KITTY
Mike Ramon
© 2013 M. Ramon
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Bernie scooped the food into the blue bowl. It was Tammy’s favorite, yellowfin tuna and shrimp with wild rice in gravy. Bernie didn’t like to spoil the girl, and usually only gave her her favorite once a week, but this would be the third day in a row he served it for her. It was a special occasion of sorts, a get-well-soon treat for Tammy. A couple days before she had come in from playing outside, and she was limping quite severely. Upon inspection Bernie had found a small wound on her right front leg--it looked like it might be a small bite, but he wasn’t sure.
His first thought was to take her to the vet, but one look in the money envelope he kept hidden behind the dresser beside his bed had put that idea out of his head. He was broke, even broker than usual, and there was no money for a vet visit. Instead he rubbed some of the blue salve that Gertie Crabb had given him long ago, swearing that it could cure just about any type of ailment. He had never gotten around to using it, and Gertie Crabb had passed some time ago, gone to that great bingo hall in the sky. He spread the thick ointment on the wound (which didn’t look that bad he decided, no real need for a vet), and wrapped a strip of cloth around Tammy’s leg. The next day, when he took off the cloth, the wound was almost completely healed, and Bernie gave silent thanks to Gertie for her mystery miracle salve.
Although the wound had healed remarkably fast, leaving only a small bald patch roughly the size of a dime on Tammy’s leg as the only sign of the original injury, the whole episode seemed to have upset the girl deeply, and for the past couple days she had been lethargic and moody.
Bernie finished scooping out the food and stood up, his arthritic legs giving protest. He tossed the can in the trash and used his foot to nudge the bowl closer to the little bed he had made for Tammy near the wall. He made little kissing sounds through pursed lips.
“Come on, old girl, eat you scrumshums.”
Tammy made a deep purring noise, but didn’t move. Bernie tapped the side of the bowl with the corner of his shoe.
“Come on, eat up. It’s your favorite.”
Tammy raised herself out of her little bed and walked to the bowl. She sniffed at the food, looked up at Bernie, and then back down at the food. Finally she leaned her head down and started eating.
“Good kitty,” Bernie said as he bent down to stroke Tammy. “You sure are getting big. Maybe we have to think about putting you on a diet, girl. You eat while Daddy takes a little nap.”
He left her to her meal, and went back to his bedroom. He kicked off his shoes, climbed into bed and pulled the covers up.
When he woke, it was dark out. Bernie checked the bedside clock, and then cursed at himself; his “little nap” had ended up being three hours long. He knew he would be up until two in the morning now, unable to fall asleep at a proper time. He slipped out of bed and shuffled out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, where he relieved his bladder with a sigh of satisfaction. He flushed, washed his hands, and went out, taking a seat on the couch in the living room. He picked up the remote and clicked on the TV. He channel surfed (as much as one can channel surf when one only gets network TV) and settled on the evening news. He left the volume turned down, not much interested in the day’s happenings.
In the dim blue light of the television a shape appeared, sauntering over to Bernie. Tammy settled down near his feet. He reached down without looking and stroked her fur. Something didn’t feel quite right, so he looked down at her.
“My God. You really are getting big, aren’t you girl? I could swear you’ve gotten bigger since just this morning.”
Tammy gave a soft purr in agreement. The rest of the night was uneventful, and to his own surprise Bernie was able to get to sleep at a reasonable time despite his long nap earlier in the day.
In the morning Bernie made himself a cup of instant coffee while squinting at the harsh light of day streaming in through the small kitchen window. As he drank off the cup of terrible-tasting coffee he searched around for Tammy, who he usually found still in her kitty bed early in the morning, but who was conspicuously absent on this particular day. He strolled through the house--the living room, the dining room, and then back to the kitchen; she was nowhere to be found.
“Where in the hell did that girl get off to?” he asked the empty room.
It was then that he noticed the screen door. There was a hole in the bottom left-hand corner; it was ragged, as if something had chewed right through it. Considering the size of the hole, Bernie’s first thought was that a coyote had chewed its way in sometime during the night. He rushed out the door, the screen slapping shit behind him, looking every which way.
“Tammy, where are you?” he called out. “For chrissakes, don’t hide from me now.”
He caught movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to find a strange sight. At first he was certain that it couldn’t be Tammy, that the animal he saw was much too large to be his girl. But the coat was that same familiar charcoal gray, shot through with darker patches, including the one patch that Bernie always told people looked just like the state of Florida. She was facing away from him, with her head bent down to the ground; it looked like she was working at something, perhaps a mouse or an unlucky bird. For a moment Bernie just stood there, looking at her, wondering at the size of her; she looked about as big as Max, Ralph Thompson’s Border collie. Then he saw blood. He broke into a sprint, but when he got near her Tammy whirled around and bared her teeth at him with a sharp hiss. The fur around her muzzle was stained red, with little chunks of something (Bernie tried not to think of the word “flesh”) stuck in her whiskers.
“What’s wrong?” Bernie said. “It’s just me, girl. Let me take a look at you. Are you hurt?”
He took another step closer, and then he saw what it was that Tammy had been busy with, the source of the blood. It was a dead animal, all right, but it wasn’t any mouse or bird. He wasn’t completely sure (the thing was a ruined mess), but he though it looked like another cat. There was no collar, so if it was a cat it was a stray.
“Goddamn, Tammy, what a mess. Come on, inside now. Go.”
She stood her ground, staring him in the eye, unmoving, her breathing short and quick. Then she started toward the house, and Bernie nearly breathed a sigh of relief; with the shock of both her newfound size and the mangled thing that might be a stray cat fresh in his mind, he wasn’t exactly in a hurry to try and pick her up.
Back in the house Bernie closed the screen door, and after once again taking a look at the hole that had been chewed through it (by a coyote, he had thought at first, but now he knew better), he closed the door as well. Tammy was lying in her bed in the kitchen, although the bed now looked comically small for her frame. Bernie walked past her and into the living room, where he sat down on the couch; the living room seemed dim in spite of the early-morning light coming in through the window.
Something had happened to Tammy. Something was still happening, perhaps. He tried to think what it could have been, what could have caused the sudden change in size. All he could think of was the wound she had acquired a few days before, the thing he thought looked like a small bite, but it had healed up nicely with Gertie’s blue salve.
He thought again about taking Tammy to the vet, but he didn’t have the money, and without a car it would be a forty minute walk into town just to be turned away by the prick animal doctor who had t
aken over when Simpkins died. He thought about calling someone, but there was no one to call. And what would he tell someone if he did call them? Help, my cat is getting huge!?
That evening, after putting it off for as long as possible, he emptied a can of chicken and gravy into Tammy’s bowl, and set it near her. She watched him as he worked, and sat unmoving, following him with her gaze, until he left the kitchen; only then did she eat. That night, when Bernie went to bed, he did the strangest thing: he locked his bedroom door. He wasn’t sure why he did it (cats can’t open doors, you shithead, he thought to himself), but he did it anyway. It took him a while to get to sleep, and when he did sleep he had terrible dreams of being chased, but in the dreams he wasn’t quite sure who or what was chasing him, only that if he was caught he was done for.
In the morning he sat on his bed awhile, not wanting to go out there, not wanting to see Tammy. Then he was struck by a wonderful thought: what if the whole thing had been a dream? What if everything, the hole in the screen door, the Border collie-sized Tammy, the dead stray cat (if it had indeed been a cat), what if all of it had been a part of the long series of nightmares? What if the whole previous day had been one long bad dream?
The idea so excited him that