A Dead Cat in the Woods

[Eh, had to redo it.  Will get around to noting the next couple days; had been gone, awhile, and interested to see what you’ve all been up to!]

I remember the world ending.

It wasn’t so bad.  Really, it wasn’t.  For years I’d sat in the greenhouse, reading grey clouds like skimming the obituaries.  I’d always figured it was Münchausen syndrome or a terminal illness.  I asked my friend her opinion, unsurprised when she caustically reminded me that existence itself is a terminal illness.

They say that the universe will end in fire or ice; exponential expansion until stellar extinction and incomprehensible nothingness, or a growth function shrinkage, a metric expansion of space reversed, and a crunch so big it can only be called the Big Crunch.  But that’s the universe, whose lifespan dwarfs our world’s by billions of years.

So I can’t say that I was surprised when the universe did nothing to stop it.  Consider a farmer shrugging off the death of a barn cat; their lives are short, and a farmer will see a multitude of them die before he himself does.  So too the universe with earth;  it had always figured it would live longer than a blue-green speck well outside its attention’s periphery.  A farmer grabbing a half-decayed corpse, partly eaten with blood-matted fur, tossing it into the untrodden woods of existence’s posterity.

As we know it, at least. 

I fled the glaciers creeping southwards, the meteors plummeting, earthbound, the volcanoes belching smoke skywards, beat up hatchback packed to the brim.  My friend came with me.  When she broke the installed stereo, she joked, "I think I just totaled your car."  When she drove, I read her the final lines of The Great Gatsby incessantly, until she began muttering them helplessly.  "Borne back ceaselessly into the past."  But this was new, bright like a box of shotgun shells.

She confessed that she cried at night, digging her fingernails into her wrists until the veins collapsed and the feeling was enough.  Enough for what, I’d wonder, and she’d tell me, enough to be enough.  I claimed that I hadn’t cried since Mufasa died in The Lion King, hiding my face behind my hands from my parents because I was a man.  I was a man, I was so sure at nine, and right then in the car, at twenty, I just didn’t believe it anymore.

We drove all day, stealing gas when needed.  We slept beneath a copse of tupelo trees the first night, and the sky broke open.  We had sex without sexual attraction, the rivulets of rain dripping down, covering our faces, and I couldn’t tell if she was crying and she couldn’t tell if I was crying.  When the lightning crashed through the canopy, I could see.  The red of her nipples, her soaked hair, the mud on her arms, the expanse of her shut eyelids, picturing something else, somewhere else, someone else.  I was someone, a stock character, an anatomically correct automaton to be painted over by her imagination.  I looked away, and beneath another tree a dead cat, half-decayed, fur matted with blood, stared through me with empty eye sockets.   It was too human, way too understandable, and my stomach churned and my eyes watered and her legs and arms went numb and…

But that was years ago.  Ages ago, hidden in places we dare not go.  Old now, she stares out through the glass ceiling of the greenhouse, reading grey clouds like skimming the obituaries.  Oh, this is quite enough, she says.  I forgive you.  Do you forgive me? she asks.

I do, I said.  We were not precisely new, then, but younger and cleaner and comfortable again.

And now–well, now the cat is reanimated, and one of many worlds lives again.