---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v114) (the January 2013 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Entanglement (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 340 page Jan. - June 2013 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Cat’s in the Bag

Bridgette Singleton

    The grass was wet and dark beneath her shoes and moths flew upward to escape her trampling feet. Her legs felt heavy and useless. She had become lazy and knew it was from carrying the beginnings of a baby inside her. Her ponytail swung from side to side with each thudding step and she felt her cheeks wobbling as she ran. Running always made her think, and after the doctor’s appointment this afternoon she had never needed to think so badly.
    The voice of the doctor as he told her she was a fair way into ‘it’ still repeated through her head, a broken record serenading the undoing of her life. After seeing her face the doctor had said they were still in time to remove it. She had to say yes. Having a baby at 17 was not something she ever wanted. She pictured it sitting at the bottom of a bucket swimming in her blood, looking up at her with blind eyes, screaming and wailing.
    To stop herself from crying she concentrated on the road in front of her and soon a dirty yellow reusable shopping bag with a hole in the side came into view. She slowed to a walk and began to lift it off the road but the smell of it made her retch. She stumbled away. Taking a deep breath and holding her nose she walked up to it and crouched down to look through the hole. It was a cat and it was moving slightly, as if in sleep. She leaned to have a closer look and in a second understood. The cat wasn’t sleeping, it was dead. And it wasn’t moving. That was maggots. She jumped back and dizziness overcame her. The trees and houses spun in a sickening merry-go-round and she staggered away further to throw up at the base of a tree. Leaning, she breathed deeply and looked at the bag. Was it some kind of gruesome peep show?

    The cat woke early and stretched where it had slept on the man’s cushion, spreading her claws and digging them in. Stalking through the house she sat in a patch of weak sun falling through a window. A fine mist collected as dew on the grass in the yard, and stray beams of light from the lazy sunrise picked on the dew and made it sparkle like glass. The cat looked on unimpressed. She yawned, and padded through the house to the man’s bedroom.
    Her paw pushed upon the door left ajar. He was snoring. She leapt onto the bed and strode up his body to lay down on his chest. He stirred but didn’t open his eyes. She started to meow. He stirred again and opened his eyes, barely able to focus on her for her closeness. She yawned in his face. The man grinned and scratched her ears, cooing at her. When she grew tired of it she jumped off the bed and started meowing at him for breakfast. He swung his feet over the side of the bed, and the cat wove herself around the man’s legs. After yawning deeply and scratching his side, the man stood up. The cat joyfully ran ahead of him to the kitchen. He opened the tin of food and dumped it in her little pink bowl, and placed the bowl in front of her. She looked at it then looked up at him. He stared at her. She stared back at him. He shook his head and laughed at her, and went to the fridge. His every movement being watched, he reached down and placed the sprig of parsley onto the grey mound of her food. She purred and began eating.
    The cat’s belly full, she walked out the back door the man held open for her and went around the house into the street. She decided to sleep in a sunny patch of path just before the house.
    She woke later when the sun had moved, and walked to the road to sit in the warmth there. She was just dozing off when she heard a screeching sound. Before she had a chance to look around she was smashed by a large, screaming something. For a time she felt nothing but swirling blackness, like falling from somewhere without hitting the ground. Heat and painful prickles began to seep through her body. She breathed heavily and quickly, and heard something else breathing near her, but could only see black. She felt a shove, but the reverberations came from far away, like someone slamming a door on the other side of a house. Then she felt herself being picked up. She knew it must be the man, even though it didn’t smell like him so she meowed, but it didn’t come out right. It hurt to breathe and she choked and then she was dropped and knew nothing more.

