The After Life of Kittens

The After Life of Kittens

I drove past a building today. A one story concrete square painted orange. The business inside and the people that go there are as much a mystery to me as the makers of the brittle cement and the workers who paved the walls that now crumble in aggregated handfuls onto the lot below. I wanted to know the architect and I wondered if he wanted to know me and the other tin cans that floated ahead and if he cared that we didn't stop to go inside. The parking lot was made of pavement, but falling tufts of rocks and kicked up road side debris, combined seemingly senseless of their place and gave the peripheral impression of gravel. I drove past a woman who walked slowly inside with a red shawl rapped around her head. She carried a heavy bag on her shoulders that sagged low on her side and bulged out the size of a grown man's chest cavity. I past a kitten asleep on the road flattened and orange, fur matted down along the center yellow line that continued past any place the feline would have gone if it had known the dangers ahead and avoided them. The yellow lines continued for as far as I could see but would disappear as the road winds and no one needed them anymore.

As I pulled into the schools library an urge pricked the outer most curve of my body and spent through quickly and I sat motionless trapped between terror and the dash. I planned to spend the day in an attempt to be productive and use the resources the university is paid to supply to further my vague impression of what it means to be responsible, but instead all I had on my mind was the sleeping kitten against the yellow lines and the orange concrete building. Both surrounded by the chill of March and the retreating winter winds that whip around the Earth leaving them both alone but together.

I sat in silence thinking of a conversation I had a few days ago with a friend from Catholic school. We first met a few years ago but after I got kicked out for smoking grass in the parking lot and was then quickly redistributed to public school a day after my suspension turned into expulsion he was the only one from that place I stayed in contact with. The school was called Father Ryan but everyone in town knew it by another name. Father Rehab. It was called this because most of the students that went there were real fucked up most days in class and had enough of their parents money to stay that way through out the year. The founder's son of Captain D's seafood was even in one of my classes.

We met in the bar. It was smoky and congested with grunters and spitters, the usual clientèle we liked to hang around and make jokes about that no one else could understand. Grunters can be good for conversation sometimes if you get drunk enough and don't mind the smell of sweat crusted work uniforms and partially wiped asses, but spitters are always a pain in the ass and it is usually a good idea to stay away from them. It's something about the way they were raised I assume. After we drank at the bar for an hour or so, in between casual glances at the hockey game on the television to see if any fights had broken out, we started to talk about heaven, God, and the usual. I don't remember the conversation that led to us up that alley but that's not important, we had them all the time and something about that one, sitting alone in the parking lot at the library, seemed like the only cure for transcendental postmortem blues.

Most the younger people I know, including myself, gave up on the idea of heaven and God and religion a few years after we gave up on the ideas of Santa Clause and the Easter Rabbit. But not Matthew. Nothing could falter his faith and believe me I tried. Not because I wanted to hurt him or anything like that. For faith to be true it must be challenged in my opinion That night he spoke quietly, more soft then usual, with a hushed monotone voice that made me really have to lean in to listen “heaven is pure and beautiful and perfect.” In a bar, half way past drunk this idea of perfection seemed ironic and in a memory with a crushed kitten in my mind almost laughable.

“What is perfection,” I asked. “My idea of perfection could be a dog fight and expensive gin.” He knew that wasn't my cup of tea but I wanted to throw a curve ball and see if he would duck or swing.

“You're lying, he said.

“Yea but that doesn't matter. Perfection is subjective and I like gin so why wouldn't there be gin in heaven.”

“Because Jesus drinks whiskey,”he said.

.

After a few drinks and the bar was getting ready to close and after the waitress finally gave me her number, which I wrinkled up in the seat, we left. What good was a number, I was drunk and wanted action. Beside she was old and I was young at least young in spirit. She might be also but her spirit fought to get out already and she had the lines to prove it. I wrinkled up the paper and put it on the seat for someone else to find.

I realized for the cat to be in heaven and not just a scab on the road it would be up to other people to imagine the cat in heaven for him to be there because what is heaven to a cat. A field and endless daisies. I would prescribe that to anyone

Heaven seems to me a scene from the Great Gatsby, where everyone sips fruity cocktails drinks from expensive see-through glasses. Heaven seems to be occupied by draft dodgers and ecclesiastic socialites that were able to bride their bag of bones for a place at the golden banquet table and somehow stay off the menu . Perfection is a carper bagger with one eye closed.  He or she uses the other to look past the dead cat and toward ethereal divinity with a blind eye morality that is always forgiven for the sake of progress and status quos ladders . Who will laugh? Who will jump from heavens gate on a free fall towards hell only to see earth as a ghost for a mere maximum velocities second.

I sat still in the library and called Matt. He said to meet him in the bar.

“I have work to do,” I said.

“Fuck it,”he said. So I did.