What Should We Do If the Cat Dies in the Middle of the Night?
Keith Dunlap
What should we do if the cat dies in the middle of the night? Should we take him outside, with our barely functioning flashlights, and try to bury him in the hard-pack January ground, heft some larger than average stone, and place it over his shallow grave to memorialize him and keep the scavengers away? What should we do? Put his already stiffening form in a paper grocery bag? Or leave him sideways, as if he were standing, on the floor, as a kind of reproach to our breakfast, to our sleeping through the night, waiting until the veterinarian opens its doors to accept this solid lifeless fact, the corpse of our sickly, incontinent, somnambulant cat? 20
