The Saddest Little Boy In The World, Reprise: and Some Animal Tales

It was because I wouldn't let him bring this cat home, which was because I'm the meanest mommy in the world.

So I let him take this picture of the cat. It's a nice cat, and has saved me the trouble of explaining where I think Gray Kitty might be. Gray Kitty (a gray cat other than this one), called Duman by the neighbors, is the nicest little gray cat. I once rescued her from a tree (she was within arm's reach up, stuck to the trunk, but just a kitten who found it all rather terrifying), and she followed us home and forever after was always whoring for a scratch and purring like it was the best day of her life.

Until she got knocked up, I'd thought she was a boy, which is rather stupid but I just never looked. She was lolling around the street most days right up until she popped, with a belly so big we could rest our hands on her sides and feel the babies squirming around in there. Cats in later stages of pregnancy are funny because they still think they can do things like leap gracefully up onto the top edge of the fence, but they totally can't.

Then she disappeared for about a week, and I checked up on her one weekend afternoon when a bunch of neighbor women were hanging out of their windows shouting up and down at each other and whoever was on the street. It was really funny because they were shouting stuff like, "How's it going, beautiful? Why don't you get yourself inside and dust already?"

One of the women had taken in Duman's babies as a sort of nanny, charged with caring for them while Duman went off and did her thing. She was mostly a grown-up cat, but still a little young for babies. If she were a person, she'd have been like 16. She'd had four, all of them living.

But last Monday on the way to work (LE was at his Babaanne's because he had a fever), a car screeched on its brakes, and there was a little crackling sound like someone thumping old sticks together. Duman bolted in front of me from the street, all puffed up, and I watched her disappear into a garden and I haven't seen her since. I knew it was her, because her bottom was still all gross from having babies.

I've heard that stick thumpy sound two other times-- once when my dog got hit during one of his many insane excursions across the 4-lane rush-hour street were I caught the school bus every morning. He survived the incident without any terrible injuries. After getting hit he got up and tried to escape back over a fence into someone's yard, as though the hit had triggered his doggy memory of his past abused life of getting hurt for trying to escape and he was trying to get back into the yard before he got in trouble. The other time I heard that sound was driving with my brother and some friends on a dark, deer-ridden road and we cracked over a little deer that really did jump out of nowhere. We were sure the poor deer was broken and murdered so we jumped out of the car to check the road, and all over and under the car, and the deer wasn't there.



After that, the deer always seemed to line the road malevolently, with their flashing rabbit eyes.





 So it's hard to say what happened to Duman. Maybe she was hurt, and maybe she wasn't but she hasn't been out.

My fantasy or LE's?

In any case, LE's been wondering about her lately, so I'm hoping this new cat distracts him for a good long time because, even though I've tried to be honest with him about most things (except Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the thing about how our service bus driver Ali Bey Grouchy Pants is actually a Secret Kung Fu Master at night), I'm really not ready to tell him unfathomably bad shit can happen like nice cats getting run over for no reason.

Yesterday, New Gray Cat grew more insistent in his pleas for love.

Thus, happiness is restored.

It's a good thing New Gray Cat is so distracting because LE needed to be distracted from what was going on half a block up the street. Paşa, a handsome German shepherd whose sick-fuck owners I curse for buying that poor dog, was off the two-foot chain he's always tied up to and locked in a silent, ripping fight with Black Dog (the nicest street dog ever, who practically knocks you over with his big smelly head-cuddles), while a man stood over them beating the shit out of Black Dog with what appeared to be the buckle-end of Paşa's black leather collar. Suddenly, explaining the possible death of Gray Kitty didn't seem so brutal anymore.

There's all this talk of censorship because of the plans our Good Leadership has to Ruin the Internet For Everyone on August 22. And I was thinking about the stuff I protect my kid from because there are just some ways in which his little world just doesn't need to be turned upside down yet. I mean, I can't make myself tell him until he needs to know, that there are people who beat dogs with belts and other people who do way worse things. I just can't believe, with all the large and small brutalities in the world, that there are people who think little boys seeing vaginas on the Internet is the worst thing that can happen to them.