THE DEAD KITTEN
by Sean Farley
The sawdust-colored kitten on the lawn had grown stiff with rigor; little Bobby Richards poked it gingerly with a stick he found in the gutter a few feet away. “Wake up, kitty,” he said, bending to examine it in such a way six-year-old boys are apt to do. “Are you dead?” He crouched down closer to the kitten and poked at it a bit more fiercely. When nothing happened he threw the stick down and stroked the kitten’s wispy fur.
Bobby turned his head and he saw me watching him from my yard. “Hi Eileen!” he shouted, waving hard.
“Hi, Bobby,” I replied.
“My kitty’s dead,” he told me, again daintily stroking the fur.
I had no reason to be outside. I’d been watching cartoons for what felt like days and my mother, in her frustration, snapped off the television set and told me to get some fresh air. I told her I was happy watching cartoons. She told me summer vacations were not meant to be wasted inside the house all day. “Go play with your friends,” she directed me. When I told her, with a bite to my voice, that all my friends were at the beach, she sighed. “I’m sorry. I forgot. But you know very well why you can’t go to the beach. And that television will burn holes in your corneas so I suggest you go outside.” I told her I could just as easily stare at the sun for a few minutes and then she’d be sorry. My mother pointed sternly at the door.
“You should probably let it be, Bobby,” I said. “You could get a disease or something.”
“Come over and look at it,” he said excitedly, waving me over.
I had nothing else better to do. I crossed the street and looked at the kitten; it was dead alright.
“It’s my sister’s kitty. She’s gonna be really sad.”
“Where is she?” I asked, pulling up a brown sock that had a tendency to fall.
Bobby didn’t say anything; instead he continued to stroke the kitten’s fur.
Just then the front door to Bobby’s house clicked open and his father stood in the doorframe. In his robust voice he said, “Bobby. Son. It’s time to come into the house now. Hello, Eileen.”
“Hello, Mr. Richards,” I said sheepishly. He was a large, towering man. He had a way of fixing his eyes on me that I often found myself nervously clutching my elbow and staring stupidly at my shoes.
Bobby stood. “Dad, Sally’s kitty is dead.”
“Bobby, come inside young man.”
He looked up at me, then his father. “Bye, Eileen,” Bobby said. He waved with the fervor of a crippled windshield wiper. He walked sluggishly into the house where his father looked at me one last time and let the door close gently behind them.
It was the last time I saw either one of them alive.
__________
We were blind in our sheltered, impenetrable suburban village. The dazzling green of husband-mowed lawns and the glare of freshly waxed sedans and polished windows forced us to keep a proverbial hand over our eyes like a visor. We went on with our merriment, our closeted skeletons. I, for one, had known no other life than the one I’d been living. When Joshua Weinstein moved into the neighborhood with tales of apartment complexes and public transportation, the rest of us were in awe of him, if not slightly disgusted; he was marred with the stigma of being an outsider, though at our ages we were unable to deftly verbalize this. Instead we picked on him for a month or two before we found him acceptable enough to join our ranks.
It was this picturesque ideal that withered horribly by the Richards’ murders.
It was surreal to see four police cars and two ambulance trucks parked in the Richards’ yard the way they were, haphazard and full of immediacy. Our street was silent and illuminated by the swirling, candy-red flicker of a dozen Emergency lights atop the vehicles. My neighbors gathered in pairs, and groups of three and four; wives clutched their sweaters at the heart, their eyes glistening with tears. Husbands shook their heads with disappointment. My friends and I sat together in a cluster on the curb in front of my house, hugging our knees, watching in awe as the tall ambulance men wheeled the covered bodies of our neighbors from the front door, just as we’d seen in movies and on television a million times. Police radios broke the silence every minute or so with crackling, jumbled nonsense.
My father and Mr. Green had found them. The weekend had passed without incident; my friends had come back from the beach the Saturday I’d seen Bobby, telling me I hadn’t missed anything because the waves were small and the beach was too crowded. I pointed out the dead kitten but no one seemed interested, even as flies buzzed around it, its skin shrinking and the ribcage growing prominent. I told no one about Bobby because it seemed inconsequential at the time.
When Monday came, full of sunshine and turquoise sky, I detected a slight undercurrent of tension in the kitchen, where my mother and father were talking pointedly. My younger brother, Bradley, was sunk into the sofa watching television, absent-mindedly twirling a G.I. Joe figure in his hands, his eyes glued to the set. My mom stood at the sink, washing out a pan, and my father stood next to her. “Something isn’t right,” he was saying. “Their porch light is still on. It’s been on all weekend.”
