Trophic Cascade

There are thirty-seven steps to the attic in my uncle's house. Every step counts.
Ninety million miles away, at a spot in the sky that I never see, there is an explosion on the surface of the sun. The corona twists like a towel and plasma jumps like water in an deep fryer, sending loops and arcs dancing across the surface. Within minutes, eight billion tons of ionized iron is ejected into space and heads toward the earth at speeds reaching four million miles an hour.
Eight minutes later, a teakettle whistles in the kitchen. Steam fogs the window. A cat stands up, stretches, then walks onto the landing below the steps. Outside, sunlight drops through the leaves of an oak, and lands on a windowpane. Half of the light rebounds into space and the other half slips through the glass and falls upon the landing, spattering it with yellow. The spots move around with the wind, and the cat stabs at them with his paw. He circles and pounces. His paws never get yellow. He never eats. He wanders off, walks down the stairs and calls out at the kitchen door. He steps out into a larger world, where the leaves whir and the sun hides behind big thick trunks, and throws more yellow spots at the ground, but the cat doesn't notice. There are birds about and he has had his fill of light. Every day he crouches beneath a chokeberry bush and watches a fox sparrow land on a branch nearby. He tenses, then explodes.
The lights in the parlor flicker, the radio goes silent, engines stall, people shout.
That was the day that I walked up those stairs into the attic. Thirty-seven steps. The door was unlatched. Sunlight was smudged on the attic window. It looked like a museum. There were seven throw blankets, two chests, three dressers, hundreds of photographs of deceased relatives, a baby crib, several hat boxes filled with jewelry and gloves and more photographs of the dead and stationery, a rocking horse, a copy of Pilgrim's Pride, three badly worn dolls, newspapers, dishes, two bed frames, five lampshades, and a painting of an American Indian standing on a cliff overlooking a mountain valley. The frame was red. Somebody left their gloves on a table, as if to stay the night. I looked down at the painting and picked it up, angling it in the sunlight. As I turned it in my hands, just then, I looked up and I saw through the attic window a plane fluttering from the sky like a leaf.
I know it hit the ground - it sent up a ball of fire - the flames spread into five counties, burning six towns to the ground. But every day, that cat deposited a bird on the doorstep. Every day. For fifteen years. Today, I buried him in the backyard, next to five other cats and near the remains of 32,868 sparrows. There is barely enough room for me.