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By: Rob Turk
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TURK: Appreciation:
She crouches in a small palely illumined room the size of a pantry, where the neighborhood stray cats enter through a small hole in the wall and eat from an ever-full bowl that presently she fills with poison. The room, an almost metaphorical extension of the 'room' of her mind, with all its clutter and weak lights is nevertheless cold and unattached from the house; the house where five souls wander in a sulky maze of unspoken sentiment and idea... The hour of the afternoon caused the Woman to haste, for soon she would no longer be alone.
"My name is Thompson," he says somewhere., "I'm here to look at that television set of yours that's been acting up on you..." The door swings mechanically open, as if operated by pulleys and levers rather than by a young girt; she smiles, embarrassed, at the man.
"Thank you for coming on a holiday, sir. My parents will be home soon, and they'll pay you for the TV."
"I'll leave this with you," he said as he handed her a large yellow piece of paper, "and they can mail me a check next week."
"Thanks again." Her eyes were bright, anxious at sixteen. Anxious for more of everything; another one, someday (maybe)...
Mr. Thompson smiled at the girl and for a moment, imagined that she was someone else a long long time ago, in another world. A strand of blond hair crossed her forehead like a yellow scar which trembled in the wind. He wanted to blow the strand from her face, like the wind, but as he imagined himself puckering his lips and exhaling slowly there in the doorway he was ashamed of himself and embarrassed by his cigar-thick breath. Maybe she'd like it. (Of course not)... He patted against his bluejean pocket and felt the bulk of his key ring, smiled again at the girl, and went away. The truck lumbered noisily through the winter streets, causing animals to bark and cower behind their fences, afraid.
The driveway was crowded with two immobile cars, an old Camero and an old Toyota, which he had intentions of repairing and giving to his two oldest children, both boys, as gifts for their fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. He tried to remember how many months he had before his son Gary would turn sixteen, and need a car. A couple. He was annoyed by this, and he pushed in the cigarette lighter of the truck and grabbed the cigar violently from the dashboard, smelled it, winced; and lit it. He slammed the door of the truck as he got out, cigar clutched between his remaining teeth, and the noise alerted his wife, inside, of his arrival. Shit.
The poison stuck to her fingers like paint; and she nearly licked it from them with her unhappy tongue, but did not want to experience any sickness short of unconscious sleep...She wiped them against a pair of dirty overalls which hung next to the kitchen door on a hook. The poison did not seem to want to let her go so soon; she hurried into the kitchen and he was there.
"Howdy, Jo. Doing the laundry?" He asked, removing his overcoat.
"Just feeding the cats, dear." Her reticent reply put Thompson in a poor frame-of-mind, recalling childhood images of his mother smiling and baking in her kitchen and wondering to herself: "What have I done here?" He walked across the kitchen, carrying his coat across his arm like a dilettante of forgotten films, approaching his wife whose hands were hidden in deep housecoat pockets, strange. The refrigerator was nearly empty; he took the last bottle of beer and left her, her hands still hidden, to prepare a meal.
She went to the clipboard and removed a small bag of flour, poured some in a bowl and added some water, as she kneaded the contents of the metal bowl with her fingers, she watched as the poison left her fingers and disappeared into the lump of rudimentary bread. She stopped, raised her fingers to her face, and saw that they were clean; she went for an onion in the pantry.
Here her thoughts weren't constricted to the circumstances of her (heretofore) dull and suffocating existence they were allowed to be free, to loop around the shelves and swinging lamp shades of her empire, the pantry,, to soar amongst the dust particles which danced demurely in the air before her and defied her attempts to clean ... She found that the pantry was physically impossible to keep clean, because of the cats.
Gary and John insisted that, if they could not keep a dog in the house, that at they should be allowed to keep a cat. Where to keep it? Feed it in the pantry. When their mother had said, in a desperate attempt to keep animals out of her house, that the cat could not get into the pantry without crossing her kitchen floor, their father had decided to cut a hole in the wall of the pantry which would allow the cat easy access to the food but not the house. The cat, being indignant about its exclusion from the household made friends with the other cats of the neighborhood and brought them back to the pantry to eat and procreate. "This was my pantry before you came, and it'll be mine again." The poison discolored the cat food slightly, and made it smell different, but the cats of the neighborhood (who had a good thing going) ate it without hesitation...
