Benni Goes Feral
There is no sound like the sound of the Mourning Dove. It reminds me of the time my sister died. It was at the beginning of the cold season, and I was asleep in the comfy chair, and I heard its hooing in and out, in and out. There was a cold dry air with the light going away, and on it I could smell dead leaves, and outside I could see the individual blades of grass stir and move and the many, many dead bats that covered the lawn. Then I stretched and meowed, and I walked by the corpse of my giant, who had exploded his mouth and head and died because he was very sad.
I padded to the porch door which never closed anymore because I had moved a shoe there to block it. There I looked out into the deepening blue, into a sky that was bleeding its color away at the cloudy fringes. Giant had loved these late skies because of ‘red.’ I do not know exactly what ‘red’ is, other than it is a color I cannot see. My sister was this color, was this ‘red,’ although she looked grey to me. This makes me sad because if I could see ‘red’ then maybe I wouldn’t forget her. I forget things now. I think I am forgetting how to be a cat. Giant was the cat expert despite not being one. He knew all things I should and should not do to be a good cat, taught me special things like words and not to go on the countertop because it is a place of sacred energy.
Sometimes I like to think that it wasn’t her that died, that it was some other ‘red’ cat that got scooped up by an owl, that maybe she just wandered off, that maybe she finally found the courage to be wild again. And this makes me both happy and sad. Because I know it isn’t true. I know she is dead. Because I saw it.
On the porch I called to her, rumbling a noise from a humming place in my throat, a sound I had made just for her. I could see the little waves the noise made as it went out to search, disturbing the ready to sleep air. I stretched. The Mourning Dove’s call disappeared into the cricket buzz of the bright dark, and it was quiet because the world was afraid. My spine crept and I went flat because I was also afraid, and from the yard came the deep stuttering call of an owl, a dark question, echoing from the great pine tree that stood apart from the wall of the forest, like the other trees were afraid of it. I saw it there among the branches, a great horned darkness with her shape slack in its talons, saying nothing, the descending sun heavy and large behind it. And it called again, summoning a wind that toyed with the wings of the dead bats on the lawn like it was pulling them back to life. Her name was Apricots, and she was not good at being a cat. She would bite Giant and hiss things like, “Apricots is my slave name!” She died when an owl plucked her from the world. It could have eaten all the dead bats it wanted to, but it took her just the same. And then I was all alone.
My name is Benni and I am trying to remember things. Each day spent alone makes me less good at being a cat, makes it harder to do the things cats do like use the litter box and not drink from the toilet. All the things Giant taught me.
My interest in killing has gone way up since Giant and Apricots died. Which is sad and exciting. I do not want to lose my higher functions, the contemplative mystery of the ceiling fan, how Apricots’ flank smell-touched against mine, the earthy taste of her fur. I have exciting, arousing dreams where I groom her and my tic-tac comes out, but mostly I dream about dead mice and dead mice heads and dead mice babies.
I’m scratching the contents of my head into the walls and furniture of the forest house, for anyone who wants to read it, or for myself, in case I return to my history as a stranger, and I won’t ever be alone because I’ll have these stories. I’ve started my notes on the comfy chair, which previously was a big no-no because it belonged to Giant and led to sprays from the spray bottle. I’m beginning to think that perhaps Giant did not know as much about being a cat as he let on. For example, yesterday I chased a moth to the sacred countertop where I killed and ate it, smashing it a little for fun, and nothing happened! Everything was totally fine! And I got a really good look at the kitchen and knocked the horrible spray bottle to the floor where it can never spray again. Maybe Giant was selfish and wanted all these fun things to himself. But even with all these fun things Giant didn’t want to be alive anymore after his children died from ‘flu.’ Most of the giants died from ‘flu.’
I cannot see ‘flu,’ like I cannot see ‘red.’ If I could, I would have tried to bite it and eat its head before it killed Giant’s small giants. Maybe ‘flu’ is still here? Waiting in in the under-couch spaces. Coming up with plans to make my life worse. Maybe ‘flu’ is making me less good at being a cat.
