We kept on digging that night, pushed through soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we used our hands, took off our gloves and did the dirty work directly.

Nobody had told the little one about what had really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell him what was happening, what would happen. He hadn't known loss and I swore he wouldn't, not until I was old and sinewy, not until Joe's alcohol-pickled mind had gone south and his hands were blurry with the shakes. I had seen enough of loss myself by age eight, learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other people. My boy, he could remain untouched.

There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so Joe lifted up Tristan's lank body, bony at the spine but swollen around the belly, carried him off into the back yard. I tossed him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish rack. The boy, always his father's shadow, made for the door, but I knelt down and blocked him with a hug. "Tris needs a little privacy, that's all. It's like at the doctor's office. Daddy's giving him medical attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got through two stories when Joe finally came back in, eyes red, the towel clinging to his fingers. "Tristan's ready to see you, kid," Joe told him. I sent the two of them out there alone.

Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a fuss. He and the kitty had sat together by the corner of bamboo that Tris loved to hide in, where all you could see in the thick stalks was a pair of shimmering green eyes, maybe the hint of white whiskers. Joe had professed his love while the cat panted, glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on Joe's trembling hand. It was true mercy, over in a few heart-breaking minutes. Before he came back into the house, Joe had shaped him into a comfortable round, pressed his thumb gently against each eye to close it.

He told the boy that it looked like Tristan was taking a little rest now, sleeping off his fit. “Give him a quick pat like a good boy.”

That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy touch him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy quality of dead flesh? Once the heart stops, it's like petting wax. But the boy didn't seem to notice, came in dancing and told me Tris was better, was sleeping.

That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek Park, looking like grave robbers, sifting through the dirt in the dark, Tristan in a Teva shoebox tied with butcher’s twine. Fog had blotted out the moon and the damp had sunk into my bones, made me drop the flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama raccoon and her kits peered at us out from the bushes, rustled the leaves with interest. Joe tossed a trowelful of dirt at them. "Git! Git! This isn't a midnight snack." They shambled off in the direction of the creek, looking like hunchbacked cats themselves, all the fur with none of the grace.

A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet deep and just wide enough to jam the Teva box into. Tristan's stiffened body shifted as we pushed him into the hole, hit the sides of the box. I hadn't looked at him since the collapse, but suddenly I had the urge. I made Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in the flashlight and take a final look, could stroke the tips of his fine orange fur.

The next morning we told the boy that Tristan must have taken off, shimmied through a hole in the fence, or through some miracle of will had scaled the nine-foot planks and taken off for a better place. He put his little hand in mine and asked, "Is he OK, mama?" There was only one way to answer it: Tristan was fine, perfect, whole.

Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now, eyeing the ground squirrels, dipping a paw into the cold water as he searches for fish. Or he’s stalking a bird in a field of waving grass, tail quietly twitching before the final pounce. Tristan is somewhere out there, away from here.

This was from a writing prompt last summer: write about something you don't want to write about. I didn't want to write about our cat's death, at least not directly, so I wrote this instead. It seems to fit the theme around here these days. It was originally three paragraphs with very little spelled out, but as I expanded it the details it became more gruesome. Not sure what I think of it, but here it is.

Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down. This one's slower than usual at least!

Image: Strawberry Creek, by Edwin Deakin, from Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, cats, Death