Chapter 2 - The Box
Plain. Brown. Cardboard. The lid folded shut in careful overlapping quarters. No label. No Name. No postage. No markings at all except for a small dark stain bleeding through the bottom right corner, spreading unevenly through the cardboard.
I find myself standing in the open doorframe and look at it for a long time. This is the armour doing its job. A buffer. A gift, almost. You get a few seconds of not knowing.
I use the seconds.
The smell arrives first. Sweet. The wrong kind of sweet. The kind that has no business being here at 23:23 on a wet January night. The sweetness is the smell's one concession to being tolerable. It doesn't work. Underneath lies its true nature. A refusal of death.
Formaldehyde.
I fold back the lid.
He's there.
Arranged.
That's the word that comes to the mind first, surfacing slowly and wrong through the silence the way things do when the armour is working. Wrong words before the right ones, observations before understanding.
Arranged.
Not curled. Not collapsed. Not the boneless, gravity-surrendered slouch of a sleeping being.
Arranged.
Deliberately, painstakingly arranged. One paw tucked beneath his chin, the white patch on his chest turned upward, his tail curved in a perfect arc along the line of his body.
He looks fine.
He looks fine.
He looks -
My hand goes in first.
I know what Sable feels like. Three years is long enough to know. The specific grammar of him. The density, the warm, the give. The way his fur moves with the breath underneath, the small involuntary flinches and resettlings of a living thing that doesn't know it's being held. My hand goes in expecting all of this.
My hands find something else.
He is firm. Not the firm of sleep. Not the cold stiffness of a creature that has been outside in the middle of January. Something else entirely, an evenness, a totality of resistance that goes all the way through, that doesn't yield at any depth. I press my fingers into his side and the flesh beneath doesn't shift or compress or respond in the way you expect.
It has been replaced.
Whatever was inside him, whatever made the give, has been removed and substituted with something that holds its shape absolutely.
I press harder.
Nothing.
The fur is perfect. Every hair exactly where it should be, the texture exactly right, the white patch exactly the right shape, the notch in his left ear from some ancient cat argument he never explained to me. The fur is his fur. I can see a fine strand of it caught in the corner of the box lid. A single strand that came loose in the process. This is definitely his hair, the colour and fineness of it is unmistakeably -
My thumb finds a seam.
A thin raised line running from beneath his left foreleg across the plane of his belly, veering slightly at the sternum, climbing toward the throat. My thumb traces it. Like the way you move along a scar without meaning to. It's almost meditative.
Fine, close stitching. Precise. Whoever did this was practiced. Whoever did this had done it before, many times, and had gotten better each time, and this time... This was a good one, by their measure. This was careful work. This was something they were proud of.
I follow the seam to the throat.
At the throat it terminates in a small tight knot, waxed thread pulled flush against the fur so it barely raises the surface. And above the knot, sitting exactly where it always sat, his collar.
Black. Of course black. I bought it because it suited him, because he was a black cat who deserved a black collar. It has a small silver bell that doesn't ring properly anymore because the clapper rusted out in the first month and I never replaced it. I liked the quiet soothing sound it made.
The bell is gone.
The collar is stained.
Stained deeply and unevenly. A dark rust-brown that has climbed the weave of the fabric and settled there permanently. I inadvertently look at his face.
I look at his face.
His face is every millimetre of Sable's face. The particular flatness of his nose, the scarred notch, the markings above each eye that always made him faintly disapproving of everything, which he was. But his mouth.
His mouth is slightly open.
Just slightly. Lips parted with small white teeth visible. Cats sleep with their mouths closed. His mouth is open the way a mouth is open when the jaw has been arranged to be open, set in that way. Held that way from the inside with wire or foam or whatever it is they use to hold a jaw in a position they decide it should hold. Cats hold their mouths closed unless they cry or eat or yawn or... Other than this.
His eyes are open. I noted this when I first lifted the lid. But when I look at it now... They are open and they are catching the pathetic light from the streetlamp and returning it flatly, without depth, without the particular dark living quality of his eyes which caught light and moved with it, which reflected your face back at you with a faint and private amusement.
These return the light unchanged.
Because they are glass. Because they are not his eyes. Because his eyes are gone.
Whatever the rest of what was inside him has... Gone. Wherever it went during the process, his eyes went with it and someone chose these. Someone held two glass eyes up to the light, decided these were the right colour, the right shape by comparing it to his lifeless -
These eyes are slightly too large.
I don't think I would have noticed if I wasn't already looking at them. Staring at them. A millimetre. Maybe less. But they are too large and they are glass and they do not stare back at me the way he stared. They act unfazed. They tell a lie so precise and so patient that the only two things that gives it away is being one millimetre off and the reflection of light like glass would without depth. The failure of a person did this, who got so much right and got that wrong...
Out of everything.
How can someone willingly kill a cat, rip its insides out and stitch it back together and do less than a perfect job?
It's pathetic.