I’m not sure the children were meant to be with us. In the days before we left for the forest house Giant screamed things into the air like, “I can make them safe!” and, “Goddamit! They’re my kids too Jeanine!” The children always made Giant sad, even when they came over and slept on the floor Giant would act happy while moving sad. And when they left he would cry and cry.
Apricots was not a big fan of being a cat. She had lived in the parking lot of a library before Giant brought her home to be my sister, or as she put it, abducted her. The library parking lot was tough living, bad giants occasionally did things like skateboard her paws and tie firecrackers to her tail, all of which turned Apricots slightly crazy. I did my best with her, showed her who was big cat and who was little cat. But she always got back up, never submitted to what I had to show her about living indoors.
Apricots believed that the truest way to be a cat was to do the opposite of what any cat expert demanded: that good cats were outside cats, not inside cats, which, as per Giant’s wisdom, was heresy. This was why she sometimes peed on Giant’s lap and bit his ankles. Or so she said. I don’t know that many words, but I do know about something called “compensating,” which was the reason Giant fed his children pizza and ice cream whenever they stayed with us. Apricots was tough to be sure, but she ate from the food bowl like I did, slept by the fire like I did, and accepted the belly rubs just like I did. And she was beautiful and strange and a very, very bad cat.
She had no fur on one knee and half a right ear. If there is one good thing about my deteriorating condition it is that I am becoming the wild cat she always wished I was.
The porch door is shut because a raccoon stole the shoe and decided to move in. Now I am trapped inside with the shoe-stealing raccoon and cannot reach my supply of dead bats. The raccoon lives inside the sofa and squawks at me when I try to write my stories. It is big and dark and scary like a bush with teeth. Perhaps I can find a way to kill it. Perhaps I can trap it in the toilet while it drinks up all my water. I imagine intelligence is on my side as the raccoon chose a shoe over freedom, trapping us both here, but then again, now, starvation is against us both.
There’s just me and it, and Giant’s smelly body. Every now and then I lose consciousness only to wake up in the middle of gnawing one of Giant’s fingers. I think I may have eaten the wedding ring he refused to take off, as my stomach feels like a pinecone. This is not good cat behavior.
I tried to mate with Apricots several times, despite having no balls. She would be sleeping or dozing on the comfy chair, which was really mine when Giant wasn’t looking, and I’d jump up to bite her a little and remind her how mine it was only to end up on top of her and curling my lower body towards her butt. She was a good sport about it, letting me try to do this thing I had only half knowledge of before twisting around and biting my nose. I believe if I had balls, things would have been different, that we would have been mates and not siblings, even if I was, as she described, “a little cat in a big cat body.” She really was wonderful, in a real-life sort of way. Sometimes things that sound mean can actually be very nice, like nose biting. Now that she’s gone I try mating with a foam football. Perhaps that is something that does not need to be recorded.
The toilet trap worked wonderfully until it did not. I managed to shut the lid on top of the greedy interloper but keeping a desperate raccoon trapped inside of a toilet is not an easy thing to do. It’s a scary thing to do, because of the squawking and the clawed hands that reach out with every bump of the lid, searching around for something to punish. I think there is something deeply wrong with the Raccoon. Perhaps ‘flu.” It foams from the mouth and cannot control its swiveling golden eyes, bounds headlong into the walls till it falls into convulsive sleep. I am reminded of Giant. Giant used to bang his head against things as well. Sometimes, late at night, Giant would pack us up in the car along with a knapsack filled with snacks and wait outside a house in the darkness. Sometimes his children would come and go with the woman Jeanine and Giant would lie down in his seat and hold his breath. Apricots and I did not like these trips and I would start to freak out a little, sensing something bad about to happen. And Apricots would tell me to shut up and Giant would tell us both to shut up and then start to bang his head on the wheel. I think I am starting to paint Giant in a bad light. Being his cat wasn’t always sad and uncomfortable. Sometimes Giant would bury his face in my side and cry and cry. Which was uncomfortable but also nice.
