⚠️ CW: animal death ⚠️
It’s my last full day here. I’m supposed to be packing the last of my things. Today is overcast. I feel a bit “scooped out” inside, like my feelings are happening outside of me.
Anise and Poppy were killed today. Our neighbors–I’ll call them D and A–left their gate open for a few hours. The kittens’ “home base” was there, which I suppose a few of the street dogs noticed. They came in and chased them around. Mauled them to death. D was crying when I spoke to her. The state she found them in was so gruesome that I can’t repeat it or imagine what it must have been like. The timing is terrible; D and A had just decided they were going to adopt Anise and Poppy. We even set aside Gaia’s old cat carrier so they could take them to the vet. There was talk of pitching in on funds to get Caramel and Nutmeg spayed as well. D and A were delighted to make things official with the kittens.
A is apparently so furious that he intends to shoot the dogs. He says he doesn’t want to see them ever again. D is trying to talk him down, telling him that’s just how dogs are, but I don’t know what will happen. I mentioned animal control, but A said they’ll kill them anyways, and I know he’s right (in fact, there was already a scandal about this). D is so devastated that she says she doesn’t want any more cats. Doesn’t want to deal with any more heartbreak. It isn’t hard to understand why. She told us that Caramel’s first litter was four kittens, but they all died. Her second litter yielded two survivors out of four: Nutmeg and Licorice. The other two died. Her third litter, the one that included Anise and Poppy, was also originally four. Two of them died, but we thought Anise and Poppy were out of the woods. Apparently not.
Caramel is pregnant again. In a few months, there will be more kittens. I truly don’t believe D could turn her back on Caramel and the new litter, so I hope that by the time the new kittens are born, D’s heart is mended just a bit, and she is willing to take them in or help them get adopted out. I think it has at least helped make the decision to have Caramel spayed more straightforward. I think when no one “owns” the cat, it’s easy to see it as not your problem, but I think we’ve all grown too weary of this to let it continue. All the neighbors around us had this look of anticipatory grief as soon as we started to speak. “Bendito,” they all said.
The “full story” is so pointlessly tragic in retrospect that I almost didn’t feel like it’s worth telling, but I don’t know. I guess I will anyways.
One day, Caramel was suddenly, clearly, very freshly not pregnant. My brother and I couldn’t find where she’d stashed her babies, but we could hear them. We walked around aimlessly outside, trying to follow their tiny meows, but we still couldn’t find them.
The next day, we were supposed to go to a birthday party. My brother was wandering outside, then came running in to tell me he’d seen a kitten’s leg. “They’re inside the car!” he said. I had no clue what he was talking about, but I followed him. At first, as I was crouched down and staring at the underbelly of the car, I wondered if he was seeing things. But sure enough, a tiny leg shot out.
D and A, along with a few other neighbors, came over to help us remove the kittens from the engine. We had to pop the hood open and carefully maneuver each one out. A gave us an empty half box for carrying beer and we lined it with a towel to plop them into. Caramel was very disturbed by this and tried to pick them up and carry them away, and D and A decided they would take the kittens and keep them in their shed. Needless to say, we were quite late to that party. My mother kept telling my brother he had saved the kittens’ lives–after all, had he not noticed them, we could have easily just driven off with them in there, and they surely would have all died then and there. This litter took on a special meaning for us.
A few weeks later, D and A invited us over to meet with the kittens. They’d finally started opening their eyes and running around. A said he was very fond of the gray one (Anise), and I found it difficult to disagree. They were all charming, although Nutmeg didn’t like any of them much. She hovered around to hiss at the little ones, but all was well. I thought they were all charming in their own ways.
Over time, they started to venture out. There were two boys and two girls. They liked to come over and wrestle. After about a month, we found one of the boys by our gate, dead. There was trauma to his head, and I speculated that perhaps dogs had gotten to him. Still, the scene wasn’t all that grisly, nothing like what D described, so it’s hard to say. We debated on what to do with him, and my father ultimately opted to put him in the trash. I disliked it for many reasons–symbolic ones aside, it happened on trash day, so it’d be a week before they’d take the kitten away. Think of the smell, I told him. This is a tropical island. And sure enough, after four days, the stench was overpowering. Every time I smelled it, all I could think about was his little glassy-eyed face, and my father finally caved and put his body in the backyard for buzzards to collect.
D told us the other boy was killed by a dog, and she disposed of his body independently, as I suppose she is accustomed to doing. Initially, she thought perhaps the tomcats had something to do with it, but our tomcats have always been very fond of new kittens. Butterscotch raised Nutmeg and Licorice like his own, and Sesame certainly never had a bone to pick with them, so I thought it was far more likely the dogs had gotten frisky and just so happened to find the boys.
I never named the boys. I wanted to wait until I was more certain of their survival before getting attached and giving them names. Now, I feel like an idiot for being so hopeful, but I guess another way to look at it is that I’m glad I was able to spend time with them all while I could. Maybe I should have named the boys, too. I don’t know.
Here are some of the pictures I took of Poppy and Anise over the last few months. We kept remarking on how big Anise had gotten…Caramel was starting to wean them off her milk. Poppy was very spirited, like Nutmeg. She broke one of Gaia’s toys, and she liked to use my leg as a scratching post. Anise was mellower, but she really liked to bite me, and she also taught Poppy how to poop in our gardening pot. My mother complained endlessly about this, but I told her it bode well for their litter training. I really liked these girls. They were sweet and silly. I will miss them a lot.
The reality still hasn’t hit me. I just can’t believe it. I was with them just last night. I still have Poppy’s scratches on my knee…how can she be gone? But I hear Caramel meowing, looking for her two daughters, right as I type this. I wish I could tell her they won’t come back. Typically, they come running to reassure her, no matter where they are, but it’s been hours of her wandering and howling. I’m tired of seeing this happen to her. She looks for a few days, and then she gives up. I really hate all of this. I don’t know how anyone can tolerate this status quo. There are so many stray cats here, so many…I have never seen a place that needed TNR as badly as here. I don’t even know what to think, or how to conclude this post. I just feel so empty. I don’t even know why I want to write all this, because I feel so…hollow about it. It’s like there is a sadness, but it’s so enormous that I can’t feel it all at once or it will crush me.
I guess I should get to packing. My plan is still to take Nutmeg and Licorice with me before all is said and done. Even though I leave tomorrow, I still want them to come with me in the end. I will think of a way to make it happen. I do hope they survive long enough for me to make that a reality. I think I can make it happen.
There was so much I wanted to post about today. The landslide (I have pictures now), my final trip to the beach, the verdict of my grandmother’s Victorian furniture hand-me-downs, my feelings about leaving…but I just feel so consumed by this. I feel sad. What a terrible note to leave on. It’s making me miss Gaia, too. Attachment is such agony, sometimes. But…how do I put this? I’d do it all again, even knowing what I know.