Dead Cat

It's difficult to dig a hole in Hawaii, even the simplest of holes. The earth composed of bits of lava, doesn’t yield easily to the bite of a shovel. The blade grinds into the rock, scarping metal against once molten earth. Digging is as slow and unrewarding as chewing a piece of gristle at a dinner party.

In my back yard, my piece of real estate is a tiny concrete slab encircled with a narrow strip of dirt where the areca palms and ti plants push their roots into the mixture of lava shards and course dirt. Roots are shallow. There is no place for a grave, even if I could manage to dig one. And surprisingly in these conditions, I own a shovel.

This morning I found a dead cat at the entrance of the condo complex. Someone hit it as it crossed the street. I assume that some else removed the calico from the asphalt and laid it near the complex's entrance sign. It looked like it was sleeping, stretched out in the sun like a cat would do.

I knew the cat, a mother of four surviving young cats. The feral colony lives across the street in a vacant lot, near the ocean. In the evening when I go to see the sunset, the cats are out on the rocks eating what someone has put out for them. I found all four perched on the rock in anticipation of their dinner. Mother, a bit more guarded, crouched under a papaya tree.

When I see these cats I think of Phoenix and Diablo and how much I miss them. My heart sank when I saw her this morning. I don’t know why she left the protection of the bushes in a place where no dogs run loose, no hawks cruise the sky and her only competitor for rats is a mongoose.

When I got back to my condo, the sprinkler system was watering my plants. I called the office to inform them of the dead cat.