Kedi Page #4

They can find some earth out here.

To do their business.

Its harder to do that

in a house with cat litter.

But out here they dig it up.

Oh no, where did he come from?

- An older cat got to him in the backyard.

- Oh sweetie.

- I immediately thought of you.

- What are we going to do with you?

You poor, poor thing.

Is he gone, I wonder. Is he dead?

He must have slammed him against

the ground got attacked by a bigger cat.

Its a fact of nature. It happens.

This one was my first child.

She was special

not only because she was my first

but also because she had great character.

She died of breast cancer.

I would dress her

to keep her from licking her wounds.

I tried very hard

to find a cat like her again...

but I came to realize that it

was futile, that she was one of a kind.

My longing for her...

lets just say if there is afterlife,

I want to meet her again, not my grandmother.

We cook twenty pounds

of chicken every day.

We dont feed them

dried cat food or anything artificial.

My therapist says I try to heal

my own wounds by healing theirs.

By feeding them

and tending to their needs.

My wounds must be so deeply rooted

they still havent healed despite all this.

I guess Ill heal when they heal.

There was a time

I had great difficulty dealing with death.

I accept death as a reality...

but I have difficulty

dealing with the longing.

Thats my problem with death.

Now well go out

to distribute the morning meal.

This is our daily routine,

seven days a week, including Sundays.

Wait honey, wait.

Come, come my girl.

My little darlings.

Come, Ive got your food!

There were sixty

but five died in the last two weeks.

And its always cancer.

We say it happens to people,

but it happens to animals too.

We eat and drink the same -

the same food, the same water.

We've raised a lot of cats.

Some grew old and died,

quite a few got run over.

We learned that something you

love can one day cease to exist.

We adopted a sense of stoicism that way.

We had a cat cemetery in the backyard.

My older brother and I would

bury them with great ceremony.

And because wed see crosses in cowboy movies

like that last scene

in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

we thought they looked impressive.

Were not Christian,

but they look cool in movies

and because we werent

about to engrave tiny gravestones

wed make crosses out of twigs.

Then one day our father saw us

and freaked out over the crosses.

Immediately sent us to Quran school

so that we wouldnt suddenly turn Christian.

We told him not to worry, obviously.

If I hadnt had cats,

I wouldve had a very troubled childhood

because interacting

only with people is not enough

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