Popular Press
Owl
One Story
(2014)
Abstract
When the doctor left, I fed the cats their cornmeal. For Jane’s sake. My wife. Two bullets taken from her body and still she remembered the hunger of our sickly, mewing clowder; still she had the strength to recite her whole tiresome routine to me. Let it cool first, she whispered, holding out her hand, and when I took her hand, Let it cool first, she said again. Well, twelve years prior, I had not let it cool first. I had thought the bastards would have the sense to wait til the cornmeal wasn’t boiling. But they stuck their faces in and ate. One or two got badly splattered, and after that the white scalds on their eyeballs kept them in the dark. Twelve years ago. Those cats long dead, the offspring of their offspring prowl our land. It happened once. How many times had I seen her feed the cats since then? How many thousands of times had the cornmeal cooled? And yet, recovering from her wounds, she called out to me through all those layers of ether, wrapped up in all those layers of gauze, called out to me in an urgent whisper to Let it cool first, as if I would not hear it, as if I could forget the blind cats pawing around in their idiot darkness, as if what she sensed at my very core, when her delirium peeled off all the rest, was a thick and hot and yellow-colored cruelty.
Disciplines
Publication Date
March 6, 2014
Citation Information
Emily Ruskovich. "Owl" One Story Iss. 190 (2014) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/emily-ruskovich/7/