Tabby Cat Confessions

I posted this last week on Dave's in a thread titled "Confession Time," but for posterity's sake am posting it here, not because I think what I did was anything noteworthy, but because I like the writing. Read on:


My second year in Korea, I took in a free cat advertised on the Internet. This feral monstrosity, though it was but a wee young thing, would claw and bite me non-stop, and more than a few times it shred my newspaper before I had had a chance to read it.

Compounding my feline problems was the fact that kitty litter was nowhere to be purchased, and even after the wife (then girlfriend) and I covertly procured some sand from a nearby construction site, the little terror wouldn't regularly use the box, preferring instead to piss behind the TV stand and any other corner it deemed fit.

At night I would close the bedroom door, for I learned early on not to allow the wretched beast to lie abed with me, for the sake of my own sanity; it would claw and jump and bite at my face and legs ceaselessly into the early hours of the morning. But when I shut out the little devil, it mewled and caterwauled so that the neighbors cursed me, and I spent many sleepless nights.

At the end of my tether, I resolved to turn the enfant terrible out; I first tried to give it away in the same manner in which I had obtained it, but with no success. Finally I opened the door and nudged the cat out as I was on my way to work one afternoon. Yet it stayed; it was there seven hours later when I returned. I had second thoughts and wondered if it wasn't a good idea to give the poor thing a second chance, or at least wait a little longer until I could find someone to take it in. But the wife (then girlfriend), ever the Lady to my MacBeth, insisted that what I had done was for the best. The cat would soon enough venture out and either take up with the neighborhood strays, or, hopefully, a kindhearted man or woman would come across the cute little creature and find it in their heart to adopt the little Damien.

Three days passed, then four. The cat was still outside my door (hey! I'm a poet and I didn't even realize it). It looked emaciated and weathered, but still I wouldn't take it back in.

I like to believe I have compassion and a kind heart, but I guess that's untrue, a bunch of BS, because I let the cat stay outside my door for a full week, and when I awoke one morning, it was no longer there.

I like to think that the cat found someone, anyone, whether feline or human, to accept it into their fold. Sadly, I doubt this is true. One scorchingly hot summer afternoon three weeks later, while my mother was visiting from Canada, and shortly after I had proposed to my wife, we returned from lunch to find a tiny cat's corpse, fetid and desiccated, at the foot of the alley that ran up to our apartment.