The skinny cat haunts me. I leave a can of tuna fish for my new kitten- the one that adopted us- came calling at night in hunger till I relented and left her some milk. The skinny cat is older. She is sleek and calculating. Appearing on the table trying to get at some black beans in a jar. Her sleekness is not fashionable, it does not wear well on her, hip bones jutting. The grey of her coat with faint stripes and the green of her eyes would otherwise be appealing if she did not seem as though she would eat your face off if you turned away for a second too long. She is at my car door when I leave, sniffing at the rank milk I spilled in the backseat a month ago. Her hardness hardens me, and I act as though I’ll kick her, certain if I play nice she will jump into my arms and eat my baby’s nose.
My kitten is both weary of and eager for my touch. Is it her smallness? What allows me to love her? Her mother and litter mates abandoned her weeks ago. I have not seen another cat in the area all season. I wondered at her existence, where did she come from? Where had her mother come from to land under the old granary and give birth to a multitude of little beings?
At the ole lady’s house next door I discover she has a small nest of pink bodied kittens, abandoned by their mother. Did their mother starve before returning? Did she know she could not nurse them- so left them all rather than wither with them? Was she a heartless little thing, leaving them to their own without a second thought?
My neighbor took to feeding them, even though she says she had about twenty feral cats hanging around last month. Is my kitten’s family right next door? Living in the brush behind the yellow house? Did she stop too soon at my trailer, as she followed her family across the fields and corrals?
The starving cat with green eyes haunts me. My willingness to kick her starving stomach haunts me. She disappeared into the sage and rabbit brush. What did I have to fear from her? What would she have taken that I could not spare? If I dole out a sliver of compassion for her will it consume me, ruin me, here in a country with lots of wild things fighting to survive. Why do I cater to a kitten so openly, yet so strongly defend against its starving brethren? At some point my city girl silliness has to adjust to the realities. Dinner sizzles in the skillet, it is goat- it is Sally- whose daughter Plank has an eternal place in our herd despite her runtiness and inability to birth. I can not stomach butchering her after orphaning her last spring.