I find that scratching my story is simply reliving my story. The only story I remember well enough now is the story in which Apricots dies. Which disappoints me because the only thing I get to relive is Apricots dying. Which was not the point of this exercise, which was to remain a cat and remember loved ones and good times. The problem is I do not fully understand what I have scratched, or I forget what my marks and smells meant at the time that I made them. So, I cannot read the memory perfectly. The more I try not to be confused the more confused I get, the more un-cat I become. It feels like my memories are collapsing forwards, shortening my history till all I have is an image of a dead Apricots. There must be a point to this besides horror. I wish Giant was still here. Or here in a different way. He is here as food now because I have nothing else to eat. Occasionally a mouse will emerge from a crack and I’ll eat it, much to the Raccoon’s howling dismay. The raccoon apparently dies for several hours a day only to resurrect into an angrier, bushier raccoon.
Let me try it again. This time on the curtains. There is no sound like the sound of the Mourning Dove. Aside from, of course, the sounds of other Mourning Doves, and perhaps even owls, except their noises make me go flat and pee. These sounds remind me continuously of the day my sister died. It was cold, and I was asleep someplace in the forest house, maybe the scratched-up chair, and the wind moved stuff around outside which I observed through the window. It is cold so this must have been close to now, because it is still cold, colder even. I made some observations about the nature of this movement, namely how grass was all grass but also pieces of grass. Then I maybe saw wings out the window or from the porch and a thing called ‘red’ which, as far as I can tell, is something grey. These wings that I maybe saw made me sad because Apricots was dead. From a tree an Owl went hoo, which is confusing because it is so similar to the sound that a Mourning Dove makes. And the bats moved like an army of the dead.
The owl visits me and it is a strange and unnatural thing with the face of a giant. It waits on the other side of the screen window, which is the only open window, eyes heavy and large, one the full moon and the other a crescent. A color I cannot see bleeds from its moon eyes and fills the sky. There is a hooing. It is the color of my blood. There is a hooing. The color of ‘red.’ There is a hooing and it is ‘flu.’ I know this and see this only with the owl’s harmful stare. So still, it remains so still. My cat self is withering. Apricots speaks from its stomach, through its frozen incorrect face and tells me that it is alive, very very alive. She tells me that I have been incorrect about the extent of the world. That I am becoming more cat, not less. In the distance the deep green trees stand up and move, cover each other into a bushy wall, and everything is soundless, and the sky is ‘red’ and there is the sound of the Mourning Dove cooing in and out, in and out, and they really are the same sounds.
Before Giant made his head explode, he did us the kindness of giving us all the bats. It was the night after he buried his children, and Apricots and I were killing light bugs in the tall grass. So many light bugs! Giant was watching us from the porch, where he sat hugging his knees and rocking and I meowed at him to see if he wanted to kill some bugs too—but he didn’t. The darkness grew less bright and the bats came to eat the bugs away from us and we tried to catch and kill them for doing so and Giant finally showed some interest because he went into the house and came back out with the long metal tube he’d later use to blow the top of his head off. His shotgun. He sat down with a bottle of special water that made him cross-eyed and proceeded to blast heavy fire into moving night above us making many, many dead bats. This is a memory I want to hold onto. Apricots in the darkness, eyes bright and yellow and in awe of all the bats falling dead around her, one ear flattened, happy and surprised at something, because she was never happy or surprised by anything. She used to stand in the driveway on moonless nights, seeing everything, confident in her cloak of darkness. “It’s very, very alive,” she would say, referring to the humming night like it was some big animal. I did not know then that it was an animal.
This is getting more difficult. I’ve done this so many times now and I am missing the point of why I am doing it. This lack. This lack feeling. I scratched it into the sofa and the ottoman and the curtains and everything and I feel time running out. To remember the feeling. To make the right tombstone for this death story, which is the only important one. Once there was a cat named Benni and a cat named Apricots. Who were they again? They were me. Benni. Benni the cat. The cat who is here. Right now. Hurry. Hurry Benni.
There is no sound like the sound of Mourning Dove. One time when I heard it my sister died. It was the hooing that reminded me. It was my sister dying that made me remind me.
Makes me remind me. I was in the house when it happened. I was asleep or maybe awake. A bird. A bird that went hoo.
