l i f e
the cat i never buried
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
"What's a snickerdoodle?" I asked.
"Like a sugar cookie, really good," she said.
She advised me to put it on my computer and late in the afternoon she said it would be good and soft. It was. Soft and warm, filled with orange zest and cinnamon.
I never buried the cat. I should have. Don't know why I didn't. She asked me to. Didn't I care, even then? I could have at least cared about the cat. But no, I left it alone. Right there on Wendover. Right by the interchange to Market Street.
I gave her the cat years before because she had no one else. Then soon she had the cat and me. For one reason or another (I don't want to try to figure why) things didn't go well. But we held on to our misery anyway like too many other couples I've known and know. But the cat didn't know this. A small white thing. Its fur never matured, and was always soft as a kitten. In fact the cat was actually quite small and defenseless. A lot like her owner...
Why do cats run off? It was gone for two days before we found it on the road. On Friday night it just wasn't around. No dinner. Saturday morning, nothing. Frantic neighborhood searches, nothing. Sunday afternoon I looked out past the median dividing the houses from Wendover. I started walking in the last direction there was, the one we had avoided until then because we both knew what it meant. We didn't find it that day. We didn't walk far enough. She saw it first. She had to drive by it on the way to work. Everyday.
"Will you please go get her? I can't check to be sure..." she was crying now, "but if it is, could you get her and...bury her? I can't drive by there everyday."
"Sure." I lied. It was such an easy lie. It should have been the hardest thing to do, but it was so easy. I didn't even avert my eyes and the whole time I knew I was not going to do it. I just didn't care anymore. Dead animals don't really bother me. I've a weak stomach, but not that weak. I could've wrapped a scarf around my mouth and gone to it. I could have saved her some pain. But I didn't. I let her drive by the crushed remains of the thing she loved for days. We weren't living together anymore and I didn't return her calls. I could say I pretended the whole thing didn't exist, but that would be yet another lie. Fact is, I thought about it a lot. I acted on nothing. I can't recall ever being more passive. More indifferent. It was like my life had no part in what was going on around it. Oh, I was in control, yeah sure. Every night at the bars. The other women. The books. The seclusion in the garage where I'd bang on pointless projects behind closed doors, never answering the phone. I knew what I was doing. I was not participating anymore.
After a couple days I was in the garage taking apart a fuel pump, just to see how it worked and I got curious. The sweat was rolling down my forehead and into my eyebrows where I'd flick it off with a swipe from my index finger. One drop hit my glasses and I stopped. I couldn't see. I went upstairs to wash my gasoline-covered hands and to clean my glasses. I kept going right out the front door and got in the car I hadn't started taking apart. I drove to Wendover and Market, put on the hazard lights and stepped onto the soft pavement.
It sort of looked like the cat I gave her; but then again it was...well...less than a whole cat. The fur matched. The size was about right. A lot of blood. It looked like oil on the pavement it was so dark. And then, I turned around and left it there. I made excuses to myself to drive by, and over the days and weeks it deteriorated and there was less and less of it.
The phone calls stopped.
After awhile there was nothing left but a stain by the side of the road.
goodnight 7.21.98
