I
WHEN I GO OUT, the blue cage is bare.
Girbaud must have bolted out of it. And maybe he is now running in the
backyard, creeping across the lawn, or pouncing with some other cats somewhere
in our house? Of course, he isn’t. It can’t be
like that today anymore. It can never be. This is the day we buried his
remains.
I gait toward the
cage to make some final cleaning. This was Girbaud’s cage. Was, because after
all that’s one thing death can change permanently: the shifting of verb tenses
from present to past. I pass by our terrace, and just nearby the terrace door
sits, motionlessly, the litter box Girbaud had used whenever he had to excrete his solid and liquid wastes alike. The gray mixture of gravel and sand,
which Girbaud couldn’t do without whenever he needed to answer to nature’s
call. He’d been trained really well in doing this. There were times he would
cry aloud just so I would give back this translucent, plastic box inside his
cage for him to pee. Or poop. In the
hallway―which serves as my mother’s miniscule garden where she grows her gumbo
and eggplants and birds of paradise and orchids and other species of plants
unknown to me―assemble in parallel the yellow and blue feeding bowls I bought
for Girbaud when he was still young. This pair was maybe his fourth or fifth,
because the ones we initially handed him were real human bowls. Which were too
big for his taste. And for the size of his cage. The blue bowl is empty, dry as
bone; the yellow one is half-filled with water. This might have been the last
water he drank before he had succumbed to death. If he ever had the chance to
drink.
