The Death of a Cat

• EMILY PECORA

The cat crouched low, scanned right and left, ran quickly, smoothly, a blur of motion rather than discreet steps, across two hot lanes of concrete, into and across a sloped median planted ragged with wildflowers, and onward, across two more hot lanes. The driver of the eighteen-wheeler had been looking down, just for a moment, at his hands on the steering wheel. He looked up and out at a streak of animal movement aiming for direct intersection with his right tire. Trying to stop too suddenly could cause his rig to jackknife and so, even though he recognized the tabby coat and crouched posture of a house cat, he did not brake. The jolt was minimal—the animal thrown by the wheel and not crushed beneath. He maintained his speed, kept his eyes on the road, avoided any of his mirrors until he had traveled another mile, and then he looked back and saw nothing but highway, grass, and sky.

The carcass had come to rest on the gravelly outer edge of the east-bound lane.  The sun rose in the sky. The bleeding slowed then stopped. The soil leached the blood’s moisture from the gravel, leaving a film of chalky, rusty red. Cars sped past, trucks sped past, heads turned, people wondered, was it a wild animal or was it a pet, and realizing that it was a pet, sighed.  The first fly landed just after noon. Others soon followed. They crawled up slopes and into wounds and lay eggs that would hatch if the temperature remained warm, if a scavenger didn’t first consume the flesh.  

The former owner of the former cat drove toward and past the carcass at 5:07 in the evening. It was spring. The light was strong. The car, already traveling slower than most, braked abruptly, but even so pulled off the highway well ahead of the animal’s resting place. The window lowered, an elbow jutted out and a face followed. Slowly, the vehicle inched back, tires crunching gravel in nearly but not quite a straight line. The wheels stopped rotating, the face withdrew, the engine grumbled into silence. The driver, a man old enough both to be a father and to have lost his own without the loss being considered a tragedy, stepped out of the car on the passenger side, into a patch of last year’s burdock. Several steps brought him to the animal. He rubbed a palm over the top of his head, sighed through his nose, crouched down, sighed again, made a shoving motion with his hand, away from the highway and toward the weeds, but did not make contact, thinking of everything, of everyone that he touched with his hands. He stood up. A car passed. A car passed. A truck passed. He looked back at his own car, the turn signal blinking, the passenger side door open. He turned his left foot outward, nudged the insole up against the curve of the cat’s spine and stuttered forward, making small hopping motions with his right foot, dragging the left foot, and the cat with it, behind. He did not look down (but felt the weight resisting and then yielding, felt the fur scuttling the gravel, dragging some pebbles along) and then his right cuff was snagging more burdock balls and the carcass was half-hidden in the weeds.  

Back in the car, passenger door still open, he bent himself in half, pulling at the burdock balls one by one. He worked at this task for many minutes and then, the burdock finally gone, still sat, letting the scent of the office dissipate from this clothing, be replaced by molecules from the weeds, the highway exhaust, the dirt and gravel. He felt his cheeks, wrists, ankles warm in the late-afternoon sun, felt the burdens of his job—the frustrations of commuting, small talk, paperwork, of sitting at a desk all day, back to the window, never knowing if the sky were filling or clearing, if the air were gusty or still unless he made a deliberate effort to turn around, look out, see—be replaced by the burden of sharing the news of a pet’s death with his children.

The path that the cat had taken, that had led to its death, was a path that the man himself had walked many times when he was a child and adolescent; a path leading from the back door of his house to the barns where his father’s cows stood moving their jaws against their cud and staring with their huge moist eyes at the safety that surrounded them on either side.  It was a path that his father had walked even more than he had, at least four times a day, out after breakfast and back for lunch, out after lunch and back for the evening meal. It was, it had been, a path through a grassy meadow, where buttercups and dandelions bloomed in the spring, asters and goldenrod in the fall.  It was quiet, interesting, able to surprise with a sunning snake or a fluttering bird. And now it gleamed hard and hot in the sunshine, screamed with traffic, with human needs and human intentions, even the wildflowers in the median selected by committee and seeded with large, loud machinery that left ruts in the mud and compacted the soil.  

