August 26, 2002
death dropped by
Listening to: silence.
Reading: The Secret
Lives of Cat Lovers by Bruce Fogle
Wrote a poem related to what happened today.
This morning my mum came home from her business trip. Within ten minutes of walking around downstairs, she yelled that Juju’s mouth was frothing. Azza and I ran down.
Earlier this year, around late January, I lost eleven of my cats in a span of two weeks. Poison. Source, unknown. Type, unrecognised. My mum collected a vomit sample from one of the cats and the vet took a look at it. He forwarded it to a lab and they researched it. They had never encountered something like it in their life. They couldn’t identify it. It definitely wasn’t your ‘everyday’ pesticide or rat poison.
It works slowly. By the time the cat’s mouth bubbles and their heartbeat accelerates you could say it’s too late to do anything. From the medical reports I stole from the vet after the cats’ deaths, it appeared to crush all vital organs into practically nothing. Painfully.
So from 20 (yes, TWENTY) cats I was left with only 9. Gave some away, some gave birth to more, the number stuck to 9. And now it’s August. We’ve placed wooden fencing around the terrace house in February to keep our neighbours out. We knew they had something against us. But nothing’s happened since.
Don’t you get it?
It’s August. That’s a fucking 7 months after the mass murder. Why the
fuck would they want to take whatever the fuck they used out of their closet and fuck up
our cats again? Why kill them so fucking cruelly? I’m under the assumption that it
was murder, of course. It could just be a contaminated piece of grass or rat carcass or
something in the water. It’s just too unreal… all that coincidental shite eleven
times, that’s all.
The last thing we wanted to do was send Juju to a doctor. The vet had 11 die with him
already, how the hell would he know what to do with this one?
Alfalfa came stumbling in, with shaky footing and a weak whimper. He too had froth, and it
bubbled down to his paws. He vomited and it was a vegetable green.
Two of them. Two of the most beautiful, nonetheless. But why the fuck would that matter anyway. Maybe the killers thought that they were the ones that we’d miss the most. Maybe they were right. These two were among my mum’s favourites.
You know how sometimes they say your life flashes in front of your eyes before you think you’re going to die? It happened to me, for them. Images flashed through like a slide show through my head in a span of a blink. Juju chasing a butterfly. Alfalfa snorting on Mum’s lap. Juju nuzzling his mother. So many movements and fuzzy pictures. My eyes were closed. When I opened them they were in the cage in front of me.
Froth. Everywhere. They couldn’t even
open their eyes or sit up straight. The moment they felt the newspapered floor of the cage
they crumbled to their feet and Juju rested one side of his face on the ground, tongue
lolling out and panting hard. Alfalfa just huddled in a corner. So unhappy.
The entire Sunday afternoon was spent with all three of us trying to take a nap, to
forget, or to syringe them water and charcoal, and to just sit with the cage door open,
stroking them. Alfalfa managed to run away between visits, he still had strength to mess
with the cage door and escape. When a cat doesn’t intend to be found, you won’t
find him.
Juju was brought out at night and we held him close while watching television upstairs. He moved around when he could. He kept his mouth open sometimes, hissing and breathing so sharply it’d draw tears from us and him.
“He’s getting stiff,” I whispered from the back of my mum’s armchair. Juju had crawled behind it and was limp on the floor. The only part of him that was moving was his belly, up and down almost violently. His tail wagged slightly, always, as if to show he was still there. He was slowly leaving. He felt so soft earlier this morning, and last night. Now even his ears didn’t seem flexible. His entire body was stiffening, save the heavy breaths.
Then Alfalfa came home. We knew because of a heart-wrenching whimper downstairs. Mum was asleep and I ran down.
He was against the wall, again trying to walk
but leaning on the wall for balance. He gave up, fell over and foam exploded from his
mouth all over the floor. It had already soaked his four paws and was now just puddling.
He stank of the poison, a stench now permanently etched in my mind. He was a fool to have
left. He probably realised it now. We tried to feed him charcoal but he didn’t seem
capable of digesting anything anymore.
