That’s sarcasm, by the way.
I have $20 in my pocket and $12 in the bank, and both of my credit cards are about to go overdue. There isn’t any food in the house to speak of. I’ve eaten spaghetti four nights in a row because I had the presence of mind to stock up on spaghetti and sauce the last time I managed to get to the grocery store. Tonight will be spaghetti night five. When I woke up this morning that was what I was worried about and obsessing over.
So I go downstairs and my mother asks, “Have you seen Felix? I can’t find him anywhere.” I go looking, and find him under her bed. Dead. Long enough for rigor to set in but not decayed. A day at most. I get him out of there with plastic gloves and get him into a green plastic bag, and take him outside to rest on the porch temporarily. Then I go back up to the computer to find out if it’s legal to bury a cat in your yard. I find out that it isn’t.
Oscar, the other cat, meets me at the foot of the stairs. He looks confused. I sit down on the floor and call to him but he won’t come. He was always the more friendly of the two, but even he only lets me pet him through the staircase banister, where he knows I would be able to pick him up and carry him off. He won’t let me near him now.
So I don’t go to the basement and find my dad’s old spade, I don’t carry the plastic bag with Felix in it into the backyard, and I definitely don’t spend a half hour digging a a grave under a shade tree. I most certainly don’t place the bag into the grave and fill it in, tramping it down, and marking it with a brick (because all I would have been able to find would have been a brick.) Because that would have been illegal. And then I positively don’t cry.
Felix is the one on the right, with the white nose.