In the backyard, inside both a plastic bag and a box, the next door neighbor’s dead cat lies decomposing. And I expect a visit from it at any moment.
I’m just freaking myself out, really. Really. I mean, it’s not like it can have anything against me. I didn’t kill it. I don’t think anything did. When I saw the neighbor a couple of days ago, she was sure it was dead, because it was old, too old to be out on its own really, and she just wanted to know where it was, where it had ended its life, so she could move on. So, it came to our yard to die. Several days ago, in fact.
A few mornings ago, as I was getting ready for work, I heard meows from the back yard, but they sounded normal; not sick or anything, and there are a lot of cats around in the neighborhood, so I didn’t think anything of it, except that I hope it doesn’t wake my boyfriend, and I went off to work. Thinking back on it, the cat must have been dying in our backyard. It got to over a hundred and five here that day. My boyfriend is on the night shift, so he doesn’t wake up until two or three in the afternoon. It must have been long gone by then. It probably wasn’t a very good way to die.
That was the night that we discovered that the attic trapdoor was distinctly ajar. Neither of us had ever been up there. It’s not an easy door to get to. I checked; there was nothing in the attic. We joked around about it nervously; my boyfriend said that it sounded like the start of a horror movie.
But we don’t go out in the yard much, it being over a hundred degrees out every day around here. So the cat stayed there. My boyfriend says he spotted it one day, but it just looked like a mophead or a dog toy; he didn’t think much about it. Of course, that was before we knew our neighbor’s cat was missing.
And then this afternoon, I spotted it, and put two and two together. We were out fixing the washing machine, which had recently developed a tendency towards grand mal seizures during the spin cycle. I checked it, and sure enough, it was the cat, in a bad state of decomposition. The smell wasn’t strong, but it was awful. I won’t describe what it looked like.
I put it in a plastic bag, and then into a box, and still it smelled. I had to touch its leg through the bag to get it to go into the box. I’ve been smelling that same awful smell all day.
I hate even seeing dead things; roadkill upsets me. I work in a hospital, and have to walk through the loading dock several times a day, and every so often I see a corpse being loaded out of a van, draped in a body bag, wheeled towards the morgue, and I’m vaguely freaked all day.
The neighbor wasn’t home. She hasn’t been back for hours. We’ve bathed the dogs, in case they’ve been in contact with it, and washed the couch coverings. And waited, checking to see if the neighbor would get home. And now it’s night. And my boyfriend had to go to work. And there’s a dead cat in my backyard, that I’m feeling very guilty about. What if I had checked on it that morning? It might still be alive. If I’d found it sooner, my neighbor wouldn’t have had to wait for days to find out if it was dead. And the moon is out, behind a screen of clouds, and the house is quiet and empty, and there’s a dead cat in the backyard, and the neighbor still isn’t home, and any minute now, I expect a scratching at the back door, and an almost unrecognizable yowl…