Last Updated on May 28, 2026 by admin
The intake form on Roman had two lines that were not on most intake forms.
The first said: no teeth. The second said: no tail.
He was a small black cat, by the rescue’s estimate eleven years old, brought in by a neighbor who had finally been able to corner him in a garage. He had been around the neighborhood as long as anyone could remember. He had been, at some point, somebody’s cat. He had been, somewhere in the years since, very badly hurt.
The vet who looked at him on intake said the tail had been removed by something the cat had done in a hurry to keep the rest of himself. The teeth were a separate story. The teeth were a long, slow story of someone who had not been fed for a long time, of resorptive disease, of a body that had eaten itself for nutrients. By the time he came to the rescue, there were eight teeth left. The vet pulled the six worst ones in his first week.
The photograph the rescue put on TikTok was taken a month later. He was in a sun spot on the kitchen floor of the foster’s house, his back legs splayed in that loose way old cats sometimes splay them, and he was looking up at the phone with a small pink tongue half-out — because, of course, without teeth or much of a mouth left, the tongue did what it wanted to.
The caption read: Roman is around eleven. He has eight years of hard road behind him. He has no teeth. He has no tail. He sleeps on the windowsill from ten until three and he is looking for the quiet armchair that is going to be his.
The video went out at two in the afternoon.
By eight that night, the rescue’s adoption inbox had three hundred and forty-one messages.
The one they came back to was from a woman named Ciara Faulkner. She had attached, instead of an application, a photograph of a striped wingback chair in a room with a small Christmas tree still up in May. She had written: I have not been able to bring myself to take the tree down because my last cat was buried under it in February and I think I was waiting for somebody to use the chair. I am three hours away. I will leave now.
She did leave. Then she drove three hours, mostly in the dark, in a car with a heated passenger seat she had not used in three months.
The foster met her in the parking lot. The foster handed her a small black cat in a soft carrier and said, very quietly, “this is Roman.”
Ciara Faulkner sat down on the curb of the parking lot — in a coat that was not warm enough for the night — and she opened the carrier with both hands.
Roman walked out. He did not run. He did not hide. He walked the small two steps from the carrier to her lap and he settled down with his head against the inside of her elbow.
The foster said it was the calmest she had ever seen him.
The TikTok the next day was nine seconds long. It was a small black cat on a striped wingback chair in a sun spot on a Wednesday afternoon, with one front leg dangling off the cushion and his tongue, as always, sitting an inch out of his mouth. The caption read: Hi from Roman, who got the chair.
It has been watched, as of this morning, two and a half million times.
Some of the things that happened to him before he was Roman are not the kind of things you can undo. The teeth are not coming back. The tail is not coming back. The eight years of hard road are not going to scrub out of him; they will sit in his body until he goes.
What you can do is the rest of it. The afternoon. The striped chair. The pink tongue. The two minutes after dinner when nothing in the room asks anything of him.
Roman, who has been some other people’s cat, and who is now Ciara Faulkner’s cat, is doing the rest of it.