No humor here folks, just tragedy; if you think this might be upsetting, pass along.
Yesterday, when I got home, my wife told her about her day. “I left pretty late,” she said. “Some of the neighborhood kids wanted me to help them catch some stray cats: a mother and three kittens. Those kittens were so fast! I spent a half-hour trying to catch them. One of them ran across the street and started hiding in cars, and we couldn’t get it out.”
If my life was a novel, this would be called “foreshadowing.”
Later on, we got a call from a friend who had just acquired some stone blocks. Did we want them? Sure! Just the thing to edge our little vegatable garden. C’mon over.
To make carrying the stone into the back yard easier, we decided to back the vehicles out of the driveway. I started my car and backed out. BA-BUMP! Uh oh, what was that? I look and see a kitten scampering away. It’s running kind of funny; not right at all. Uh oh. I back into the road and get out. My wife backs out her truck. I walk up the driveway and look. A kitten is lying on it’s side near where the truck was parked. Uh oh.
I walk back to find my wife. “Um, I think I found one of the kittens.” We walk together up the driveway. The kitten is still breathing, and twitches every once in a while.
My wife bursts into tears. “Oh my God, I killed it. Sorry, poor kitty, I didn’t mean it. I wish I had caught you earlier.” She pets the kitten. It twitches. “Oh no, it’s still alive!” Then to me, sobbing, “Can you please kill it? That would be the best. I can’t do it.”
I feel like crap of course. I can’t kill it either. But what else can I do? It’s obviously badly, badly hurt. I get a crowbar. “I can’t watch,” says my wife. I smack it once, hard, on the base of the skull. The whole body bounces. The eyes glaze over and it doesn’t move at all. I killed it. It must be dead. It has to be, because I cannot hit it again. It still doesn’t move. I get a shovel, and bury the body in a corner of the back yard.
When I am done, I get a hose and clean off the shovel, and the crowbar, even though they only have good clean dirt on them. I also scrub my hands, even though they’re still clean.
Later on, I tell my wife that I’m positive that I hit the kitten, and, judging by where her truck was parked, she couldn’t have hit it at all; therefore, I killed it. Even though I’m not really positive at all.
Sometimes I feel really low. This is one of those times. I realize this incident is hardly on par with all the terrible things that happen to people every day. In fact, I imagine that if this is the worst thing that happens to me all year, I’ll probably be pretty lucky.
But I still killed it. And I still feel like shit.
