Middle of the

Keith Dunlap

What should we do if the cat dies in the middle of the night? Should we take him outside, with our barely functioning flashlights, and try to bury him in the hard-pack January ground, heft some larger than average stone, and place it over his shallow grave to memorialize him and keep the scavengers away? What should we do?

Put his already stiffening form in a paper grocery bag? Or leave him sideways, as if he were standing, on the floor, as a kind of reproach to our breakfast, to our sleeping through the night, waiting until the veterinarian opens its doors to accept this solid lifeless fact, the corpse of our sickly, incontinent, somnambulant cat? 20

What should we do? Write an essay or a poem? Or call my sister on the phone to tell her that the cat whom we adopted from my father when he moved into a home, almost two-and-one-half years ago, just before he died at the age of ninety-five, the cat whose name we changed from Beauregard to Toby, (my father called him Bo,)—let my sister know that the last vestige of my father’s peculiar existence is no longer alive? What should we do?