A LITTLE HORROR

Walking this morning to the subway on the way to work, texting someone, distracted, glance to my side and see a large, healthy, and very dead house cat in an empty parking space next to a large, empty, cardboard box: head run over, mouth all smashed open, eyeball popped out. Someone’s pet. I almost took a photo but was so goddamn disturbed and bummed out that I couldn’t detach enough to even remotely try. I look up and an obviously upset laborer from a nearby building is walking towards me.

“Nobody calls animal control, why is this? Look at this! How could someone do this?” He asks me or nobody in particular and how the hell should I know. He has some yellow tape in his hand and he starts to mark off the mess, like it’s crime scene—which it is. How anyone could run over a cat and leave it is one thing, unless it was injured and died under a car and then someone ran over it without knowing. There’s more explanations than I care to think of, and as another laborer shows up behind the other one all I can say to this one is “This is fucked.” And fucked up is how I feel on my train ride and the next hour, until something else fucked-up in its own way gets in my craw and the fucked-up feeling dissipates.