CREATIVE
them out of the house. “A cat, I think.” In an effort to save the dying bird species, outdoor pets were the first to go. We were allowed to keep them so long as they stayed indoors. Then we were paid to turn them in. I vaguely remember having a dog when I was very young; a little white thing with brown patches over his eyes—couldn’t tell you the breed even if I wanted to. He was put down when he shocked a bird to death. Mum turned him in. Not that it was the dog’s fault; birds are easy to shock. Felicide Friday was the final reckoning. People hung their dogs and cats up by their necks at their windows, on their front porches, from the streetlights. The blood dripped down their gullets and to the ground beneath them in puddles as if they were being prepared for butchering. I’m not really sure what happened to their bodies. By the time morning came around again, they had all miraculously disappeared, and we all went on as if that horrific day had never happened. The sounds of whining, dying cats and dogs, screaming and choking on their own blood, still haunt me. “Where did it come from?” the child asks. For a fleeting moment I think that the cat will catch flame from the heat of our combined gazes and the beating sun. Dried out and rancid, it is flammable in my mind. Or inflammable; flammable and inflammable being one and the same. My neighbour’s cat died of old age, lucky thing. She buried it in the front yard with a small wooden cross plunged into the earth where it lay. The grave was robbed by birds about a week later. I remember them swarming, pecking at the earth, deranged and wild. I think a dog had dug it up and the birds found it ravaged by insects; the worms were probably the first to find it, to dig inside it and make a meal of the wretched thing. It was a crude display, watching those birds striking into feline carcass like some godless inversion of fate and evolution. None of that exists anymore, no dogs or cats. Nothing domesticated. The birds remain. And the worms remain. The worms always remain. I suppose the only places you’d find those animals now are in the earth and in the worms. Ironic. “I haven’t got a clue.”
Illustrated by Sally Yuan
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