The End of the Day

I just had the unsettling experience of driving home late at night after a long day and swerving around a cat lying in the road, and I found myself looking at him in the rear-view mirror at him thinking, “Oh no, that’s somebody’s kitty, somebody’s baby. What if he’s lying there hurt, not dead? And even if he is dead, I can’t just leave him there. Should I turn around?” I turned around in the parking lot of the nearby funeral parlor, drove back and parked at the drugstore across the street from the small, still, white and grey body, and waited impatiently for the cars to pass so I could cross and walk down to where he lay. As soon as I saw his face, I knew that he was dead, one eye popped out from its socket, and a small glimmer of wetness beneath his mouth, no other mark of violence visible. And the cars kept coming, and I kept standing there, waiting for a lull in the traffic, because I couldn’t leave him there in the road to be mutilated, desecrated. Finally there was a pause long enough for me to dart out and pick him up, and oh gods, his body was still warm, limp and dangling from my hands, not yet dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in. I carried him over to rest beneath a tree in the small park by the road, damaged eye hidden. With no collar to identify him, there’s no way for me to find his people and tell them the sad news. Just a moment for a prayer, tears for a soft creature stilled in a flash of harsh headlights coming out of the autumn night. He is lying there on the grass, and I am at home crying over somebody’s kitty that they don’t yet know they’ve lost.