The cat was run over by a blue Honda Civic on the last day of summer. 

It wasn’t really their fault, to be fair––the Honda’s, not the cat’s. The cat chose to run out into the middle of the street, unaware of regular traffic safety rules, not bothering to pause and look left, right, then left again. Really, the cat should have seen it coming. Fifteen years spent tip-toeing around this earth on pink-pawed feet, whiskers no longer perky and straight, fur scraggly and matted in hidden places, and what did the cat have to show for it? A failure of pedestrian etiquette? 

But the girl didn’t seem to care about nuance or responsibility. She had run out after it, seconds too late. It happened so quickly, in fact, that she almost thought the cat had escaped to the other side––but there was no escaping the ruthless hand of impact. Of death. The orange blur jerked, rolled, splashed onto the street. The Honda Civic did not stop. Remorse is a petty man’s occupation, and cat-killers are not petty men. 

By the time she had reached its mangled corpse, life had already lifted itself out of the cat’s still-warm body and drifted away. She sat there, in the street, cradling the cat in her lap like one of the baby dolls she used to love so tenderly as a kid. A dead cat, a plastic baby doll: the circle folds over, completes itself. The sun was sinking down telephone lines. The sky was pink and mournful. The air smelled of August: cut-grass, asphalt, and the promise of rain. 

The girl had not loved the cat as she thought she should. It had lived in that house for so many years that it seemed to become part of the structural integrity itself––one expects the door, the walls, the roof, the cat. It was background noise on quiet nights: a soft scratching in the hallway, a conversational meow. It was an object to trip over, a mess to clean up, a party trick to bring out when the guests came over. And perhaps she had petted it every so often, and perhaps she had whispered noiseless, confidential things into its fur, when the hour had grown late and no one else was there to catch her. 

The cat hadn’t seemed to mind the girl’s indifference. It was content to laze in small patches of concentrated sunlight, eat large quantities of food, and litter the carpet: menial tasks to a cat, easily accomplished. So there was a mutual understanding between them. A symbiotic relationship of negligence; they got along passively, they acknowledged each other like passersby on an empty street. 

But now the cat was lying dead in the girl’s arms the summer before her freshman year of college. And how do you move on from this? How do you stand up, cradling the cat, and get off the street? How do you accept the unimaginable, that which was never supposed to become real?  

Around her, cars swerve to continue down the lane, and fireflies begin to emerge in the slow-creeping dusk. Like a rock in a riverbed she remains there, stationary, as the water glides around her body. This is nothing new. She has spent eighteen years as a rock in a riverbed, waiting for the current to sweep her up and show her where to go, what to do. 

Life wobbles on its feet. Life stands up too soon, sways like a seaman on his first voyage, stumbles and steadies itself against a wall. Soon, the girl will rise, or her parents will pull into the driveway, or her brother will come outside, and the cat will be buried, and the summer will end, and the girl will leave for a college in a different city. But still, there will be this persistent memory, this moment crystalized in her mind. The ending of things. The grief that comes, like a quiet whisper in the night, and guides her through the darkness.