The
Torturers
Through the small square cat door, they carry them delicately,
those hapless mice from the compost heap, moles rising
from their tunnels and worms, even the lone wren who
sang
just this morning. They bring them in, chins high, the
thing
not dead, never the quick death that would have made this easy,
but stunned and wounded, though not so much that they cannot move.
The cats have learned how to keep them alive for a long time,
how to let them rest, gain some naïve strength, all that,
for the pleasure of their play. They drop them into our too-deep
bathtub, turning our one luxury to chamber of horrors.
They leap in, bat, toss, step close and curve the paw, nestling,
almost gentling the striped ground squirrel, urging it to try
again
to learn the secret of escape until it stills itself and waits,
too hurt to care. The cats watch from the rim, patient, attentive,
delighted when, after long moments, the thing shivers to awareness
and moves toward the shining walls of the curved enamel well,
knowing this is no longer their world, this is nothing they can
know.
And when at last the thing has stopped moving for certain,
they pick it up and shake it, hold it in their front paws, roll
on
their backs, and rake it with their back paws, hoping some remnant
of sensation will make it move yet again. Once I saw her, my long-haired
beauty, place her paw on the creature, press and press, as though
she were a furry paramedic playing Jesus to a too-far-gone Lazarus.
When all this fails to work, and even the cats know the thing
is dead,
they abandon it on blood-spattered tile, where, turning from the
sink
just before bed, I find the small mole, starred nose still clotted
with dirt,
open-eyed but still in the bottom of the tub. My husband says
they do not kill cleanly because they are not hungry, that it
gives
them pleasure of some sort. He says it is what they do,
who they are. Like us, he pauses, like some of us,
and rises
from the table to chop wood while I cut chicken for supper.
I wake, kicking, at night, cats tangled in the fleece at my feet.
No and no, filled with panic, but softly in the voice
that sounds
as though I were saying here, here I am. My husband's
hands reach for me. He rocks me in the curve of his arms,
as he would a child, Shush, shush, he says, only a dream,
It was not real. I pull away, look into his face, searching
what I have never known, what I have always known.
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