The kittens are stillborn, a breathless mess of placenta and fur. Daryl is at his bowling league, so I’m left to clean them up alone.
The little bodies are tangled together, and I wonder if the babies were alive before I noticed them here in the garage. Did they emerge from the pain and push of birth to take a first breath? I imagine them writhing in their tight, wet pile, searching for warmth but finding only this old flannel shirt on the cold concrete floor of the garage.
Mama cat was a stray. Daryl is allergic, but when the little tabby came to our doorstep with a bulging belly and tired eyes, I begged him to let her stay. His lips had pursed into that tight line that usually means no, but he softened when he saw the way I held her in my arms. Or at least that’s what I like to think. Maybe he was just tired of arguing with me.
Mama cat sits in the corner of the garage, watching me with careful eyes. She licks her paw. Does she realize what’s happened? Can she understand the ache of growing these bodies that would never have life?
Daryl told me not to get attached by naming the mama. A name makes things personal; it’s an invitation to knowing—to be known. To say someone’s name is to recognize they have so much worth that a handful of letters are dedicated solely to describing their existence.
But in my mind, I had started to name the kittens: Dakota, Sunset, Grasshopper—words that serve as placeholders for my favorite memories with Daryl. Words that I hoped might rekindle something between us.
I scoop the little bodies into the dustpan and hope to see a flutter of life beneath the goopy afterbirth.
Daryl says I’m a wishful thinker.
He works maintenance at the forest preserve down the road. He fixes broken picnic tables, waters the Japanese garden, and drowns raccoons in cages when they have distemper. It’s a horrible thing to witness.
Sometimes at night, I think about last summer, showing up to the park in my pale pink sundress and hoping to surprise Daryl with my homemade chicken salad. But there he was with his big rubber-gloved hand, forcing the writhing raccoon into a metal cage. The poor thing was foaming at the mouth, clearly sick, but the look of quiet desperation in its eyes was begging for a life it couldn’t live.
I left without Daryl knowing I was there. I drove down country roads and cried—partly for the raccoon and partly for the look of cool indifference on Daryl’s face as he held the cage underwater.
There are four bodies in the dustpan, all still and silent. Daryl would tell me to throw them into a garbage bag—what’s done is done.
Sometimes I like to imagine that Daryl and I are two parallel lines that will converge someday at the vanishing point on the horizon. There is this hope, this longing. But deep down I know two parallel lines never really converge; it’s only an illusion one sees when looking down the road.
They say animals can’t remember the past. They’re fortunate. What a buoyant freedom belongs to the animals alone, while I’m forever anchored to a name I only let my lips speak once. It happened after the procedure while Daryl and I were in his truck.
“I would have named him Henry,” I said.
“It could have been a girl,” he said.
We drove home in silence, and that quiet has lingered between us ever since.
Mama cat is rubbing her face on my leg as I hold her babies in the dustpan. I decide to bury them in the backyard, next to the daffodils. I decide that I’m going to keep the stray and name her Mama as a reminder of what could have been.
Daryl won’t be happy. He will say that he’s too allergic to keep her around; we’re not home enough to care for her; we don’t have enough space or money. But I will say that we have love, and sometimes that’s enough.
The hole is dug, and the kittens fall into the dirt without a sound. I cover their bodies with the flannel shirt and say their names out loud. I repeat their names like a mantra, and in some small way, I feel like this makes them real.
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