For A Cat

Translated by Edina

lets see...

today on the front page of metro newspaper they had a statistics that in Hungary approximately 3 million cats live. now its one less..
today morning I found one of my cat dead. She was laying front of the entrance of the kitchen, she looked like she was sunbathing, but knowing the fact that it was 6 am in the morning and the weather looked like its going to rain soon, i knew its not about that. her mouth was open, and with her last breath, she coughed out something nasty to the floor.
she was sick. she was breathing heavily and she was coughing, she was choking on her sickness for days now. I think she couldn't eat as well. and I wasn't able to help her. she wasn't really my cat, I could barley catch her. when she started being sick, she still ran away from me when i tried to get closer. it shows as well that she wasn't my cat that she didn't leave. all the others who i could pet on my lap, I let them sunbath with me on my chair in the garden, i shook a piece of rope for them to play - they left to die somewhere else.
I don't remember finding not even one of their body around the house. I had cats since I was a little child. sometimes one, sometimes six at a time but i never found any of them dead. Probably when I was younger the adults hid them before I could find it, but for a long time now, I am the adult here...

I cant really count how many cats I was taking care of in my life. Probably a dozen or more. Lots of them died. Rules of the nature, but i never felt like this, that i have to pay tribute to them... this little mongrel who just died here. she wasn't even the most beautiful. but she wasn't the most miserable or the most damned too. we had bandy legged, or one with a deformed spine. We had a cat; we rescued her from a high rise building, and i had one which i got from Budapest and took him out to our garden city by a train. We got some of them like gifts, and we took some of them when other people didn't want them anymore. we adopted some stray cats, and of course we had cats born in our garage after a while. like this little gray half Persian fur-ball. who when she died wasn't rounded anymore, she was flat and stretched out like a sticker-cat. If i would have lift her and put her on her legs she could stand there without any stuffing or wires... cause poor thing, she was rigid and hard.

here eyes were wide open but i didn't dare to look into them. I felt ashamed. last night i heard her from the garage fighting for her life. she was breathing loud, gasping. I should have tried to catch her again and if i could succeed, then just put her into the car and try to find a doctor. I haven't. the garage is "the place". our cats goes there for their agony. like the valley in the legend the sacred place, where the elephants go to die. the cats which go to the garage being indisposed I know those don't have much time left and I let them go. If I could I would bring them to the animal hospital to get a shoot and they sleep in peace after and skip the suffering part. but It just never happened. that's how it is. I am milksop, I remember with my letters, with my text, like the journalist when something shit happens to him and he writes about it, complains about it in the newspaper or in his blog, instead of doing something when he was there, when he was in the situation, when he had a chance to do something at all about it... but at least a good writer knows how to write about it. I don't even know how to write. How could I write cat stories like dream of a thousand cats or the gift from Neil Gaiman's pen. I just write my stupid lines and I bury my animals.

I would need a highly effective cue here. like I hope I will get buried how I bury my cat. Lightly, people little bit sad around me, but not mourning above me, and remembering me with gratitude.... but its not a highly effective cue....

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* (A Dream of a Thousand Cats) a Sandman #18
(The Gift in Smoke and Mirrors)