Ring of stones

The knock on my door came early, too early to be a delivery. It was one of the college students from next door, obviously distraught, trying to talk to me and holding a phone to her head at the same time.

“I’m so sorry to bother you, I called Animal Control but they said we’re not in their jurisdiction, and Miami Shores says they can’t come until this afternoon, and I don’t want to leave him in our front yard.”

Oh no. “Him? A cat?”

“Yeah, he’d been coming around for a few days, but we hadn’t been feeding him or anything, but he was really sweet and would get up in your lap, and his leg is messed up, and he’s dead and I don’t know what to do.”

“You found him in your yard?”

“When I got up this morning. He was so young. We called him Cheerio.” She wipred her red eyes with the back of her free hand.

I told her I would be there in a minute, and got my shoes and a shovel. This is not how I wanted my day to start.

Cheerio was a young orange and white cat, very clean, with a strong body. Between his affection toward people and his general appearance it was obvious he had been a pet. I hadn’t seen him around before, which is surprising, since most of the neighborhood strays end up on my porch eventually.

There was a bloodless gash on his leg and one foot, and his hips and back were hunched in a way the bones shouldn’t have allowed. A hit and run, I guess. We get a lot of them on my street; there’s no stop sign so people floor it for the two blocks between the four lane roads. Not everything is able to get out of the way.

“I’ll take care of Cheerio for you. Thank you for letting me know.” I picked him up and put him in a cardboard box, and then carried him into my backyard. A tree there will give him a shady place to rest, and to play with the others.

When I’d put the shovel away and washed up, I sat on the porch steps for a while. Miss Fuzzy sat a few feet away, washing herself and watching me.

“Did you know him, Fuzzy? Cheerio?”

She glanced up, then away. “Why do you give us such silly names? No, he was new.”

“I don’t think he suffered, for what little that’s worth.” I watched another car rip down the street. “I wish you didn’t have to live outside, Fuzz. I worry about you.”

“Do you think I want that? No, here I am free.”

“You are full of it, girl. You sit on my porch rail all day. You stare at the door waiting for me to bring you food—”

“I catch my own food. Have you forgotten those tree rats I brought you? And the iguana I gave the kittens?”

I shuddered. “No, I haven’t forgotten. But you still whine for food. And when I leave the front door open you come in, too, so don’t give me that ‘I have my freedom’ crap. You’d live inside if you could.”

Another car whizzed by, bass thumping.

“His family will miss him, Fuzzy. They’ll wonder why he didn’t come home, but tell themselves he’s just off playing somewhere. In a day or two they’ll start to worry more, and maybe go and look for him. But they’ll never know for sure what happened, and not knowing is the worst thing of all.”

I thought about the tree in the backyard, now ringed with stones.

“One of these days, girl, I’m going to come out here to feed you and you’ll be gone, the same way Evil Tom and Colonel Hoppy and Lady Grey just stopped coming around. I’ll never know.”

“They left when my kittens came. That is the way.”

She jumped on the rail and began grooming her tail. “We live and we die, the same as your people. Sometimes we are hungry, sometimes we are not. Sometimes there is pain, sometimes there is not. Sometimes we are alone, sometimes we are not.”

She tucked her feet under her chest and put her head down. I knew our conversation was at an end, so I stood to go back in the house.

“Feeder?” She raised her head again. “It’s good that you kept the young one’s body from the dogs.” I stopped with my hand on the door.

“And it’s good that you gave my children homes, so they will not need to rest under your tree.”