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Death and Domesticationby Che Mejean
Purgatory's Pet's Contest Winner
Revulsion swept over Lauren as she opened the door. The smell of cat piss and blood was enough to turn her stomach. She let out a strangled cry – something between gasping and gagging. Her bathroom was now home to the single most disturbing sight she had ever witnessed. She closed the door but she couldn’t escape the image she’d just seen.
The mutilated kitten was still hanging from its mother’s mouth. One of its paws had been ripped from its body and laid on the linoleum. An ear lay a few inches away. The baby’s tiny body dangled from its mother’s jaw. But the head was missing.
Lauren’s stomach lurched inside of her. She ran for the door and heaved over the edge of the porch. She wiped the slobber from her mouth with the back of her hand and transferred it to her blue jeans.
“Holy fuck! Holy fuck! Holy fuck!” Lauren was near hysterics. It was a mantra – the repetition slowed her racing heart. She sat on the top porch step and fished out a cigarette from her pocket. She fumbled for a lighter with trembling hands. After 3 attempts, she was sucking in nicotine and feeling a little calmer.
“It’s the cards”. Lauren didn’t dare speak this. She simply allowed the thought to take shape. She could never curse the cards out-loud.
The fresh air and smoke soothed her nausea and her nerves. She waited for few minutes before going back inside to face the carnage.
“What the fuck is wrong with you – you stupid bitch. Domestic animal - my ass!”
It seemed Lauren expected an answer. In response to her questioning, Kiki stood motionless. She had devoured more of her child – but had allowed it to fall from her mouth. At the risk of being bitten, Lauren seized Kiki and threw her into the travel kennel that she had borrowed before bringing her to the house. The cat mewed on impact.
Lauren gathered up the broken pieces of the kitten with a paper towel and placed it inside a kitchen bag. She wrapped it tightly in the plastic and took the makeshift coffin out to the trashcan.
“I should probably bury you, but I just don’t have it in me, little one. I’m sorry.” Lauren voice was uneven and shaky as she addressed the tiny carcass.
Lauren poured bleach over the entire bathroom. The odor stung her nostrils and brought tears to her eyes. Her hands were reddened and raw. As she scrubbed she inwardly damned the cards and Kiki and the day she let them into her home.
The entire kitten ordeal had been a nightmare. Kiki was a hideous, white, blue eyed beast of a cat. Her eyes were set close together and she looked cross-eyed and dopey. Kiki wasn’t even Lauren’s cat and here she was scrubbing the bloody remains of a kitten from the bathroom floor. The monster belonged to Lauren’s brother. He’d found Kiki wandering around the train tracks near his house. Kiki promptly repaid him for salvation by getting knocked up only weeks after her arrival. Lauren agreed to let Kiki have the babies at her house so the possums and the hawks didn’t pick them off. All three of the kittens had parished under Lauren's supervision.
In her heart Lauren feared that cards were responsible.
The cards were something of an obsession. She slept with the cards under her pillow so that they were intimate. She told them her secrets. She held the cards closely to her heart before dealing. She studied their meanings. Lauren found them to be beautiful - she loved them. But the cards did not love her back.
The cards warned of financial woes – Lauren lost her debit card to some redneck kid who bought tickets to see a cowboy with a guitar.
The inverted Sun card consistently disclosed Lauren’s poor self esteem and her internal struggle to accept herself.
The cards rarely heralded good news – they relayed only festering sores and nagging suspicions that made Lauren jumpy and paranoid. And then it happened. Death came to her house.
When she first dealt herself the death card – she panicked. She immediately searched for alternate meanings. She allowed herself to be consoled when she read that many well-renowned psychics interpret the card as simply the end of something. Some people even referred to Death as the garden of life.
But now, as she scrubbed dried blood and cat urine from her bathroom floor she knew that Death means death and it don’t fuck around. Death is a cross-eyed, bitch cat named Kiki.
© Mejean, 2007
Ché Mejean suffers from chronic boredom at work and writes when no one is looking. She is a product of good Christian parents and the fine public school system of Hall County, GA. She lives in South Carolina with her cat Zapper Louise.