Dead cat

Last week in our front yard there appeared a dead cat. Since the object in question exhibited no signs of cathood other than its form, perhaps what I found was the corpse of a former cat, an ex-cat.

The first thing I thought of was whether, now that I had one, I had enough room to swing a dead cat, that being a unit of measurement that I’d heard of but hadn’t experienced. As it turns out, my front yard would be big enough to swing a dead cat except for the porch.

I just stood there in the front door looking carefully at the body to see if it was merely resting. No rest there but eternal, though, so now I had a corpse to dispose of. We’d had a complete absence of dead cats until then, and still I felt sure that nobody else in our house would deal with the late cat but me. As it turns out, I was right.

Not that my wife wouldn’t take care of a dead cat with effectiveness and dispatch, because she would. After making sure that I had no pulse, she would indeed dispose of the dead cat, but as things are, dead cats are mine. My son asked what I was going to do with it, and I said I’d dispose of the body respectfully and appropriately in our household’s large black receptacle in the driveway.

My wife suggested that it might be one of our neighbor’s cats, and I should check before I moved the body. I hadn’t noticed a long-haired gray cat next door, but I hadn’t been looking for one either. I have vowed not to let my neighbor become a certified cat lady, and I take a cat census now and then to ensure that she hasn’t slipped over the edge. I texted her, “Do you have a gray cat?” That was her notice.

The matting gray hulk by the east cypress in the rain was probably somebody’s pet not long ago, so maybe I should advertise its fate and ease its family’s anxiety, although from the looks of its fur maybe not so much anxiety at that. Some cat owners would want to retrieve the corpse and maybe cremate it and save the ashes in an urn on the mantle. There are such people.

I didn’t do a flyer, and my neighbor wasn’t missing a cat, so a couple of days later I took great joy in allowing Waste Management to take a remarkably heavy, wet lump to the Neal Road landfill for me, along with some other stuff I wanted to get rid of. What a great place. A person can pay for anything.