2.27.02 – midnight

my cat, midnight (the one that lives with my parents) was hit by a car this afternoon. my parents live on a quiet suburban street – the sort with so few cars that people still let their kids play in the street – and someone hit the cat in broad daylight and left him there. the neighbor’s little girl found him in the gutter. the neighbors took him to the vet, but his pelvis had been shattered and his back broken. the vet doped him up on pain killers until my mother could arrive; she kissed him goodbye and they had to put him down.

we got midnight when i was seven. when he was a kitten, he was so small that i could put him in my dollhouse, close up the walls and roof, and then peek in the windows and watch him run up and down the stairs and through the doorways, swatting furniture out of his way with a oversized paw: a furry black monster come to torment the dollhouse family’s peaceful lives. he grew up to be a huge black cat with long silky fur that smelled like woodsmoke when he’d come in from the cold. this afternoon he lay in the gutter in front of our house with a broken back for who knows how many hours because some asshole was in such a hurry to get where he was going that he couldn’t even stop to see what he’d hit. losing the cat isn’t as hard for me as thinking about how helpless he must have been, laying in the cold with his back legs paralyzed, waiting for my parents to come home from work.