Feeling Blue

Tuesday To have a cat dying in the basement, perched on the green towel we cover the treadmill with because she has a habit of throwing up on the black track preferring as we do not to run on it, while I am am up here in the clouds my head, that is, up in the clouds like a four-year-old, daydreaming whatever unpredictable plans the future has in store. No, not like a four-year-old rather, a writer I am a writer whose head is up in the clouds, thinking of— trying to reflect, reject the death happening beneath her. Conceiving ways for my character to kill another human without getting caught. A writer, who imagines she can hear her cat jogging. Wednesday She is no longer eating so I buy Beechnut baby food—beef with broth Chicken. I boil a bony thigh. I tell the man at the seafood counter that I am trying to keep my cat alive "Even the farm-raised salmon is $16.99 a pound? Wow, that’s expensive.”“It is,” he admits with the surety of a man who knows what things should cost. but then He slides a hefty fillet off the ice as if rescuing it from dangerAnd severs a fractional slice of pink fleshswirls of fat and bone, and places it atop a piece of butcher paper, white—is it still called butcher paper, I wonder, if one is weighing cold-blooded muscle? Yes, I really do wonder about this for less time than it takes me to breathe in one breath, —air, not water before he hands me the package, wrapped, and light, and now magically costing $12.99 a pound. A deal for a dying cat. Wednesday Night I eat the chicken on top of a salad. The dear salmon is, regrettably, forsaken. A few licks of Beechnut calms my worry, but only for so long. I am beside her, reminiscing. She is struggling to listen, to stay present, I can tell, but still I talk. “Bluestar,” I say, “you have had a great life. The animal rescue

found you strutting down Amsterdam Avenue in a snowstorm. All your whiskers had been cut and you were pregnant! They called you Sophie. As if you, Warrior leader of the ThunderClan, could have ever been a Sophie.” She nods, as if remembering that hard time in the city twelve years gone. Not really, but I continue on as if we are two old friends One of us in a hospital bed, connected to machinery, but knowing time is short. The other, in a chair, worrying hands wanting to remake the bed because the sheets are tangled and no one should die without smooth sheets.

Or a life that did not include:

-tuna water -the white fluffy ball (when you lost it we all mourned) -sunshine on your belly -Loy -licking sour cream from a fingertip -boxes, no matter the size

Thursday

I lay her atop a blue rug atop a metal table Like a piece of salmon She purrs as the doctor—she’s pregnant and for this I am gladdened—pushes A needle into her fur while, inches away, the faces on the phone My family, her family, the child and the man Who happen to be in the city Her birth city Watch and cry and we three cry together Me here They there Bluestar beneath my hand, her chest rising slowly slowly Falling slowly slowly The purrs diminish And then I remove my hand, still warm and open the door.