When I was two years old, a Siamese cat clawed my grandfather’s obese

calf. The wound grew septic in lack of care. This, among other difficulties

of his damp age, dragged him to the ground.

The body was found many days later.

Mercy: I was never given visuals.

He was given a funeral (military), and so begins my first memory, of a

twenty-one gun salute.

Guns firing

Because of this, and a family practiced in omission, I thought maybe he

had died in a war. I set the memory in rain, but I do not know for sure if it

was raining.

I wrote his obituary:

“Fifty-something years to turn a baby into human earth.”

The cat? Still alive, now forty years old. Fifty. A hundred.