On the Landing

Matt woke up not uncharacteristically early one Tuesday morning to a silent house. Light radiated through the paper blind suggesting that today would be rather wonderful. He turned over and squinted at his alarm clock rather than putting on his spectacles - just going on 7 o'clock. Apart from some chirruping birds somewhere outside, the house was quiet. There was no cook banging about in the kitchen, breaking crockery left and right. There was no sound of the butler's light footfall on the floorboards in the hall. Above all, there was no incessant meowing of the cat, Walter, who served as a trusted alarm when the clock failed. He imagined the cat was upstairs sunning himself by the window or at least perched on the sill watching the noisy grackles.

As he rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses it occurred to him that due to economic reasons he had neither a butler nor a cook - nor a housekeeper for that matter. He must have been awakened out of some dream of opulence, one filled with light treading butlers and noisy cooks. The book on his bedside table, a mystery of a bygone era, seemed to give every indication that that must have been the case.

"I do have to stop reading that kind of stuff just before bed." He thought. "It does fill one's head with the most idiotic notions." He sat up and got out of bed, his toes grabbing the soft plush, camel colored carpet. "I wish I could afford a staff to bring me breakfast and clean and manage household affairs for me."

Matt sighed thinking of all the cleaning he had to do this week. It was in fact the primary reason he'd taken a week's holiday from the office. The impending arrival of his parents from Beijing where they were teaching at university, prompted the sudden rush to clean everything. There was so much to do: there was the laundry to wash, dry and fold, the bathrooms to clean, the carpets to vacuum and a thousand and one other things that needed doing. He yawned at the thought and padded along the floor much more noisily than his imaginary butler would have done and walked toward the stairs. He knew this stirring would cause Walter to let out the most pitiful wails of need as ever a cat could emit. Yet all was silent still.

"Funny," Thought Matt, "he must still be sleeping up on the couch. No, there he is."

And there he was. Walter lay sprawled out lazily on the landing between the small and large staircase. He often waited there for Matt after being chased out of the bedroom at 5:30 (or sometimes even 4:00) in the morning for waking him too early. Matt wondered at Walter's immobility - surely he would have gotten up and started running up to the kitchen to await his breakfast of Cat Chow and water by now. Matt leaned forward and rubbed a finger under the cat's chin. Walter remained inert. Matt slowly drew back his finger and placed his hand on the cat's torso, there was no movement. He quickly lifted the cat, hoping Walter was merely ill and could be wakened, but noticed the rigidity of the feline's body. As his hands, pressed against the stomach, lifted the cat, Matt heard an exhalation of air, a kind of horrifying final sigh. It disturbed the man so much so that he almost dropped Walter.

Matt turned the cat toward him and a sickening feeling came over him. Walter's eyes had gone filmy and grey. His tongue protruded out of the side of his mouth - a morbid parody of death. Matt carefully set the cat back down on the carpet and ran upstairs to the kitchen. He grabbed a large kitchen garbage bag and set it at the top of the stairs then ran down and gingerly carried the cat upstairs and deposited it in the bag. It looked even more ghastly covered in translucent white plastic, but at least he didn't have to see those lifeless, yet staring eyes.

***

"What do I do with a cat corpse?" Matt wondered as he jumped online. He did feel concern and even a pang of sorrow yet not as much as he'd imagined he might have felt. He had, after all, only had the cat for a few months. Those months had been trying, admittedly, but in the last month or so, Matt felt that he and the pet were making a pretty good go of it. He searched for information by typing "sudden cat death" in the Google search box and deduced the culprit may have been a heart worm, that or the poor thing had a sudden aneurysm. Glancing back into the hallway, outside of the den, he could see the bag protruding where stiff front and back paws and head and neck pressed against the plastic.

"What to do! What to do!"

Then he thought about it for a moment, "I'll call mum and dad - they'll know what to do."

His father made a few comforting remarks, knowing Matt had grown fond of the cat before discussing the disposal of the body. This turn in conversation was eerily clinical, ending with this paternal edict: "Just get it buried in the back before the neighbors start to wake."

"Too late," Thought Matt. "In this geriatric neighborhood most of the neighbors would have risen long ago and even now may already peering through their blinds to see what's going on in the court."

Matt moved quickly by the corpse and to the door to the garage where he found a shovel. The thought of garage, cat and garbage bag reminded him of an earlier adventure he'd had at school, but he had no desire to repeat history. Shovel in hand, he returned to the house and picked up the bag. The body pressed against the bottom of the bag and Matt half wondered if it would hold the cat's weight until he'd gotten it outside. He carefully, yet swiftly brought shovel and bag downstairs and out the sliding patio door.

After scouting about for a proper final resting place for Walter, he decided on a spot just behind the lilac bush, far away from tree roots. As he dug, he looked around him trying to decide what he would say if the neighbors asked what he was doing. Should he confess that his pet had died suspiciously in the night or pretend that he was going to be planting flowers for his parents return? The latter notion seemed ridiculous given the position of the grave - who would plant flowers behind a lilac bush? As he dug a space wide enough to accommodate the body, he remembered his father told him to dig a deep hole. But how deep was deep enough? After about a foot of digging, removing stones and breaking roots he hit a layer of impenetrable clay.

"Oh dash it all!" exclaimed Matt, now tired from digging. "I suppose it will just have to do." As he set down the shovel and walked back to the patio to get Walter he wondered if he oughtn't to have had an autopsy conducted to discover the cause of death, but then Matt was always practical over matters of spending and an autopsy would be costly. He lifted the bag and carried it to the hole in the ground then placed Walter in his grave. He carefully positioned the cat so his paws would not stick out of the hole. It took some additional digging and some careful placement, but soon Walter was in place.

In his haste to get the cat buried, Matt had given little thought to how he felt about all of this. He stared at Walter's lifeless body and felt somehow responsible. How if he, Matt, had been a better person, this cat would still be alive. Silly thought, of course, a retributive power taking people's sins out on their pets, yet he still felt a level of guilt.

Quickly, he replaced the dirt over the grave and packed it down by slamming the back of the spade over the mound of dirt. Matt worried that it wouldn't be enough to cover a smell that might attract carrion birds, so he ran upstairs and to the garage where he'd remembered seeing a 40 lb. bag of potting soil. He heaved it over his shoulder and ran downstairs again. As he reached the landing where he'd found Walter, his bare foot came into contact with something wet on the carpet and he faltered. There would be additional cleaning up to do after covering the grave.

The End.

Nota bene: Walter died this morning suddenly. For some reason, I decided to describe the events as Agatha Christie might have done in one of her novels. I'm pretty sad about the loss of the cat; I guess this is simply my way of dealing with it.