Baby Kitten McBride (?-July 24, 2021

Vinn McBride, First Place

A kitten died on my sidewalk today. She (i don’t know, for sure, but i want i want her to be a she) She was small, and clean, flame pointed and little, with her legs stretched out like she was mid run and she was well fed. Somebody loved her– mama cat, or adoptive humans, someone wanted her, and she was a baby still– so small. She was so small.

My mother came to bury her behind the log house i sleep in with its yard full of weeds and a landlord who has mostly forgotten it– i carried her little body so gentle, on a white paper plate and ignored the ants and the soft smell of decay setting in from the hot sun– my mother took up my shovel and we cleared a hole in the earth and i put her small, nameless body inside and covered her quietly. She was so small, and clean and just for a few minutes, loved as my own.

Baby McBride, like so many before her

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gone quiet to the earth loved, clean, quietly dead with no clear signs of what took her. My parents have three spaces purchased in the cemetery they plan to be buried in just in case– just in case there is a child, gone quiet or loud that needs to be covered with soft earth in the summertime heat. So small, even grown. And this too is love, to bury the small and precious things the children of your heart and your hope. This too is love, a shovel biting dirt, a white shroud, a quiet burial on a late afternoon with only one mourner, to love fierce and hot and forever over a small body that may yet be forgotten. -- Baby Kitten McBride (?- July 24, 2021)