— After Cat Devouring a Bird, by Pablo Picasso (Musee Picasso, Paris) 1939
The occasion that Spencer came and left, I almost broke my teeth biting down on Jolly Ranchers. It was the time of quarantine: I badly wanted a creature to love again, and assumed it would be enough. But he was a wild thing. He’d been left to his own devices in the concrete jungle I called home, and now he couldn’t comprehend that fish and fuzzy blankets were his for the taking. The stress of his suffering drove me to drink, but midway down a glass of Shiraz I was half soused and nauseous and wanted my own mind. My nerves were frazzled and I was desperate for oxygen. If he could have just taken a sip of water or a morsel of chicken in those tense 24 first hours, I could have turned in with a racy mystery and an Ativan. But my senses were jarred into overdrive, parallel to his terror, and I was choking on the anxiety and racing with adrenaline. The creature was climbing the walls, hair on end, mouth jagged and agape, like something out of Transylvania. I popped a watermelon lozenge first, then a blue raspberry, crushing them between my molars with a vengeance. An old and badly patched cavern cracked a little more. Just a fracture somewhere between gold and bone and sugar. In the night, the ache awakened me and I spat shards of blue jelly and a few enamel tendrils into the sink. There was a hole in the window screen and a handful of black and white fur stuck to the gash in the wires. Spencer was gone as quickly as he came, as if he’d never had a chance. I questioned everything in that moment, if love could cure anything, if safety was always a mirage, if grief over nature’s brutality was really empathy or just a mass delusion. I wanted to be as tough as my mother, who once conquered the vicious snapping turtle attacking her geese. She wrung his neck with her bare hands and made him into soup without flinching. I wanted to be tough like my father, whose reasoned softness was just the frosting on steely resoluteness. I wanted to look at life and death with the same sturdy peasant blood as they did, but all I had was anguish and poetry. I was all hope and impulse and wound. The ragged tear in my mouth started throbbing and I fumbled for Aspirin, for anything harder. But the kibble and the tuna were still untouched; and the kennel carrier was empty. Spencer was gone, and now in more danger, like everything else I’d ever tried to save.
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