ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Today when I got home late from work my boyfriend was working in the back yard trying to get as much of the stuff back there knocked down as he could. He was hot and sweaty and seemed irritable, understandably, so I stayed away for a while. Later I went back outside to see how he was doing and whether he’d like me to bring him something, like a soda, but he didn’t look like he particularly craved anything other than a swift death. So I stood around awkwardly for a few minutes and then noticed an enormous dead rat lying just on our side of the neighbor’s fence.

Obviously it was entirely disgusting and it stank terribly, but I stood there sort of sickly fascinated because it was so covered in huge flies. The main reason I could tell it was a rat is because of the long tail sticking out of the mass of flies. There’s no mistaking a rat’s tail.

Then I saw a kitten. When the kitten saw me seeing it, it ran into a little space under our laundry room and mewed loudly. I backed up a little, partly to avoid scaring the kitten, and partly to avoid smelling the dead rat. I wondered if the kitten was hungry and if he might consider trying to eat some of the rat. I hated that idea. I saw the kitten peering out from under the house at me. So I went back into the house and got the last of the smoked meats left over from the funeral and left them outside the place the kitten went in. I waited around to see if the kitten would show up and eat it, but it probably did not want to come out in front of me. That is fine. I just feel kindly toward kittens and want to make their lives easier.

Three days before the funeral I went with my boyfriend’s dad’s wife to the mortuary to drop something off, and found a wounded tiger striped kitten outside on their steps. Because she is a nice person, his father’s wife, who like my mother-in-law really is more of a surrogate mom to me than anything else, drove me to the animal shelter without a second thought, even though there were probably more important things she needed to be doing. The people at the mortuary gave us a towel to wrap it in. The kitten was in bad shape, with a serious bite near his neck, and wouldn’t stop mewling pathetically all the way there. What worried me most was that his wound stunk in the most putrid way, which made me suspect he was probably septic.

We gave the kitten to the people at the animal shelter and I signed a form relinquishing all my rights to it. I thought, this kitten has had the same shit week the rest of us have. “This kitten has had the same shit week we have,” I said. No one answered.

I was afraid for the girl at the counter to tell me that the kitten might not live, so I told her I already knew he probably would die, but I thought it seemed more humane to just put him to sleep instead of letting him die in front of a funeral home. It seemed important for me to be the first one to bring that up. “Hey, the girls are pretty good with these little guys,” said a burly man who was hanging out behind the counter with them. It was nice of him to try and make things seem less grim.

I didn’t think very much about the kitten the rest of the week, but on Saturday after the funeral I remembered and dug out his father’s phone book to find the number to the animal shelter. The girl on the phone was able to look up the kitten based on my last name. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, we had to put him down.”

“It’s okay,” I mumbled. “I knew that would probably happen. I just wanted to know.” I couldn’t have a kitten anyway with us both being so allergic.

“I’m sorry,” the girl repeated. It sounded like she really meant it.

“Thanks anyway,” I said in a brighter voice to make her feel better, and hung up. I leaned against the kitchen doorway, feeling keenly that nothing at all about this week had been the least bit fair. Somehow it had seemed that if I just avoided any hint of optimism and went with the expectation that the kitten would die, then the bastardly laws of the universe would function correctly and the opposite would happen. I think my error was rooted either in my imperfect ability to avoid all hope, or in my efforts to thwart the principle that sometimes bad things happen irrespective of any rhyme or reason.

I wandered out to the porch. I wanted to tell someone that the kitten had not lived, but it didn’t seem prudent. Since, you know, they had just buried their son that morning.

So I’ll look for this kitten again tomorrow, and if I see it then, maybe I’ll pick up some cat food at the store to leave out. Because, you know, I like kittens.