9-12

The little body is already cold and stiff, formed into the shape of a tufted stuffed animal bed. She holds her position as I lift her, and though her face is stretched strangely in death, her pose, curled and languid, speaks of comfort. I hope she was peaceful as she died; not the gasping, fighting death from earlier. I resisted that death, and I wonder if it was cruel of me to struggle to keep her. In the end, she seemed more pained, her thin delicate chin elongated somehow in that face of inevitability, than perhaps she would have if I had simply let her go.

I wrap her in a towel, gently, carefully but she is no longer there. She does not care how I wrap her; she has left her small fragile body. I do not know when or how, and I feel excluded from something important. Slighted.

I am growing distant and cold as the dead kitten, I feel nothing either. Nothing but surprise, as if she had fled and left the back door open rather than died. She is gone, she left, and this artificial soft cold thing in my hands was discarded behind her.

I go through the catalog in my mind, paging through. Filing her under failure, glancing at successes as a reminder. A strange sense of disappointment in her and her sister, dead creatures. Why did they not tell me they were ailing? One lies gasping, more than gone, on the floor, and I fight for her. I have done all I can, I tell myself when she fades and her eyes go still.

This one, I resent her peaceful death. I cannot soothe myself. She did not give me the opportunity to find my own peace. I was abandoned. I was not consulted.

It is a cold week for me, and I have withdrawn. I shut myself down. Quarantine. My mind needs to rest. My body needs to rest or I will become cold, cold, again. Bar the doors and close the windows. I shutter my frantic thoughts in darkness and they settle slowly like sleepy birds, quieting and rustling but never still.

Around me, death in the night, and life, and things move forward, and I carry on with my sadness and my heartache and my joys and my anger and the world spins onward without any care toward the burdens I nurture, so I snap the cords and I let them fly into the ether.