The Cat
exerpt
This was the first piece that I ever wrote, and it remains as one of my favourites.
The events are all fictional, but the setting for the story is in Barbados, where I was born, and still live.
It’s hard to know when I first started to understand that there was something in my mind that perhaps is not present in everyone’s. I’ve tried to pin it down to a particular time but haven’t been that successful. I think it goes back as far as the morning when I watched our neighbour’s cat choke to death on something she swallowed, while I sat there on the step, barely hidden by the Hibiscus bush that seemingly grew at random out of the cracks on the back steps of the old plantation house where I grew up, but I’m not sure.
I guess I must have been 11 or 12, maybe 13. I just returned home from wandering around the 150 or so acres that made up the plantation. I would have been out, perhaps shooting monkeys with an old .22 rifle — unlicensed as it was — or even just rambling the cane-tracks, living out some fantasy or the other in one of the several gullies on the plantation.
We lived in St. Peter. Not quite, but almost the most northerly parish of the island, where hardly anyone else lived. Or so it seemed. For me back then, life was really simple; there was no-one of my age for at least a mile in any direction — my brothers were 5 and 7 years older, my sisters 8 and 9 years younger than me — I could as well have grown up as an only child. At the time, it seemed like I had been sentenced to live my life alone. Looking back on my childhood, I have come to realize that, for me anyway, it was only a fraction short of perfect; I could be — and usually was — whatever and whoever I could dream up in my agile, imagination-flooded brain. I didn’t realize this until several years later.
These years, the constraints placed upon me and, yes, the opportunities offered by my environment, played such a significant part in my development and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was a situation for which I was envied by many of my schoolmates, who lived lives much more restricted and ‘managed’ than mine.
My typical weekend or holiday day would go something like this: I was an early mover, so I’d usually be up by 5 AM, before most of the household. I would grab a half-gallon jug from the kitchen, wander outside while the grass was still wet with dew. I would walk around the croquet lawn and through the plantation ‘yard’ where the trucks and other equipment would spend their life; finally winding up in a large cowshed, the home where the few cows that lived on the plantation spend their nights. There I would meet our groom, who would fill my jug with warm, fresh cow’s milk, and send me back to the house.
One morning, after I finished, I was sitting on the step when I heard an animal coughing out in the gravel. Curious, I stood quietly and walked softly around the hibiscus bush. There, just in the gravel yard, sat a rather large, black and ginger cat which I recognized as being a resident of one of the houses which lined our half-mile driveway.
The animal was clearly in some distress and was trying to remove some object stuck in its throat. Windpipe, as I later discovered. I must admit that I was at a loss for what action to take. I suppose I could have run upstairs and got my parents to handle the matter. As it was, I sat there, morbidly fascinated by the drama unfolding in front of me, and watched the cat slowly choke to death. As it happened, I moved ever closer until, when the choking animal was about to expire, I was close enough for it to fix me with a soulful, baleful stare, as if asking me if I would just remain there and watch it die. Which I did.
This available on Amazon Kindle as a standalone story. Click the link below for more info.
