short story

short story

The walk to the municipal pool from our apartment could, if memory were feeling charitable, be described as a slice of heaven. Through narrow streets the route bent downhill, where one could bear witness to old women watering basil plants in rusted tins, and cigarette smoke drifting lazily from shaded balconies. In the afternoons the heat pressed the smell of figs, exhaust, and sea salt into everything. Silence itself began to feel imaginary; with persistance the cicadas yelped from eucalyptus trees.

The pool lingered at the bottom of the hill, ritually anticipating my 7 year old self. Bright blue and overchlorinated, lined with pennant strings and loud with whistles. It was crowded with children whose flip-flops slapped against the concrete like applause. Before seeing the water you could smell it- that sterile, medicinal coolness fighting a losing battle against August.

The pavement heat held long after sunset. A patch of it teeming with overzealous flies. The walk took 3 minutes if I didn’t stop. I always stopped.

By the 5fth day of my discovery, I knew what parts of the cat would be gone before I got there.

She was beautiful once, you could tell. The silky silver of her skin still suggested it, as did the sly shape of her sunken snout. But the sun had stripped her face of all specificity, softening it into a soulless, skeletal sewn-shut slit.

But if before she was beautiful, now she was exquisite. Fur matting against skin, as black blood pooled beneath her from internal hemorrhaging caused by rigor mortis setting in. Her death was a call for life- by the second day maggots slowly began their feast underneath her exposed belly button, all taking their turn at this macabre meal ticket; flies swarmed around her etherial corpse- vultures, like buzzards drawn towards carrion, they layed eggs which eventually hatched into more hungry maggot larvae crawling through her eye sockets, feeding off of what remained of her life until all that was left were bones picked clean!!

She didn’t have a name. Why would she. Not here, not in the heat, not under the slow discipline of flies. She was just another subject of nature. I could have picked another road, a shorter road. But that one didn’t have the cat. I knew my humanity was superfluous as I watched her decompose. There was nothing to be done.

I could blame it on childish curiosity, but by the end I never arrived to see something new. Just a daily confirmation that nothing required me to intervene in order to continue. For she didn’t change in any way that required response; she changed like the weather did- indifferent to being noticed, already completed before arrival.

This feeling became familiar in a language I did not have for yet. So many things could be seen without being answered. That decadent, vivid carcass was only the tip of the iceberg. I learned that something, however revolting, however gut churning and repugnant, could always become background if repeated often enough.

I witnessed many creatures decompose since then. A city can burn behind a screen and still feel unreal and detached if you’re not inside it. Wars unfold in fragments- names, numbers, brief flashes of corpses and ruins. The same structure appeared, somewhere in the distance between headlines and bodies, between what was seen and what could pragmatically be reached.

Still I sit in a room that looks untouched. Never due to a lack of care, but due to the internalisation that care can’t scale into action in a way that provides meaning.

So we sit; idle, futile, impotent.

Stuck in sterile observation.

Perfectly conditioned voyeurs of the grotesque.

(sorry about the picture- the story needs a cover though)