any, but I knew that the horrible cat would be back.
“Just keep Bess inside,” my mother said.
I tried, but Bess cried at the door, and it was a semester during which my father was hosting his senior seminar at our house; students came and went Tuesday and Thursday nights, swinging through the front door to smoke cigarettes on our steps, and Bess could easily escape.
It was spring and starting to get warm and I slept with my window cracked. One morning, just past dawn, I heard Bess yowling outside, a ferocious, terrified sound. I pulled on sneakers and ran downstairs, exiting out toward the back garden. In the gray, early morning light I spotted them right away, Bess backed against the fence again, the horrible black stray crouched and ready to attack. They were each frozen in the terrible moment, like a diorama at the Museum of Natural History. I clapped my hands together, yelling, and the stray merely turned its ugly matted head my way, appraised me with indifference, and turned back to Bess. I knew right then that the feral tom would kill Bess if he got a chance, maybe not on that morning but some morning, and that I would do anything to stop that from happening.
There was a pile of paving stones on the edge of our unfinished patio. They had been there so long that moss had grown on some of them. I picked up the largest one I could carry; its edges were sharp and it was slippery with dew. I walked quietly and quickly to stand behind the stray. I didn’t need to be quiet. He was unafraid of me, intent on terrorizing Bess. Without thinking about it, I lifted the paving stone above my head and hurled it down onto him as hard as I could. He turned his head at the last moment and made a squalling sound as the edge of the stone caught him on the skull, the whole stone coming to rest on his body. Bess bolted, racing across the backyard as fast as I’d ever seen her move. The stray’s body shivered, then lay still. I turned to the house, expecting to see a bedroom light turn on, the house woken by the sound of murder, but there had hardly been any sound.
It had been easy.
The bulkhead to the basement was unlocked. I crept down the dark, leaf-slicked steps and groped around the entryway, finding one of the snow shovels that lined the wall. I used the edge of the plastic shovel to slip the paving stone off the stray, then pushed the shovel under the inert body. I could see no damage on the matted head; I was terrified that the cat was not dead, just knocked unconscious, and would spring up any moment, come at me hissing and full of vengeance. But when I lifted the cat it flopped like a dead thing, and I was suddenly struck with a bad smell, a trail of defecation that had sprayed from the cat when it died. I had expected blood but hadn’t expected shit. The smell sickened me, but I was happy I’d killed that disgusting cat.
He was not as heavy as I thought he would be, his stiffened fur giving the impression that he had been larger than he was, but he was heavy enough. I managed to carry the cat about ten feet away, to the edge of the woods, and dropped the body on top of some rotted leaves. I spent another five minutes digging up debris and tossing it on top of him till he was covered. It was good enough. My parents never went in the woods anyway.
Climbing back into bed, shivering from the cold, I didn’t think I would fall asleep again, but I did, easily.
I checked on the corpse of that stray for the next few days. It lay there, undisturbed, buzzing with flies, till one morning it was simply gone. I guessed it must have been dragged away by a coyote or a fox.
Bess resumed her cat’s life, coming and going from the house, and sometimes, when she brushed against my ankles, or purred in my lap, I imagined she was thanking me for what I had done. She had her kingdom back, and all was right with the world.
After what happened with Chet the night of the party, I immediately thought about the incident with the stray cat. It gave me ideas about how I would kill