The man, mostly, hated the highway: the smell of it, the noise of it, the fast food restaurants and industrial park it had brought to his home town, the expectations it had brought too—e.g. that it was reasonable to take a job in a town thirty miles away, to drive back and forth day after day, no stop signs or intersections to break the monotony, no front yard animals or flower beds to catch his eye. The man hated especially the worries he attached to the highway, about the trustworthiness of his car and his own reflexes at sixty miles an hour, about the judgement of his children, one of whom who might one day, like the cat, get an idea to try to run from one side to another, for no reason other than the thrill of doing something that they knew was forbidden. But he loved the highway too, not, as some others expressed, because it had made possible jobs in fast food restaurants and gas stations and industrial parks. He loved the highway, at least in some small way, because when he heard or drove on or thought of the highway he thought of his father, who, yes, had lost a path through a meadow that connected his back porch and place of work, but had not minded the loss, had in fact lobbied for the highway to be driven through their town, had suggested the meadow field as part of its route, had celebrated its construction as progress, as new possibilities for neighbors who struggled with fatigue and illness and degrading homes, who dreamed of a life that was better, that was different, that gleamed—as life gleamed in commercials—with only human needs and human intentions. His father had delighted in negotiating with the representatives from the state for the sale price of the meadow field, and then delighted also in the construction of a new house for himself and his wife, to the west of his farm, requiring no crossing of the highway, and delighting also in gifting the man’s childhood home to the man when he married. His father was still somewhat recently dead, the loss of him still a heaviness and an ache. The man sat alone in a car along the side of a highway, breathing sunshine and exhaust, and felt the ache of loss, the fatigue of the end of a workday, the residual disgust of the body of his children’s dead cat scuttering against the insole of his shoe.  

On the porch of the house that the man had been a child in, a porch where he had rocked on a ceiling-mounted swing and listened to Redwing blackbirds, house wrens, crickets, bumble bees, a young girl sat on the same swing and listened carefully to the sound of every car engine traversing the road at the end of their driveway, listening for a car that slowed. She was waiting for her father to come home. He was late getting home and she worried—not with her mind, not yet old enough to entertain many what-ifs that ended in serious injury or death – but with her body, specifically the center of her chest, which felt tight and hot and unsettled. She fidgeted her feet to distract from the tightness, and the swing rocked slightly, a few inches forward, a few inches back. The overlapping ends of the chains, anchored to the porch roof, clanged against each other and the sound, which she associated with days when her father was not late coming home, comforted her, but did not take the tightness away. Behind her, the highway made its steady rush-hour hum, a blur of engines continually passing, meaningless to someone interested in the journey of a single car. From comfort, the uneven rocking of the swing became unpleasant. She put her bare feet on the concrete porch floor, felt a sensation of coolness as the stone absorbed her body’s warmth. She padded through a warm pool of sunshine, the cool shadow of the picnic table, the sticky spot where her brother had dropped a popsicle earlier that day. She stood at the top of the three steps that connected the porch with the yard and fixed her eyes on the portion of their road visible through the trees. She and her little sister often pretended that this porch was a ship, the yard below it an ocean wild with sharks and sea monsters. She felt now that same sense that the world beyond the house was dangerous and unwanted.  

When finally his car did appear, her worry suddenly became an embarrassment. She watched him carefully as he parked, gathered his lunch sack and thermos, rolled up the windows, stepped out the car. She watched him as he walked toward her, waited for him to say hello, but he didn’t. He sat down beside her, which was unexpected, and said, “I have some bad news. Tiger was killed by a car.” She said, “oh.” He and she looked together out into the yard and then he touched her shoulder with his hand and moved away from her, off into the house. She understood that this was bad news but knew also that she didn’t really care. They had two other cats and Tiger had been the least friendly among them. Days passed and she never thought of him, weeks and she didn’t miss him. He rose up strong in her mind only once that summer, when she stood at the side of the highway, after climbing over the low woven-wire fence intended to keep them away from it, and asked her sister if they should run across the hot lanes of concrete to the fields of what had been her grandfather’s farm on the other side. Her sister said no, she said yes. She looked up and down the lengths of its four lanes, so different close-up, so tame and contained. It was midday, not commuting time. For a long stretch, there were no cars, then one passed, startling them backwards at the wind it created, then none again. She grabbed her sister’s hand and ran, straight across the first two lanes and then onto the next. No car came close enough to even honk a horn to scold them. She ran, and she thought now of Tiger, and looked from side to side as she ran, but saw no danger. Many years later, she would think of that day, and wonder why she had done it, for she was not a rebellious child, and would have especially hated to upset her father. She decided then she had done it not because her father had forbidden it, but because she had believed herself that it could never be done.

EMILY PECORA has previously published both fiction and nonfiction. The birth of her child was a turning point, which brought with it a hiatus in her writing life. This piece is her first return to the endeavor of fiction writing in nearly nine years.   

This story was previously published in Turning Points: Owl Light Literary (2021)