Lydia Cooper - My Second Death

“Tell me about your mother.”

Miranda stiffens. Then she turns away from me and goes over to the table. She ladles punch into a plastic cup and turns around and hands it to me. She glares at me, and I am startled again by how eerie it is to be stared at by Aidan’s eyes, only his eyes in her face are twinned, synchronized, perfected.

“Some people,” she says, “deserve to die.”

I take the punch and sip it. It’s frothy and citrusy. “This is good.”

“Thank you.” She can’t help it. The words slip out. She looks irritated. “She was one of them.”

I almost choke on my drink. I thought Miranda was insulting me. I swallow and lower the cup. “What?”

“I answered your question. Now please leave.”

“Well,” I say, “that was sort of a bizarre answer. Could you explain it?”

“No.”

I take another sip, then drain the cup. I look around for a trashcan.

“Plastic recycling is in the cupboard there.”

I go to the sink and rinse the cup and then put it in the bin Miranda points out to me.

“Your old neighbor thinks the sun shone out of your mother’s ass.”

A pink stain spreads across her face.

“Is this what you’re into? Dredging up pointless gossip ? You get off on the salacious details of other peoples’ lives, other peoples’ pain?” Her voice trembles. “Get out of my house. Now .”

I want to ask what she means by salacious gossip but she has a point. Asking more is just prurient interest at this point. They were just kids, Miranda and Aidan. Nothing they think they know has any more truth than the other person’s, and neither of their truths are helpful. Her brother thinks their autistic sister committed a crime and he tortures himself daily for loving her anyway. Miranda, on the other hand, believes that her mother committed suicide and she spends her days pretending she is a damaged shell of a human being so that she doesn’t have to admit that she’s stronger, better, and more whole than her own mother.

I shrug and walk toward her front door. She comes after me and reaches around me to yank the door open.

I turn in the doorway. She is very close to me. Her skin is a poreless matte and she smells faintly of orange peel.

I say, “For the record, you’re more like your brother than you think. And you don’t deserve to be punished.”

She inhales. Her blue-veined eyelids close briefly.

I leave and when I look back, she is leaning against the door, holding onto the edge with both hands.

The sun is setting when I get back to campus. I park and walk toward the library. The cracked slabs of the sidewalk cant drunkenly, exhausted by a season, a lifetime, of freezes and thaws.

A group of students is clustered around something on the sidewalk ahead of me. When I get closer I see that they are staring down at something hidden by the overhanging shrubbery. The knot of people takes up the whole sidewalk. I stop and look around for options. To the left is a thick slide of brown mud, and I’m only wearing sneakers so I don’t want to wade into it. When I look back at the group of students, someone has moved and I see that they are looking down at an animal, growling and writhing under the bush. I look with more interest.

One of the students, a guy in blue and yellow athletic sweats, turns and sees me watching. He moves to the side. The animal is a brown cat writhing and meowing in a puddle of shit and blood.

The cat looks like it’s been hit by a car or run over with a bike. Either way, the cat has dragged its broken spine across the sidewalk from the parking lot, leaving a smear across the concrete. The animal shows its pink spiny teeth, yowling.

When I move forward, a girl notices me and makes way. “Oh, my God, isn’t it the saddest thing ever? Can you imagine? We don’t even know what to do. Derek went to go see if he could find cardboard or something to put it on so we can take it to the vet or whatever.”

The thing is, I recognize it. The yellow eyes, the patches of caramel and mocha-colored fur. The cat I found in the bathroom sink when I moved into the apartment.

I look up at the kids. They seem so young, their cheeks pink-tinged in the gusty wind as they stare lusty-eyed at the distressed animal, their mouths warped into shapes of distress or disgust.

“Shit.” I sigh and shift my backpack more securely over my shoulder. I nudge the Zips athletic guy with my elbow and he takes a step back, his bullish head swiveling on a golden-brown neck.

I kneel carefully. The fur on the cat’s hind legs is matted with runny diarrhea. I reach out to turn the cat over so that I can see the ruined bowels better. The cat snarls but then when my hand brushes its flared whiskers, it starts suddenly to purr. The cat butts its wedge-shaped skull against my hand. I cup my hand, rub my knuckles once along the smooth side of its cheek. Its rough tongue strokes my finger.

“Oh God,” says a girl behind me. She sounds like she’s crying.

The Aztecs — and I think this is true of many cultures — believed that eating certain parts of their victims, like the heart, imparted the essential qualities of that person. If this cat has an essential quality, it is trust, or forgiveness. The cat looks up at me and I touch its warm chest, its vibrating, rumbling ribs. My fingers feel the cool, slippery coils of pink small intestines. The cat cries once and keeps purring.

When I touch its head I remember driving the knife into the pulpy wood of the stair. I still have that knife. It’s in my backpack. I think it’s Aidan’s knife. I saw him slice open a tube of paint with it. But I’ve held onto it ever since, like a talisman. Like if I held onto it, I would remember how I didn’t kill the cat. But now I will have to anyway.

I feel them around me, the students gathered close at my elbows. I don’t want to get out the knife in front of them. I don’t know how else to do it. But it’s up to me. I did this. I am the one who is the cause of its suffering, even if I’m not a useless moron standing around mordantly luxuriating in its pain like the rest of them.

So I bend over and pick up the cat, gather up the limp hind limbs and the frantic scurrying front legs, the dripping shit and blood and bile and matted fur and purring vocal chords. Warmth bleeds through the fabric of my shirt, and I can feel a dampness against my stomach. The cat cries when I cradle it in my arms.

The cry makes me feel dizzy. But the dizziness doesn’t make sense. This is just a cat I cast into the night a few weeks ago to remove any unnecessary temptation, to prevent myself from giving in to my darker side. I didn’t care then about the animal. Or maybe I did. Maybe I sent the cat away to save it.

I am surprised to find that I’m having a hard time breathing. My chest moves, but air doesn’t seem to flow in or out.

A cat’s skull is small, the neck vertebrae delicate as a china teacup. I grip the head in one hand, the other fist tight on the neck, and wrench the cat’s neck. A snap. The head dangles loose, a broken bone inside loose skin. The thick tangy smell of wet fur and feces.

Sticky fluids, blood and diarrhea, drip between my knuckles and paint stripes down my leg. The students look at me. Their faces are Klee paintings, void eyes and tombstone maws.

Their horror pisses me off. I raise the body of the cat in my two hands, proffered like Abraham lifting up his son to his god. “What? Did you want to let it linger? Do you get off on its suffering? Are you fucking animals ?”

They jabber frantically, screeching and squawking and flapping away. One trips on the edge of the sidewalk, flails, and steps back into mud, foot sinking with a squelch, an ooze. They yell, and one girl’s face is covered in tears and her eyes shine like burning worms.