Meow No More / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

How does a cat die?

Rasping, stiffly, gasping for air, looking into our eyes, incredulous at our inability to help him to live his time in this world of mortals, bewildered by our stupid betrayal of a life far more beautiful and true and good than ours.

Adults die, although they have only weeks.

Without a human complaint. With the honor of the fallen gods.

Suffering, and that’s the worst. It is obvious they die in pain. Somehow, we, their poor owners, we put them in the hands of bad Cuban veterinary system. Consisting of fine Cuban veterinarians. Who save a thousand pets, but always fail in one. In the indispensable, in the most feline link in the chain. Intuitively prescribing statistics or maneuvering in very bad guts.

Total.

What does it cost the State, the death of a cat?

Cat. Trash with eyes.

In a time not so remote I believed in spontaneous generation (I am biochemist and in 5 years of college no experiment read convinced me otherwise). I thought that the garbage cans, for example, those plastic pots imported from Andalusia I believe, or the Basque Country, each bred their own cats. Their lycanthropic larvae that is licked and makes meow meow …

I called them “trash with eyes.” I told them of love, petting, collecting, bringing their bacteria and gross earthworms home, making the bed an unbreathable zoo, because the kitty cats shared with me the unspeakable fate of the discarded Cuban people (“mind of trash,” it would be me). And never throw them a wild space where they can compete for food and eventually found their litters. No. The neighborhood of the Island boots them religiously there in the plastic, post-terrorist Spanish garbage, among papers of shit and insignificant cum and rotting remains of the half-rotten food we swallow daily.

How does a cat die, Miss Cuba? He dies at birth, unlike the pathetic kicking humans.

And his august body goes so rigidly into a nylon shopping bag, the greatest exponent of what despotic capitalism accomplished in the lands it will manage to develop.

The deformed jaw, eyelids open wide, the pupils on the verge of exploding, fleas fled just in time from the debacle, claws out to scratch the killer robe of God (no one has killed so many times to all humanity and emerged absolved, save He).

They die miserably, of misery, for our guilt and complicity. But they die without being miserable creatures like us: pagan felinephages that we have usurped the position of planetary princes of its species on Earth, incapable Cubans who do not connect ourselves at all with the cosmos and yet who lay waste to anyone who connects and looks and licks and knows all and dwells in the invisible and to top it off comes out with the miraculous music of a meow meow …

So cats die. Without death.

Death is social ownership of the humans unmercifully left.

May 11 2012