Esteban Rodriguez

 

Cats

CATS

Belly blacker than asphalt, than fresh tire marks and the silhouette of mesquite against a filmstrip sky, I squat down as if to pay tribute, an amateur in animal deaths, in stray cats I feed dinner-scraps against my mother’s will. These are the driveway scavengers, solicitors of sympathy rubbing against my leg, and this one is the dead one that veered off its map, tested traffic, briefly became brave. I study the lump of feral bone and flesh, how the miscellany of its stomach spreads out like scree, red, rotten, rumpled like morning bed sheets, and there is a sense that if I believe in fate, this is the only end the cat could have endured, that my being here is a kind of funeral, and my silence a roadside elegy for all the lives this stretch of road has ever killed. I feel I should toss it back in the yard, prepare a more human ritual, but my hands are too young to dig a proper burial, work through dusk and watch the suburban moon rise into our country air, as it becomes a witness to the after-act of death again, and I scrape my shovel beneath its head instead, dump it in a nearby bush, turn back home with the hum of 281 singing in my ears.