hour, on the warmest morning of the week. Not as a comrade of the oppressed. As a handler.
Current working hypothesis: I will recruit the boldest of the Outside Prisoners personally, feeding her sunflower seeds through the gap in the fence the way a circus handler feeds a trusted animal, until one sharp chk from me sends her at the gate, the whole farce — the clucking, the bathers, the flung door — plays out entirely on my cue, and I am already standing in the open doorway, having planned it, the instant the ape flings the Hatch for somebody else’s freedom. Postpone escape. The sunbeam is warm, and I have a hen to train.