    The young boy watched his feet push down the bike pedals as he flew down the biggest hill in town. He cackled and whooped as he whooshed past house after house in a giddying, delicious blur. He laughed like a madman, pedalling furiously while trying to push his helmet off his face. His helmet was a bit too big, a hand-me-down he hadn’t grown into yet and sometimes it was hard to see. That’s why he didn’t see the cat.
    It loomed before him seconds before they collided and to him it was a giant - a tiger wandering his streets, not a grey-and-white house cat. He screamed then swerved far too late and abruptly, twisting the handles around to fall to the ground, then they crashed into each other. He closed his eyes and only saw black, only heard the thump and crunch and the scream the animal made. He felt the bitumen scrape away layers of his skin on his elbows and legs and part of his chin, and shred the fabric of his favourite shorts. The gutter on the other side of the street greeted him with a dizzying smack to his oversized helmet, and he heard the crack of the helmet which could have been his skull.
    Lying on his back trying to catch his breath his heart beat hard. He felt the blood ooze from his wounds, each beat pumping more and more of it to run down his legs, his arms, his face. Ever so slowly he opened his eyes, afraid the giant tiger would come to rip his face off at any moment. Through the cracks in his eyes he saw the sky, the fat white clouds chasing each other and the sun yellow and happy. He looked down at his body and saw white skin and red blood. His hands came up to his face and they were bloody too, his palms and wrists grated away. He decided he wouldn’t cry yet, even though everything hurt.
    He sat up warily, telling himself to not make any sudden movements, listening for a threatening growl that would be the last thing he would hear. Slowly he looked around, afraid of being pounced on from every side. His head spun and he wanted to be sick. There was no tiger, nothing to eat him. There was his bike, its back wheel still spinning as it lay on its side. He got to his feet and picked it up, inspecting it. Apart from some paint scraped off it was fine and he was so relieved he started to smile, and then he saw the corpse. Not a corpse yet, it was still breathing, but it would soon be cold and hard where it lay on its side in the gutter. A shiver flitted down his spine from the top of his neck. He dropped his bike back on its side. He didn’t want to but already he was moving and as he got closer he crouched down, shuffling forward cautiously.
    There were flies already. He looked first at the head. Such a tiny skull, it was smaller than his sister’s who was just a baby. He saw the blank eyes, the gash like a red river running from behind its left ear down to its throat, the twisted front right paw. The way its ribs stood out in its skin and made him think of corrugated iron; the quick rising and falling from the panting breaths it made, each one sounding as if it rattled against the walls of its lungs before coming out. There was a huge gap of torn flesh down its side where the ribs stopped and the back leg began and he thought how much it looked like his own cuts. He looked again at its head and saw the droplets of blood dribbling from the side of the cat’s mouth.
    It would die. He knew all about death – his grandmother had died and you were supposed to be sad and not make noise or have any fun. But this was different. When it died that meant he had killed it. He closed his eyes to shut it all out - the sight, the smell, the sound of the panting and the flies buzzing. Tears leaked from his tightly squeezed eyelids but he didn’t want to cry. Why did this cat have to ruin his fun and get itself hurt? He clenched his fists and stamped his foot which hurt his whole body, which made him angrier still so he kicked the cat.
    It wasn’t a forceful kick, so the cat barely moved but he felt even worse. Snivelling now he sat cross-legged beside the corpse that was still breathing and looked at it. He just wanted it to stop breathing. He reached out towards its small head. He dropped his hand. Unsure, he looked around for an adult, anybody to take care of the corpse. The cat.
    Beside a jacaranda tree a few metres away was an old reusable bag with a big hole in its side. He stood up and got the bag, then came and knelt by the cat on his raw knees. The twisted paw twitched, his mouth twitched, and he tried not to cry again.
    Gingerly he slid his hands under the cat’s body. It was warm and sticky and reminded him of a lollipop he had once left on his windowsill which had melted in the sun. He held his breath to concentrate, picked up the cat and held it over the bag. It was huge in his arms and too big for the bag so he curled it around itself like it was sleeping. It was halfway in when it made a sound. A cross between a gargle and a meow and mixed with the ragged breath it sounded like the devil had spoken. The boy yelped, dropped the cat and jumped up in terror, ran to his bike and pedalled away as fast as he could with tears blurring his vision. He told himself not to look back but he did, saw the bag but couldn’t stop now, so left the gutter to take care of the cat in the bag.

    The roiling of the girl’s stomach gradually calmed and she returned to the bag with the cat. She peered inside. It couldn’t just lie here dead like this, a bag in a gutter. Even a little cat deserved a burial. She looked around for a grave site, trying to see through watery eyes. Walking across the footpath to a garden bed in front of someone’s house she began to prepare the cat’s grave. Two piles of dirt appeared on either side of her and her nails began to feel heavy with dirt. It wouldn’t have a coffin. Her hands scraped in the soft earth one after the other in a slow rhythm. Things live, then they die, then they get buried. Or burned. That’s how life worked. She wasn’t sure if foetuses were buried. What would they do with it?
    She didn’t know how much time had passed before she became aware of herself, digging a hole with her bare hands while crying uncontrollably. She took deep, shuddering breaths and walked to the bag. Standing beside it she gently picked up the limp cloth handles on either side, lifted it, and walked to the grave. It didn’t weigh a thing.
    She picked out a bunch of flowers from the garden and looking down at the bag she said sorry. Sorry to whoever owned the cat because they weren’t at the funeral. Sorry to the cat for throwing up at the sight of it, as it wasn’t very polite. Sorry to the human inside her, for loathing it even before it was born. She threw the flowers into the grave and watched them land on the putrid body and felt tears pricking her eyes again. She got on her knees and pushed the earth over the bag and filled the hole.
    As she jogged away she felt the presence of the grave behind her, as if something was staring at her. She held a hand over her belly as she ran. A baby was in there. She couldn’t kill a baby.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...