The youngest Thompson, Little Julie, came home from school first, stomping through the house and shouting to her mother about dinner, and she was happy to see her father had beaten her home. "Daddy!" she shouted, "Did you get fired?
"No, sweet-neck, Daddy's still got to work again on Monday, unfortunately."
Little Julie, who at the tender age of eight possessed a remarkably loud voice and had not learned to control it, shouted again: "I'm happy, anyway, Daddyl" And she hugged him, then decided to climb into his lap, she kicked the beer bottle from the coffee table and it shattered on the glass of the television. "Oops." She said, and made to get away from the scene.
"Honey!" called Thompson, "We had an accident in here!" He was surprisingly undisturbed by the loss of the last remaining beer, and he squeezed at the shoulder of Little Julie, so she would not run away from him and into the back bedroom. She turned to him and smiled weakly, as if cautious, for she expected a spanking. He cooed. "It's okay, baby, I do that myself all the time; though usually much later in the evening." They laughed together.
Carrying a large lump of slightly discolored bread in her arms, cradled like an infant, or a bowling ball Mrs. Thompson spoke to herself in an odd, conjectural sort-of-way, condemning the entire household to hell especially the cats. "Honey?" Her husband spoke, "We're watching this show. Its Wheel-o-Fortune, and this cute little coed is winning." She looked at him and tried to seem unperturbed, but the demeanor of her husband and youngest child made her indignant. She rubbed the lump of dough against the glass of the television screen and across the floor before it, picking up the shards of broken glass and adding beer, though much too frothy, to the loaf. She returned to the kitchen without a word; the others were indifferent. They watched television. The adolescent boys returned, clamored around the back porch for a moment, then entered the kitchen looking troubled.
Their mother grimaced as she picked shards of glass from their dinner, and waved 'hello' gracefully, but the boys ignored her. She saw they were heading for their bedroom where they liked to hide until dinner. "What's wrong, boys?" she asked.
"The cat is rolling over in the driveway, crying. He looks sick."
"Hmmm." she said. A piece of glass stuck in one of her fingers, she stared at the few drops of blood which began to appear there, apparently meditating on the malaise of the feline, Funky. "Maybe Lil' Funky's sick, or something." She had calculated that each cat that so much as sniffed at that bowl of cat food would have twenty minutes to live, according to the warning on the side of the poison box. She thought of its odd looking rat-skull-and-crossbones label and smiled "A better mousetrap, my ass!" she thought. The boys were troubled "
"Momma, the cats sick. Why're you smiling?"
"Well, I smile because if I stop, then I'll probably get to crying..."
'"Oh."
The Thompson family gathered nervously around the kitchen table, and stared down across it and surveyed the meal which awaited them...three Mr. Goodbar candy bars, a half-peeled and chewed-on orange, a similar apple, a pathetic bunch of skinny grapes, and a large loaf of green bread which had aroma of Budweiser to it, and not a slight look of danger, too; it steamed and vibrated like a holiday Turkey which had been roasted alive, then it shook and trembled as if it were still dying before them. The boys worried about the cat rolling and screaming in the driveway, Little Julie wanted a candy bar at all costs, and Mr. Thompson gathered up his energies to lodge a complaint with the authorities, or more specifically, with his wife who clutched tenuously at a bottle of Rhine Valley, Texas champagne with tears in her beady little green eyes and singing in a low voice the theme to a Broadway musical which had been recently adapted for television. "Um, Sugar, is this our dinner?" He asked with a heavy weight of uncertainty in his voice, as if she were about to laugh and say 'No! I've called and a pizza is on the way...this is dessert...hahaha...' but she did not say that, indeed she could not have said those words at that exact moment, because they were interrupted by a chorus of scratching at the pantry door, and several discontented meows.
Gary ran to the pantry door, expecting to find his cat once again healthy and happy (as in days of yester-) But, as he opened the door with an excited shout, (intending to invite the cat inside into the kitchen where it had once been forbidden to play for such a long long time) more than thirty screaming cats ran between his legs into the kitchen and died beneath the bright, fluorescent lights. Little Julie screamed as she lost count of the dying animals, while her family stared open-mouthed at the cats and their wryly smiling mother.
There was a knock at the front door, quickly followed by a short round of rings of the doorbell- PING PING PING (Gah-...) Mr. Thompson snatched a candy bar from the table and left the room. His wife had the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette. The children began to make strange sobbing sounds, as if their bodies weren't mature enough to cry; they coughed and sobbed.
