requiem for a roadkill cat
On my way to work I pass a funeral home that keeps a black hearse parked out front and a plastic yellow FUNERAL NO PARKING sign in front of the entrance. On my bike I sometimes have to dodge double-parked mourners and employees popping open their car doors into the street. Walking past it last week, I saw traces of a dead bird stamped into the pavement. A sparrow, maybe, once: black grime whorled with wingbone.
Birds falling from the sky—as thousands did last year in the Southwestern US—would surely be a bad omen in any other place. But dead things tend to collect on New York sidewalks as if they were never alive, as if they’d fallen from the trash.
Biking to the beach last Saturday, my friend Matt and I passed a black and white cat that had been killed by a car. The cat was striking, freshly dead, looking off at the nothing behind us, its insides stretched in a gruesome pink line all the way from where it lay in the middle of the road to the border of the bike lane.
According to NYC’s Department of Sanitation,
You may […] place a dead animal in a heavy-duty black plastic bag or double plastic bag and put it out on the day of garbage collection with a note taped to the bag stating "dead dog" or "dead cat", for example. Animals that may have been rabid should not be put in the garbage. The City cremates dead pets for a fee, though the ashes are not returned to the animal’s owner.
I walked past the funeral home today on my way to lunch. In the rain no birds flew. A gray helicopter slid across a gray sky.
ben tapeworm