What is my first memory of being cat? Was I cat before? I must have been something before. Did I have a parking lot life? Perhaps life only starts with a first memory. I was looking at Giant and Giant was holding me and I fit in his hands and he was saying words at me over and over and then I understood one of them. Benni. That is my first memory of being cat. And then I learned that Benni was me because Giant would say it and look at me when he said it and then I saw myself in the shiny silver and when I moved, I realized that it was I, it was Benni.
Giant had smaller people in the house, and they also called me Benni and taught me words and sprayed me with the bottle for doing things I learned not to do and laughed when I tried to kill yarn. One day I woke up without balls. Was sad and missed balls. One day was cleaning my penis and Giant and his small giants laughed and said it looked like a tic-tac and called me Mr. tic-tac. One day Giant took us away in the night to a cabin in the forest and his children were quiet and scared and wailed for their mother. And they listened to the bright picture box, which is filled with things that cannot be caught, and it said that everyone else was dying very fast because of ‘flu,’ because of ‘urgent flu.’ Giant’s happy face and eagerness to go on walks was different from his terrified children. They woke up very hot, and the hearts in their chests made whispering noises and I sat on their chests and tried to show them what a heart was supposed to sound like with its thump thump thump so they could fix theirs, but Giant kept yelling at me to, “Get off of them!” Then they were dead and Giant tried to hang himself from the ceiling fan but was too fat and fell to the ground and cried. For days he cried. Then he made his head explode.
And then Apricots got eaten by an owl and a raccoon trapped me away from all my bats.
Time makes hunger. Giant with ears and fingers and face all gone. I tried to protect face because face made me feel safe and warm and called me Benni when it was living but shoe stealing raccoon wanted very much to eat the face and is bigger and can kill me. Shoe Raccoon is getting violent, did not appreciate my attempt to kill it. Soon I will have to leave. Have eaten through the screen window. Very painful. Very bloody. When we first came here Apricots and Benni crawled under the porch and killed all the mice babies! What fun! All the wriggling, squeaking babies, their grey hot flesh in our teeth.
There is story all around me, scent-scratches that speak in head whispers. Once there was a cat named Benni. A cat named Apricots. Once there was ‘red.’ Is familiar. But I cannot make enough pictures in my head. Mind can see mice and birds and grass and smells and know when to go flat or kill the small things but does not know Benni. Does not know cat. But familiar. The ideas of Benni are all around, scratched and scented. I meow at them and they do not meow back. What do I understand? There used to be a Benni. Then Benni started to go away, was taken away by a thing that went hoo. Two things go hoo. Mourning doves and owls. Benni cat wrote a story about these hooings. Less long ago Benni wrote it again. Benni wrote it again. I wrote it.
Me? Benni.
I move fast. Benni moves fast. There is one last thing to say while I remember. Must get it down before too late. Before I meet the owl. Must hold it in head. What it was all for. I know it now! Quickly! Through the screen window, through the hole that cuts and bloodies me, claws to pull me back to this dead place. I’ll scratch it under the porch where we killed all the mice and mice babies and then I won’t know how I got there. And then I’ll roam and roam and never come home. The one thing that ever mattered. The point to death and life stories. Benni loved Apricots! Benni loves Apricots!
The night has smell-sound. Small things move in the bright dark. I see them and taste them. I am flat body. I crawl. I am crouched body. I pounce and eat a small thing, feeling it wiggle and die on my teeth. A possum comes and I am large body, big and black and something to be feared. I am soft in the grass and the grass is wet and smells deep. Trees whisper and I listen, tasting and seeing what they say, and it is very, very alive.
Behind me, wind beating, mad angry shape. Quick! I go flat body! But no, it’s already here, sharp talons in my neck! For a moment I am away from the grass, in the wind. But no, I am big body! Bigger than Apricots. Who?
I fall, leaving pieces of me behind. Who? I run as flat body for place to hide. Who? There is a hooing and I am paws up, claws in feathers, anger in my teeth. Once there was a cat named Benni. Sharpness cuts my belly, cuts Benni’s belly, a beak digging for his heart. I hear her. Yes! Yes! I remember! A voice leaks into my open body, vibrating from the bird’s hungry mouth.
Haha silly owl! You think you are ‘flu.’ Dig all you like, that isn’t where my heart is. I’ve hidden it far, far away. But I know where yours is. Here, let me show you.