Kitty Kitty

I have a long history of hating cats. It just became my thing. People would say, that Dorge, he sure hates cats. It's not so bad now, I'd much rather have a cat than a dog; I don't have to walk a cat. The problem with hating something is that people ask you why. I never had an answer, no real reason, so I just wouldn't answer the question. I believed this added to my mystique. You don't go around messing with origin stories, and hating cats was apart of my origin story. But, over the weekend, while I was crawling in the dirt within a two-foot crawl space, I think I happened onto a memory that must have been the source of my strong dislike. It didn't help that it was because of cats that I was in that crawl space at all on Saturday morning.

When I was little we had a cat named Kitty. When you live in the country, there's little need to call a cat anything more than Kitty. Kitty was a stray from God Knows that I ended up feeding, and once you feed a cat, you have a cat. At first I called her (not sure about the sex, cats are usually just referred to in the feminine in my stories) Shadow because of her coat, then it just devolved into Kitty.

Kitty had something wrong with her, but I was too little to know what. She was always skinny and I could see her ribs and Mom told me not to touch her. So she was infirm, she was my cat. But everyone could see she wasn't long for this earth, and when she died I probably wouldn't even notice. Probably.

One day in the fall my brother was raking leaves in front of the house, he was even going so far as to get up under the shrubs, probably extending this chore so he wouldn't be set out to do something else. Well, when he was clearing the shrubs, he found Kitty. All stiff, with matted fur, mouth snarled up into some death grimace while a green crust formed up around the eyes.

In some fit of compassion, my brother raked Kitty's body under the pile of leaves he'd began when he saw me running up the driveway, being chased by our oldest brother. I was laughing/screaming so hard I couldn't catch my breath from being chased. When I got to the pile of leaves my brother had been raking, I stopped, trying to get my breath before our older brother caught up to me. The distance I had gained had only been given to prolong the chase and soon he was on top of us. My brother tried to warn him away from the pile, but when our older brother reached us, he scooped me up and plunged me into the pile of leaves. My hands thrashed out, and I felt one of them burst into something cold and wet, I thought it was mud and my brother was screaming for us to stop, to go away. All three of us were then wrestling around in this pile of leaves and I was trying to get away, I didn't think my hand had gone into mud anymore. Something was making my hand tingle as if there were bugs all over me, little crawly bugs. Our oldest brother was oblivious (I like to think he was) of the fact he was mashing me into the corpse of my dead cat, and so was I at the time. I was just trying to keep my face away from whatever it was, I could smell something then, gasping for air as I was, and his weight on top of me wouldn't allow me to free my hands. He was trying to make me get a big mouthful of leaves, but there was the promise of some deathly mire under those and the tears were streaming down my face.

I don't remember much else about that, I don't know when I realized that I had been mauling a dead cat in an effort to keep my face off the ground.

That goes a long way in telling why I don't like cats, call it guilt or what have you.

That also goes a long way in telling why you don't name cats in the country.