THE TAIL END

Bidding farewell to a cat

- SLOANE CROSLEY

Here is a good story: It's 2003 and a childhood friend is stationed at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina—which will be renamed Fort Liberty in 2023— where she's in the 82nd Airborne Division. She is done jumping out of planes for the day, heading off the base, when she hears meowing coming from a warehouse. Inside, she finds a stray cat, proud but mangy, and decides to take her home. The cat is pregnant. My friend e-mails me a photograph of the kittens, arranged on her lap, one surfing on her kneecap. She writes, "Don't these remind you of your cats growing up?" She knows a target when she sees one.

A few weeks later, the kittens are loaded onto the back seat of a Jeep and driven north. Two are dropped off at my parents' house, in White Plains, and one is dropped off with me at my studio apartment, on the Upper West Side. The family joke is that these are military-grade cats. Your tax dollars at work. No laser eyes, but they do fetch and come when you call them, and, if they puke, they do so on nonporous surfaces. Twenty-one years later, mine is the last one standing. Personally, I think there's a lesson here about nurture, but I keep this thought to myself.

Since this story will continue, perhaps I should build up an immunity within a certain type of reader: Cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat cat. Cat. There. Now we can get on with it.

The cat is very sick, so a veterinarian whom I have never met is coming over to kill her. She arrives at 10 A.M., which feels wrong. Murders and break-ups, these are not interactions for God's hours. On the phone the afternoon before, she tells me of her pastoral childhood in New Zealand. Her mother once put a cat down by feeding it Valium.

"Like, a local cat?"

"No, our cat. So, very local."