09.30.2008 - 12:26 p.m.

Every workday, I pass two outdoor trash cans on the way from my car to my office. They're emptied plenty often, but they bother me anyway.

When I went home to say goodbye to the cat I grew up with, she had one front leg all wrapped up in a soft cast. There'd been a tumor in her toe that had burst, and now it was infected. She also had tumors in her face and her lungs and her intestines, but that foot was what was going to kill her first.

She used to like to perch on my shoulder while I walked around the house, and so for her last day, she spent long while up there, though I gave her my hand to balance on, too. Her bandaged leg rested on my wrist, just to the side of my head.

It reeked, with the sweet, awful smell of rot.

It was the very same smell I catch, not all the time but often enough, from these trash cans. I wish I had a better way, any other way, to bring her to mind.

-stonebridge

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