I knew a girl in middle school. We
were lab partners in Biology I. She
had two first names and fine
sandy hair that stuck to the crooks and calluses on your
palms like how cobwebs cling to your skin.
Fridays meant free
popcorn in the afternoons,
courtesy of the PTA,
but also that we’d have to hover over freeze dried animals,
dissecting their innards.
Together, we ogled through our lab goggles
the football players in their
war-torn jerseys
that squeezed and accentuated their toned arms.
But that one Friday in May,
the stool next to me remained
empty as I gripped the silver scalpel
and made one long slice through this cat’s
clammy, toad-like flesh on its abdomen.
I cursed her for making me do this alone.
But I tried to navigate around the various organs,
using as a reference point to locate the stomach,
what I presumed was the liver
oozing with yellow tadpole-like orbs.
I wondered aloud to the pair beside me
as I peeled the artichoke-leaf-looking-liver,
Where do you think they get these cats?
Do you think they kill them specifically for us to slice open and turn inside out?
Or are they already dead and then they suck all the juice out, turning them to jerky all for the sake of science?
The next Monday, she was back
in her place on her stool beside me,
albeit unusually glum.
Well, when I jokingly berated her for making me dissect that stupid cat alone,
she winced and quietly revealed that her cat,
the impossibly frail runt she had found underneath her porch,
the one she’d spent hours with for the past two weeks nursing him back to life
and had yet to shut up about, had died.
More specifically, had died at the fault of her hands, no,
her foot actually. She told me what happened was this:
she had woken up late for school,
well early for school
but not enough time to take care of William,
who names a cat William?
and still be on time for school.
So there she was, running around the house,
scrambling for her hair brush and tugging mismatched socks on.
Her oldest brother, one of those football players with ham hock biceps,
was hollering at her to hurry up or she’s not getting a ride to school!
She shouted back over her shoulder
No wait please, I’ve gotta feed William!
who was already mewing as loudly
as his teeny-tiny body would let him.
So she had swung her leg up and over the baby gate
that was propped in the doorway of the kitchen.
Anyways, as soon as she shifted her weight, all 107 pounds of her,
onto her right foot,
she didn’t feel the smooth, cool linoleum.
Rather, downy-soft fuzz.
Her wail permeated through the screen door
but her brothers had already reversed out of her crunchy gravel driveway,
had already cruised past the field and patch of woods
between her yellow house and our rural school,
and were in line on the highway to pull into the parking lot.
They did come back, she told me, but it had felt like forever
as she sat with her back against the over
and dripped so many tears into William’s gray fuzzball corpse.
Her brothers hugged her and wiped her tears.
They even offered a shoe box, a nice name-brand one
with the corners of the lid still sharp and taut,
and they dug the little grace under the pear tree in the backyard.
She never described what it sounded like
when she pretty much hydraulically pressed
her kitten with her own foot.
But now I morbidly wonder about the snapping and crunching of his skeleton.
Surely, the delicate fingers that formed his ribcage would collapse first,
turning him into a poor replication of a deflated lawn decoration.
Would his stomach burst like an overly inflated balloon
and meld into one with the spongy folds of the small intestine?
Would his brain smush like a rotten pumpkin in November?
After she explained this unbearable scene,
I mused to myself how absurd it was
that while I was worried about how dumb
I looked wearing my lab goggles
and whether I’d correctly identified the cat’s entrails,
across the expanse of the cornfield, where the Deere green tractors
were turning the earthworms’ worlds upside down,
she was cradling William’s mangled body in her palms.
Our teacher, after hearing the story,
never made her make up the dissection,
figuring she had enough firsthand,
even traumatic,
experience with the anatomy of a cat.
The Mackadamia Nut 