Excerpted: Dear Humans

Eyebrow

GARDENING ON MY front porch when I felt the initial pain of the thing. Tending to the tomatoes, which my 
colleague Ben had gifted me as a thank-you for cat-sitting Eyebrow at my place—Eyebrow, who’d batted a
beloved replica Minoan vase off the counter, launched it to the floor where it detonated into a hundred sharp relics of itself.

I did not tell Ben about the vase. As far as he knew, Eyebrow and I had chummed it up all weekend because when
asked for a report, I said, “We chummed it up all weekend, didn’t we, Eyebrow?” in my tiny foyer while Eyebrow serpentined loving figure eights between Ben’s khakis.

“You’re the only person I know who isn’t allergic to cats,” he said. 

“Thank you,” I said, like a fool, but he laughed, thinking I’d made a witticism. Ben’s cheekbones high and visible, his hair rolling in smooth little hillocks. My mother would have called him a pretty boy, save for his teeth—yellow ones here and there like he was replacing his real teeth with veneers one at a time. The mismatched teeth, of course, no dealbreaker as far as I was concerned.
 

My last beau Peter had diagnosed me an “odd duck.” At first a term of endearment. My odd little ducky, he’d say upon discovering a new idiosyncrasy of mine—the fact that we lived in the Eastern time zone but I kept my wristwatch set to Mountain Time so I’d know when it’d be safe to call my mother in the mornings, the fact that I didn’t enjoy the feeling of my toes touching one another so I preferred to wear socks with individual toe slots that he called my foot gloves, the fact that I refused to let him come along on my last dig on Crete because I couldn’t treat the month like the Grecian holiday that it wasn’t.

“It’ll take a special sort to put up with all this,” Peter had said, during our last argument, making angry jazz hands around my kitchen like my unwiped countertops and piled-up dishes were the problem. I said that was fine with me, I could wait for special. He told me not to die waiting.

“How was the conference?” I asked Ben, but Eyebrow distracted him by butting his head into Ben’s shin and then abruptly turning away to show us his butthole, tail curling like a question mark, asking for feedback.

Then my framed movie posters piqued Ben’s interest—he traced one of the gilded frames and gazed up at Cary Grant gazing up at Katharine Hepburn, and who could blame him? I had ordered large prints of vintage film adverts and framed them myself in these rococo numbers I’d gotten for a song at the thrift store.

“You’re a big fan of movies,” Ben said.

“Yes,” I said. “The classics. Queen Cinema downtown sometimes does screenings. I saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington last week. Before Eyebrow came to stay, of course—don’t worry, I didn’t leave him and run off to the movies.”

Ben snatched his hand back from the frame as if it’d suddenly grown hot to the touch. “I hope you didn’t stay home all week on Eyebrow’s account,” he said. 

“Oh no,” I said, “I just meant…” But I didn’t finish the sentence because I didn’t know what I meant. 

“Are you a cinephile, too?” I asked. 

“A what?” 

“A cinephile.” 

“Oh,” he said, now studying an advert for The Maltese Falcon promising A Story as Explosive as His Blazing Automatics. 

“Bogart,” I said. 

“Mm-hm.” 

“Can I take your coat?” I had meant to offer to make tea first and then to take his coat, but my brain had gotten ahead of itself. 

“Oh, I won’t keep you, but I have something for you. In the car.” 

When he opened the door, Eyebrow made a heroic dash for the front lawn. We stood in the foyer for a moment, frozen in a tableau of Man and Woman with Mouths Agape, before Ben said, “Shit,” and we both darted out after Eyebrow, who had gotten only as far as a Hosta in my flowerbed. When Ben scooped him out of the mulch, Eyebrow craned his neck in every direction, eyes popping in disbelief as if he’d just been hoisted from the earth by the hand of God.

“I’ll take him back in,” I said. 

I fumbled for purchase around Eyebrow’s middle, the distance of one cat-width the closest to Ben I’d ever been. His cologne—or aftershave—stung my nostrils, sharp and herbal. I wanted to pour his scent over ice and drink it. Eyebrow made himself boneless, and the process of trying to take hold of him felt like trying to scoop Jell-O from a bowl, holding it in one wriggly mound with only hands for utensils. Except Ben knew to handle Jell-O like a liquid. He poured Eyebrow into my arms with a practiced ease.

Back in the foyer, Eyebrow allowed me to do the thing I liked to do best: make little sandwiches with the palms of my hands as the bread and his ears as the meat. First the left ear, then the right.
 

Ben seemed to take such a long time to get whatever he’d brought me that I worried he’d left.

“Could we make a go of it, Eyebrow? You and me?” I ran my hand down his back, scratched the place where spine gives way to tail. 

When Ben opened the door again, he held nothing and I felt something in my gut snap, but then he said, “Come see,” and pulled me by the wrist through the door onto the porch.

How strange it was that there had been so many permeations: Eyebrow and me inside the house, then all three of us inside, then Eyebrow out and Ben and me in, then all three of us out, then Eyebrow and me in and Ben out, now Eyebrow in and Ben and me out.
 

“Voila!” Ben said and made showroom arms at a pot, unembellished terracotta, the size of a standard-issue bucket. Three wooden stakes emerged from soil the colour of spent coffee grounds. The stakes met in the middle, the skeleton of an A-frame house. Tethered to the wooden stakes by baker’s twine were half a dozen tender-looking plants, drooped lazily, shrugging their leaves as if to say Do your worst.

“I love it,” I said. 

“They’re tomatoes,” he said. “Or they will be.”

“Yes,” I said, as if I’d known already. 

Despite the tragedy of the vase, I did not dislike having Eyebrow in the house. Instead of talking to my mother on speaker phone while I boiled spaghetti or chopped my root vegetables, I spoke to Eyebrow as if he was my relutant teenage son soon off to college and in need of a crash-course in life skills.

“And this is how you know how much spaghetti to boil for one person, Eyebrow,” I’d say, passing a neat cylinder of dried pasta through the hole in the middle of the ladle.

The voice I had used to commune with him—all nasal and an octave higher than any voices I recognized as belonging to me—made me want to cut out my own tongue. I had to delete all the videos of Eyebrow I’d narrated and planned to send to my mother. Now, I talked to the tomatoes in the same register. 

“What’ll it be today, my growing boys? Water or water?”

Ben had said to prune away the bottom leaves so the plants could conserve their energy for turning flowers to fruit. And so that is what I was doing when I felt a sudden pain strobing in the middle of my forehead as if I’d been impaled. I put my palms to my forehead, tried to push the hurt back into my head and through the other side of my skull.

When that didn’t work, I went inside, took three Aspirin, turned off all the lights, drew the blinds, and sunk into bed. I awoke some hours later, my mouth its own terrible ecosystem and the corners of my eyes crusted over, but the pain had dissipated to a light throb.
 

I was brushing my teeth when I noticed the bump in the vanity mirror, the raised mound that must have been the cause of the pain. “Eyebrow, how’d I—” I started, then stopped, remembering I was no longer chumming it up with Eyebrow.

Excerpted from Dear Humans by Hollie Adams © 2026. Used with permission of NeWest Press.

* * *

Order a copy of Dear Humans here on All Lit Up, or via your local bookseller.

For more Excerpted, click here.