Dexter, the Dead Cat

A woman walked into the clinic the other day. Her cat was dying. There was the smugness of death all over her. Come straight to front of the line, someone is dying here. Move aside. It's Dexter.

He was a smokey grey cat. He was placed in a cardboard box, twisted like licorice. Even though we know that cats can twist their bodies in complicated ways, even though we have seen them do this in slow motion on t.v., it still was difficult to believe the way that this cat was twisted.

Maybe he was thinking about how undignified it was to be in this waiting room, twisted in this way, in this cardboard box, surrounded by these stupid Shi Tzus. We can't really know. When I was a teenager I thought that cats knew everything that I was just finding out when I started smoking pot and dropping acid. I thought that they were laughing at me. But we can't know for sure what cats are thinking. We can only guess and we guessed a long time ago, that dignity is important to them. This cat, Dexter, had probably been through the very undignified experience of being hit by a car.

The car hit him on the street where he lay, on a Friday in late October. He was absorbing the last bit of the sun like a lizard. "I am ancient, I am ancient" He was purring, a favorite and personal mantra. Of course he didn't see the truck coming. They never do. He didn't t see it leaving either because the impact left him blind. The last thing he saw was electric red. The color on the inside of his eyelids. "I am ancient, I am ancient." He was purring.

After he was dead the woman took his body home and buried it beside the rododandrun, the same place she buried the hamster bones. She decided not to mark the grave and to lie to kids about it. It was disgusting the way the body leaked urine when it died. Then it became stiff and immoveable, like old candy corn. They didn't need to know.

The next day she took the cats prescriptions back to the clinic.

"I'm sorry, we can't give you a refund for it." I said.

"I just don't want it in my house." She said, and I drew a line through Dexter's name in his paper file.