I had planned to spend the night at someone's house, but didn't... so as the folks were away, I was alone in the house, a situation I try to avoid because it spooks me. For all my independent, occasionally anti-social ways, this is still something I can't handle.

I was somewhere between dozing and dreaming the next morning when I had a horrible vision or dream... I heard noises, there was someone in the house. My cat had left the foot of my bed... and for some reason the intruder became Glenn Close, she had cut my cat's throat and popped him in a toureen of boiling water...

Suddenly bolt uptight, at then top of my lungs: 'Buddy! Buddy! BUDDY!'

My little furry four-legged child came running, with as much urgency in his step as had filled my voice, and snuggled with me for another two hours or so in my bed.

Poor baby... his sixth sense has kicked in, he knows his Mummy is leaving soon, and is beginning his persuasion, shadowing my heels and giving me lots of cat kisses when it isn't even his dinner time. I wish I could take him with me... *sigh* I'm just not stable enough to be a pet owner... he'll have to live with his Granny for a little while longer.

After that awakening, the day was not abnormal until I went out again at 9pm, to a no-particular-reason party at Prune's place... the best sort of party :)

Five minutes from home, driving over one of the bridges of the Port River, cars in front of me were swerving slightly, and I saw the cat on the white line.

I had to park 500 metres up the road and walk up to him. Not my Buddy, but alike in age, in size... and dead. Very obviously dead... it occurred to me that it might actually be the first time I had seen a dead animal up so close... his entrails flapped as another car drove past, his eyes forever grotesquely open, bulging out of their sockets, it's mouth... fear and agony.

Finally a break in the traffic, and I ran into the middle of the road, to remove the poor beast from it's hideous public grave... sliding my hands between the hard asphalt, and the soft fur... not a stray, he was well looked after... he was still warm, his body still supple in my hands... his blood still trickling from fresh wounds...

What if I had been five minutes sooner? Would I have found him alive? What if someone five minutes earlier had stopped, and taken him in? What if the bastard who hit him had stopped?? The fucking bastard... the villain in my mind, the same faceless man had committed this crime against me also...

It is illegal to leave an animal if hit by a vehicle, just as it is a human... a pet, a member of someone's family, was left to die in the street. I cannot believe that anyone would stoop to do such a thing, but they do... and I am stuck between being stupefied with rage, and so achingly sad...

A vision, of my own baby, my dog, who was killed in just the same manner just two months ago was in my hands... I had been in Sydney at the time, I had not seen her for months, and my tearful mother had to inform me over the phone lines that I never would again. I hadn't seen it, but I beheld the vision, right then... and I cried for my baby, and I cried for this baby, someone else's beloved who would not be returning home that night.

There was no collar, no tag, no ID of any description... this cat's owner will simply never see their baby again... unless they happen to pass the bush just before the Birkenhead Bridge in Port Adelaide, where I fashioned a rough grave for the fallen, covering him with leaves under a eucalypt by the side of the road. If I'd had a shovel I would have buried him.

Prune greeted me at the door, and the only thing I could say to her was 'I need to wash my hands'. The blood of the cat had began to congeal there, and on my face I had smeared it when I had wiped at a tear.

Too eerily horrific, the dream in the morning, and the cat at night... I watched my cat this evening make himself comfortable right where my head would normally rest in my bed, giving my pillow more cat kisses... tomorrow I buy him some tags.

Before After

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