CREATIVE
Content Warning: animal death (graphic), blood, insects
Felicide Friday Written by Helena Pantsis
A cat’s dead by the side of the road. Just lying there, bloodied and flat-faced. Looking at it, I think it might be a fox or a possum. Might even be a wombat. I think, though, that it is a cat. It reminds me of the neighbour’s cat from when I was a kid. They don’t look anything alike. They’re simply two cats, existing separately but parallel in my mind. I suppose the fact that they’re both cats ties them together in some way. This cat is brown, made burgundy and tawny from the dried blood and pulled flesh. My neighbour’s cat was white, pristine and blue-eyed; its thin pupils carved vertically through shallow pools of iris, black tears rupturing clean through clear waters. The cat lived on my neighbour’s windowsill, blurred by the sheer curtain. This cat’s a corpse. It doesn’t have a collar. It probably never had a home. I wonder where it came from. A child slows on their bicycle, stopping to look at the cat alongside me, then to look at me. “Did you do that?” the kid asks. Brazen. They’re looking right at me, considering my role in the death of the animal, not three feet away. I wonder what they’d do if I said yes. “I think someone ran it over,” I say. “Oh.” They don’t ride away. They just stand there, their glossy red bike helmet reflecting the sun into my eyes. We stare at the cat. “What was it?” they ask. I realise the child’s probably never seen a cat before. They used to be commonplace—household ornaments, companions to the lonely or strays roaming the streets, hunting birds, fighting each other by day and night. That’s what I’m told. When I was a kid, the domesticated cats were kept in houses. They’d poop in litter boxes and occupy their days staring out windows like my neighbour’s cat did. The only cats you’d see outdoors were strays—if you were lucky to see one at all. No one let their animals out then, not after the criminalisation of domesticated household predators—that’s what they called them. You had to be brave—or stupid—to let
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Illustrated by Sally Yuan