HOW CATS DIE
HOW CATS DIE
HOW CATS DIE
I'm whittling as I sit on the stone wall. Dork, the hired man, is cleaning up. I don’t know his real name. Earlier I saw him kick a kitten across the stall. It got up and shook itself, hissed, limped, three-legged, away.
HOW CATS DIE
These torn-ear mat-haired cats, they hang around for milk and rats and the small field mice that run ragged among the hooves toward the holes in the poorly plastered corners where they can get away. I have seen these female cats run across cow backs to get away from the hired men. Then the toms breed the ones unlucky enough to get outside, all snarl and puffed fur and neck-biting yowl, they get into the house through the wall-holes, and those poor kittens, born under the floorboards in my room. I am the only one small enough to reach a hand into the dark and haul them out, put them into the shoe box and carry them out to the barn to join the rest to live or die.
HOW CATS DIE
I have seen cats die in many ways: under a tractor tire, drowned in cow shit, run through the manure spreader, snapped up by dogs, smacked flat in the road, sunk in hay, mewing piteously. I've seen worse than that, their tails tied together and thrown over the clothesline and scrowling their cries until I put on my dad's welding gloves and got them down.
HOW CATS DIE
Dork washes his hands in the scum-covered water of the trough and flips some of it at me. I duck, but I can't mess with him. He's at least sixteen and I am not, but I know he's coming after me someday. I can see it in his eyes, the way he looks at me nasty-like. The gray one nuzzles against me, just like a house cat. I shoo it away. I watch Dork to see what happens next; I watch his wet hands on the ratty towel. He sits down next to me. I watch him file the spikes in his boot.