Mr. Thompson swung the door open, and it banged against a coat rack. He remembered that he was supposed to repair the broken doorstop soon, so the door wouldn't bang against the decrepit coat rack He looked out into the yard and saw the back of his neighbor's muffled head. The man turned around, and announced curtly: "'Evening, Thompson. what the hell's going on in there? The whole damn yards filled with cats that're puking their little guts out! Even ol' Mrs. Lanful's yard is filled with them! " Thompson casually freed the candybar from its metal foil wrapper and took a large bite, then with chunks of chocolate stuck between his teeth and gums he answered:
"Shit, Larry! I don't know! Maybe they're all sad about the holidays, you know, depressed. Like the women, you know!"
"Depressed, hell boy! They've been poisoned."
"Well, what do you expect me to do about it?"
"I don't know--I already called the veterinarian, Dr. George."
"Good thinking, Larry. When he gets to your house, give me a call"
Little Julie held the trash bag open while her brothers tossed the bodies of the cats at her, and she deftly caught them in the trash bag; they thudded softly against one another inside the bag and a few of their limbs broke from the impact. Strange. Their mother smoked a filter-less cigarette while leaning against the kitchen sink, and as she exhaled, she watched the smoke slowly dissipate in the air which smelled increasingly of cats. Thompson entered the r-room threw the packaging of his candy bar in the trash bag with the cats, turned to his wife and said:
"Seems ol' Mrs. Lanful's gone and poisoned all the cats ... They're everywhere, wretchin! and dying." His wife blew an oval-shaped ring of smoke, into the air in his direction, picked up a butter knife from the kitchen counter and stabbed through the smoke ring. "Cute." he said, thinking she was pretending to stab at the smoke ring when she actually was pretending to stab his heart, which she saw across the room through the cloudy alembic of her exhalation. "That's very good, Lil' Jules, holding that big bag up all by yourself. I imagine its getting awfully heavy, though, why don't you give it to Gary to hold." The girl obeyed her father, and made as if to hand the bag to her brother, who was trying to break the spine of a dead black cat over his knee and paying no attention to the rest of the family. The bag, of course, fell; the bodies of the cats rolled back onto the tiles, causing the children to squirm and the mother to smile. Idiots.
"Give me that, baby!" Thompson said, stooping to recollect the corpses in the bag, and the thought occurred to him that: 'Of everyone in the neighborhood, who hates animals most of all?' He shoved the remaining bodies back into the bag, and as he reached for the black one which his son had stretched between his legs he glanced at his wife whom he had never seen smoking before, yet was now blowing enormous smoke rings into the air and stabbing at them sequentially, from smallest to largest; an order which seemed to him improbable and largely impossible, yet she managed it.
The bag was cinched closed and carried to the curbside to be collected by the trash men on Tuesday, without a whole lot of ceremony, though the children cried a little and the father began wondering about the conversation which he dreaded: explaining death to his children. The neighborhood was filled with the mourning of families whose cats were now, inexplicably, gone. The yards were strewn with corpses. The air was filled with sadness and a smell that reminded the veterinarian of rat poison.
"We've seen this sort of thing before ... the police should be notified..."
"Yes! Yes, of course." they resounded.
Inside the Thompson kitchen the children had lost their appetites. Even Little Julie regretfully declined a candy bar. Their father, however, remained hungry and at the suggestion of his wife he sliced the loaf of bread and began to butter it with the butter knife, Mrs. Thompson hurried the children into the living room 'where she sat them around the television and made them watch a religious network broadcast which dealt with Loss. As she re-entered her kitchen, her husband was about to bite into the last slice of bread.
"You want the last slice?" he asked, hoping she would politely refuse, which she did. "Well, guess I'll eat it." He said as he greedily finished off the loaf which had reminded everyone of a tortured holiday turkey but to him it tasted wonderful. Mmmm. She lit another cigarette, this time leaning against the door of the pantry, her room. Her mind. Spirits seemed to scream out to her then, from that room which had been singularly hers before the cats had invaded... the room of her recollection and conscious freedom...
Her husband turned to her, saw her smiling sinisterly against the smoky, fluorescent kitchen decor which had served them well enough before. Now he felt the loaf within him work its magic... It mutinied against his digestive system with a speed that seemed improbable to her .. His eyes rolled he saw her smiling, smoking, indifferent; he turned, the kids 'were watching the television and did not look to watch him fall, rather without grace, to the floor.
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