“It’s none of our business, Dan,” my mother said without looking at him.
A few hours passed. That afternoon had grown sultry with the heat of summer, the furthest end of our street shimmering like a mirage as heat escaped the blacktop. A calm breeze rustled the oaks every so often, though not enough to assuage the warm blur of mid-July. My friends and I raced up and down the block on our bikes, certain not to go any further than our neighborhood, beyond the main streets where the world seemed destined to intrude upon our suburban living. We hadn’t expected it to happen that day, when my father and Mr. Green decided to knock on the Richards’ front door.
“Where are you going, Dad?” I asked as I halted my bike in front of our driveway. He and Mr. Green, who lived next door to us, moved with cautious determination.
“Stay right there, sweetheart,” he said to me. I was a bit taken aback with the endearment; he used it on the rarest of occasions.
Instinct and a tingle up the back of my neck told me to look behind me. My mother, a can of Pledge and an old sock in her hands, stood on the threshold of our front door. She stood firm and expectant, squinting a bit from the fading afternoon sunlight.
My brother darted past her and ran towards me, full of energy and combat. He stuck his tongue out at me. “Don’t you go any further than that driveway, Bradley,” my mother boldly warned him. Bradley stopped dead beside me, panting.
Funny, the things I noticed now that I was in a position to notice them. Indeed, the porch light on the Richards’ house was still on, burning faintly in an already bright afternoon. Peculiarly, their shades were drawn; a week’s worth of newspapers lay crooked on the two steps to the front door, untouched. Their large brown station wagon sat in the driveway, unmoved since Friday, when I saw Mr. Richards come home from work. I’d ridden in that station wagon a number of times. Mr. Richards often took us neighborhood kids out for ice cream during summer months, or even to the beach when the mood struck him, instructing me more than once to wear sunscreen; the last time I disobeyed him I suffered one of the worst sunburns ever which kept my mother from permitting me to ever go to the beach again. The station wagon often smelled of stale cigarettes and another smoky substance I could never quite put my finger on (later, as a teenager, I was reminded of that smell when my boyfrie nd’s mother tried to pass me a joint). Now it just appeared lifeless as it rested on exhausted tires on the dark, buckling driveway. The dead kitten (for a short period something of interest to my friends and I, but now useless and stripped of value) lie rotting on the edge of the Richards’ lawn.
My father and Mr. Green knocked on the Richards’ door, waited. When nothing happened they knocked again, waited. I wish I could say I understood completely what was going on, but because of my youth and inexperience I was unable. My brother and I could never have expected that the Richards’ were dead. Children don’t actually wait for that kind of discovery. Sitting there on my bike, waiting, Bradley at my side, we could only appease our curiosity, the most dangerous of afflictions.
When my father and Mr. Green went into the Richards’ home I expected them to emerge laughing, feeling silly for what they’d done. Instead quite a few minutes went by. My father emerged from the house, white-faced. He had to crouch forward, his hands planted firmly on his knees. My mother bolted past us, firmly reminding my brother and I to stay put. Bradley clutched my leg and started to cry.
“Dan!” my mother yelled. “Dan, what is it?”
Mr. Green had called the police and soon our small street was swarming with the outside world, buzzing about the place, picking it clean as the flies had picked apart the dead kitten. Newspaper reporters longed for our attention. Police officers questioned us all; even me and my friends, who apparently had nothing of relevance to say because the officers merely nodded their heads bleakly and said, “Yes? Uh-huh? Yes?” while they scribbled in notepads. For a brief time our neighborhood was a celebrity.
I never got a clear picture of what happened inside the Richards’ home. My father rarely talked about it, and when he did the words were short and sharp, letting the listener know he had nothing else to say on the subject.
Eventually the Richards’ house was gutted and refurbished. Their belongings were donated to the local Goodwill and their car donated to a small church two counties over. The home hadn’t sold for a good two years, during which time it became a sort of mythical haunted house. Local Halloween stories were plagued with rumors about the Richards’ house; Bobby and Sally walking the halls, looking for their parents. My father caught me telling a story to my brother once about Bobby Richards and how he was in search for his precious little kitten. My father told me never to say a word on it again.
He wasn’t cruel about it. He said only more thing on it, the only clue ever as to what he’d seen in that house. “The least he could have done,” my father said, lost in thought, as my brother and I listened, “was put them all in the same room together.”
My name is Sean P. Farley. I live in Southern California and have only just begun to embrace the joy of writing. I've written for local publications that focus on community. Contact Sean.
