Pet Cemetary

Oh, c'mon! It's the Ramones!

We'd only been up here but a few months when my cat, Judas, the niger daemonium feles, had his kidneys finally fail. A six year long battle I fought along side him, which he lost. A devastating defeat because it seemed we had the problem licked. I got good and drunk and buried him out back. Sabina had a stone made to mark the spot. A sweet gesture, but would've known where it was even without a marker. I'd have never admitted it when he was alive, but we had a bond.

A couple years later, Mom Cat Luna French Kitteh gave birth to a litter of four kittens, one of which died the first day. Whether stillborn or accidentally crushed by its mother we never bothered to find out. I put the body in the freezer to be taken out with the trash, what was done with stillborn puppies on the farmsteads of which I grew up. Both my daughter and Sabina wouldn't stand for it, insisting I bury the kitten they'd named Ickle Meeper-something I found only slightly less absurd as human mothers naming their miscarriages things like Nevaeh. With a garden trowel, I put the feline body not far from where I'd buried Judas.

There was the unfortunate events of a couple weeks ago. Something I still catch myself thinking isn't quiet real, despite the very vivid reality of it all. I watch Chevy arthritically trundle about and Milarepa spasmodically frolics. The cats play, hunt, and rest. My eyes drift toward that spot out back, by the square of granite, and I think of the rudimentary necropolis I've assembled of passed on familiars and failed offspring. I used to tell my mother she could bury me out back, should I get bored enough to die.

The swampy conditions of a truly impressive, and, somewhat frightening, runoff continue to advance. The ground in front of the willow that is not underwater makes squishy sounds when a foot falls upon it. Water sneaks up through the grass briefly at those points. I can see standing water in the freshly turned earth by that granite slab.

When I first started dancing with dead for money, way back then, Job remarked that he always saw me as possessed of a curious and questing nature with an underlying sense of morbidity. In his estimation, triaging potential organ and tissue donors was perhaps one of the best ways for me to make money, and I did find the gig savagely interesting for the five years I did it, even if I fought almost daily with the bureaucracy that ran it. As I watch the water rise out back, I morbidly wonder if hundreds of thousands of years from now, when archaeologists are excavating the bones of this little 'berg, if they'll come across the remains of my buried familiars. Preserved, like peat-bog mummies.