Moodswing - Dead cat

Keeping the maggots away

Thank God Lary’s cat didn’t die. This is the second day in a row I forgot to feed her, so I realized I better get off my ass and pass her some kibble because Lary prides himself on his absolute lack of attachment to anything on Earth except that cat. If he came home to a carcass he’d have to track me down and rip out my kidneys with a rusty crowbar. So I raced over to Lary’s place all worried his cat would be scratching at the door jamb in little kitty death throes, sputtering and stuff, and who wants to walk in on that? And then there’s the maggot factor. When I was a totally unsupervised 7-year-old walking home from the liquor store with two packets of Salem menthols for my mother way back when, I came across a dead cat in the gutter and, being 7 and propelled by insanity, decided to flip it over.
Jesus God. It was all furry and fine on top, but underneath it was boiling with maggots like that piece of meat in Poltergeist. I’ll never forget it. Before I flipped it I was thinking maybe I could take it home and present it to my mother as the perfect pet on account of it being dead and not needing expensive vaccinations or anything.
In the past she had reacted favorably to such offerings, like when I presented her with a poisoned fish wrapped in toilet paper I found floating in a polluted tributary behind the park a few years earlier. I remember her thanking me profusely as she took it straight to the trash pail, and then later washing my hands with lighter fluid. That type of attention was a rarity in my household, and I was hoping to score some more. But those maggots sucked all the fun out of everything. For days afterward I’d spontaneously break into shivers like a little alcoholic in detox. In fact I still do. I’m doing it now.
So dead cats and maggots go together like Porches and pricks in my book. I can’t handle that. I also hate ticks. I mean I have a total tick phobia. I hear their heads break off and travel up your blood stream where they get trapped in a ventricle or something, leaving you no choice but to clutch at your chest and die horribly. Once, as a passenger on an airplane, I was seated at the window and noticed that oh my God, there was a tick crawling toward me on the wall! Barely able to keep myself from evacuating the entire aircraft, I tried to squash the tick with a tissue but missed and then ... oh my God, I couldn’t see where it went! So I noticed the lady next to me was having trouble sleeping on an aisle seat, so I turned to her and graciously suggested we swap seats and, and ... OH MY GOD, I FED HER TO THE TICK! I can’t believe I did that. I hope her ventricles are OK.
So I was finally able to get Lary’s door open, and I say “finally” because he lives in a former candy factory with a complicated iron gate for a front door. Thank God I got in, because Lary loves that cat. If anything bad happened to her he would be boneless, I mean just a big boneless, jibbery mess of flesh. And I know how he feels. I’ve known Lary since back when we both thought there was nothing that could keep us tethered to the world. We were free and unfettered, with a big ball in our court called “nothing to lose.”
Then he got himself that cat and I had myself a baby, and if anything bad happened to a single hair on my baby’s head I would be boneless, too. Just a quivering, useless bag of boneless larvae. Sometimes I just bury my face in the folds of my baby’s neck and breathe. It’s true what Carlos Santana says, that babies smell like vanilla. And it’s utterly stupefying as well, to think for your entire life that you’re a strong and independent person only to suddenly realize one day that you can be broken in half by a baby’s hair. Jesus God, that is scarier than an entire pit of ticks.
Finally I found Lary’s cat, alive but a little shrunken on account of her fast and all. She puffed up fine after I forced three cans of food down her throat.