We called Mum and she came down.
Then came one of the moments tonight that I’ll remember always.
She had his face in her hands and was trying
to feed him a quarter of a charcoal pill. He spat it out, along with more froth. Just as
he did she exhaled a loud sob, stroking his face so softly I didn’t think he could
feel it.“Ya Allah,” she said. “Kesiannya anakku.”
Oh God... my poor son.
Azza and I carried Juju downstairs with a towel, each of us holding two corners of it. We could no longer move him without him crying out in pain. We placed him on the floor, near the door where the cage was. Alfalfa was already in it and my mum was crying, harder than her roughest time with Dad.
I hardly talked to any of the cats since Muffin left. I had always felt that whatever feelings I wanted to say was already conveyed through my fingertips. My mum was very different. All she did was talk to the cats, all of them, especially the ones she loved most, Alfalfa-Tubbs, Luke and Juju. She’d talk to them so often they’d come to seek the comfort of her voice more than anything else sometimes. They loved it when I talked to Mum on the speakerphone.
Right then, all Mum was doing was babbling to Alfalfa, stroking him. Even though I was a few feet away I still couldn’t make out what she was saying, it was thickly distorted by her tears. Alfalfa with what strength he had responded. His tail was short but he wagged it. And despite the slimy foam he still nuzzled her fingertips. These things tend to make you cry more, I guess. She couldn’t stop. She kept telling him it was okay, when all I was whispering to Juju was to leave. End it. Fast. I just wanted his pain to stop. He couldn’t move at all now.
Why do people say that things will be okay, when clearly it won’t?
Most of the time they don’t even know
whether it’ll be fine or not. Then why say it?
Why give the false hope to yourself and the person you’re saying it to?
What kind of reassurance is that?
At precisely 10:10 pm tonight, Juju Bonks, 9
months old, passed away.
It took him five minutes. We were all with him. We flinched at every whimper.
It was the second moment of tonight that will stay in my memory forever.
He suddenly moved. Violently. He thrashed about and his eyes fluttered. Then he let
out the most heart-breaking, mind-echoing moan. Worse than the one Alfalfa let out to let
us know he was home. I swear I heard it creep into the corners of the house and slink
upstairs. Every limb and muscle twitched of their own volition, and suddenly his left foot
raised in the air like he wanted to scratch the back of his ear. It thumped like a rabbit
midair five times, onetwothreefoUR-FIVE,
almost yanking it out of its sockets, then the leg fell back down, and his breathing faded
away.
My mum rushed to his side and she
couldn’t believe it. She was with him for a minute and a half before 10:10 pm. She
stroked him and stroked him for 10 minutes after and even as we wrapped his body up in
newspaper, she placed her hand over where his belly should be, saying that maybe we might
have wrapped him alive.
I stroked her hair and gave her a hug. “No Mum, we didn’t.”
“Are you sure? Are you really sure? Can we check?”
”No. It’s 10:20 Mum. He’s gone already.”
She squeezed me and I felt her tears burning my shoulder.
“…But he’s still so warm, Li. Oh God.”
As I picked up Juju in paper and plastic to
place him outside, my fingers trembled. He was warm. Completely rigid now but still warm.
And I remembered, as we wrapped him, he was so beautiful, so young, pure snowy white. At
one point, he even felt as soft as his old self. Right before he died I felt like a wave
of serenity had washed over him and I swear he glowed with happiness and relief. He and I
cursed the poison, but we were both so happy it couldn’t hurt him anymore. Maybe this
was what ‘okay’ meant.
That it was finally over.
That night Azza and Mum cried for him for hours. I didn't. I know this might sound weird, but as I lay there watching them watching him I knew that it was enough, to have two people crying for him. I just felt like I didn't have to. It was like everything I wanted to express was already conveyed by my silence.
(Afternote: Alfalfa took the opportunity to escape again later that night, and we found him dead under a tree the next morning, bathed in foam.)