Cat Lady

“A southern woman should know how to fry a chicken!” Brina mocked her husband’s redneck drawl. Cliff would always deride her lack of homemaker-ness. 

“You ain’t give me no kids yet, and now we got a buncha goddamn cats!?” he would say.

She leaned down with her body weight and put her palm on the back of the knife. With a slight resistance the knife eventually pushed through the bone with a gross pop, something Brina hated the one or two times she actually did break down a whole raw chicken. She scraped the meat and marrow across the cutting board. Brina stopped for a second and wiped her brow, leaving just a little viscera across her forehead. No matter. She sighed deeply and located her glass of wine. She took a large gulp, her eyes searching around the kitchen.

“There you are, my babies!” she said to her three cats. “Are you hungry? Are you starving? Did you miss your mommy?”

She grabbed a piece of the meat from the cutting board and dropped it in front of her oldest cat, Tobey. He nibbled at it delicately before chomping it down aggressively. 

She went back to butchering the large slab of raw meat in front of her while continuing to mock her now ex-husband, this time deepening her voice to sound more like him, and chopping hard in between each sentence.

“Ain’t supposed to have this many cats.”

CHOP!

“Can’t save them all!”

SLASH!

“Get rid of them cats or get rid of ME!”

SPLAT!

She tossed another chunk of skin and fat on the floor, this time going to Garfield, a big, large, orange cat. 

“And he actually did it! He took ya’ll away from me. Dumped you miles away, down at the marina. THAT was the last straw. When ya’ll found your way back to me, it was a miracle.” she said, gesturing in the air with her kitchen knife.

It was and it wasn’t. After a loud and violent fight, Brina had extracted the information from Cliff.

“Jesus, Breen, you really care about them more than me!? I dumped them at the marina. I hope to hell they’ve been run over or eaten or something,” he confessed with such spite in his voice.

She immediately searched for them. Garfield being Garfield never left the marina. He was found noodling through the dumpster, licking an empty can of vienna sausages. Tobey was found in a subdivision next to the marina. The friendly cat approached some children playing on their bikes. They took him home and their adults posted pictures on social media, looking for his owner. Brina saw the post within thirty minutes and was reunited after a short drive.

Tomcat, the long haired tuxedo, was gone the longest. God only knows what he got up to. He was found by Brina on their porch one morning, weeks after Cliff had dumped them. He was yowling, begging to be let in. Covered in ticks and hitchhikers, several pounds thinner, she was afraid he might’ve changed, become more feral. But as soon as she approached, he purred gently and calmly, nudging up against her legs like he had never left.

“That’s my big Tomcat!” Brina exclaimed as he circled around impatiently. “We’re gonna get that weight back on you in no time!”

Brina repositioned the cutting board and began to force her knife through a tough section. This time, her knife slipped and clinked, making a very not-bone and not-meat sound. A distinct metallic sound. The force from her slip up ran through the tough part of cartilage, but also flipped up the cutting board, and most of the carcass, into the air. As it flew through the kitchen, she located the source of the sound. Her husband’s ring. As the remaining forearm section flopped onto the kitchen floor, Garfield and Tobey ripped and tore into the hand and fingers. Tomcat, always the fastest, grabbed the flying ring finger and ran out of the kitchen with it.

“It’s funny, Cliff. You hated these cats…” she said to her missing husband.

She looked at her babies and smiled. She bent down and petted them as they feasted hungrily on the remains.

“But they seem to love you.”