My neighborhood is plagued with feral cats; many neighborhoods of this country are, as pet abandonment is as prevalent as rice over here. My house is sort of a magnet for the roving cat gangs, since I have nice balcony ledges which make nice launching/landing pads for inter-house leaps.
The other night I came home, actually it was just pre-dusk, but a little bit darkish, and while climbing the steep stairs that lead out of the darkened garden up to my top-floor of the 3 story house, when out of the corner of my eye I spy what seems to be a squashed rat. Not wanting to directly 'see' this horror, I kept moving, but as I entered my house, my brain continued to churn the image over and over; it seemed like there had definately been squiggly guts all over, and the creature was splayed out like a dead dog.
Now all I could think about was that, how I was looking at a major cleanup job, and that I had no shovel, only a one-foot midget broom, that would probably need itself to be cleaned or thrown away. Plus there would be gore and the smell, depending on how long I procrastinated.
I decided to put it out of my mind. I would find a way, somehow. Maybe the neighbors whose door it was closer to would man up and do the job. But no, I'd seen dogshit right in front of their door and they did nothing. They were hopeless. But maybe a rapacious cat, not necessarily the mother, would eat the damn thing...it was meat, after all. Don't cats eat weird shit like dogs do?
So after just letting all these thoughts fester in my mind for a while, and trying to busy myself to keep those images out, I had to go out again for shopping. This time I assiduously avoided any direct gaze, but again, in order to avoid stepping on the thing, I had to catch at least a part of it out of the corner of my eye.
Hurrying out of my house, my mind began reprocessing the eyecorner image, like Nasa scientists poring over the latest shots of Mars...actually my incessantly morbid mind was now coming to a new conclusion; those squiggly bits were not guts splayed, but actually it was a stillborn cat fetus, and the squiggly thing was umbilical cord, and the non squiggly bit must have been a placenta. I'm not sure the idea of a stillborn fetus was any less unsettling than a squashed rat, but somehow at least the idea of cleanup began to appear more cheerful.
I stayed out shopping an unusually long time, not wanting to have to go home and deal with the fetal removal by cruelly short broom implement....Somehow in the back of my mind I kept clinging to the 'roving scavenger' theory- although in all my time in Seoul I had never witnessed an eagle or a hawk, I was never more ready to witness a raptor swooping in than now, sort of like people in North Dakota waiting to see the UFO's....
So on the way back in my house it was dark, and I had to get my little red keychain light out, had to be very careful not to squash the fetus, or I would be back to square one on the cleanup nightmare. So I stepped gingerly through the garden, and this time it was almost impossible not to look directly at the pile of meat on my step, if I wanted to be sure to avoid stepping on it, plus the spotlight effect of the light in the dark, and then i shit my pants.....
THE THING WAS MOVING! A little head reared in the red light like a demon from hell....
I rushed back upstairs to pour myself a whiskey. Now I really had a mess- I have to 'put it out of its misery AND clean it up! I sat there for an hour, thinking hard about how NOT to think about this...maybe a nighttime scavenger would still come and eat the thing, but I really hoped it didn't make a mess or even a horrorific sound as it did so....
About an hour later, I stumbled down the stairs to re-assess the situation, prepared for the worst, and the kitten was gone! Apparently the mother had just chosen the WORLD'S WORST NEWBORN PARKING spot while she recovered from partum- I remembered that cats are always doing that, moving their babies all over Shit-dom.
Later after the second whiskey back in my house, I realized I had missed my chance....now there was one more feral cat in my neighborhood....
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