Cardiff, by the Sea by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-09-24T19:11:31+00:00

5.

And Mia had her own (secret) happy time. Except.

One afternoon in late winter, hurrying to the feral cat colony after school and seeing to her horror that something had happened—everything had changed . . .

Seeing to her horror that the underbrush had been cleared away. In the partly thawed earth were heavy tire tracks. The aluminum-foil pie plates and plastic bowls had been crushed, mangled.

“Oh no. Oh—no.”

Mia stood unmoving. Unable to comprehend. The feral cats were—gone?

It was as if she had been dealt a blow to the chest. In the region of the heart. She heard her breath come quickly, hoarsely.

Could not believe it. A sensation of faintness suffused her body. She was afraid to give in to tears. If she began crying, she might not be able to stop . . .

That had happened a few times. Since Daddy. Not often. Not for a while. Crying, giving in. Mia had it under control. Mostly.

But now. No.

Someone in the neighborhood must have called animal control. Someone like Mia’s father, who’d hated the feral cats and wanted them destroyed . . .

In a trance, Mia stood, staring. She could not breathe at first. Waiting for—what? A movement in the devastation, a flash of orange, or black, or white—a muffled cry . . .

Except for the calls of birds, it was very quiet here. Far away overhead, a droning aircraft. If you listened very closely, the sound of wind in the trees.

“Kitty? Kitty-kitty . . .”

The vacant lot covered an area of about three acres. Much of the land was impassable, dense with trees, underbrush. Mia had never ventured far into the woods. She had to wonder if some of the cats had run away, fled in terror, and were hiding.

The canny thick-furred tiger with just one good eye that had approached Mia when she’d fallen asleep, the sleek black cat that kept its distance, warily, the slender white cat with marblelike markings and glaring green eyes: surely one of these had escaped? At least one? So badly Mia wanted to believe, she’d begun to tremble with anticipation.

But it was terrible to see how a heavy vehicle, a bulldozer, had been driven into the lot from the road, flattening and uprooting bushes, young trees, brambles, and thistles, creating a kind of primitive roadway, gouging the earth. There’d been beauty in the uncultivated land; now all was broken, ugly. Mia felt a pang of sheer rage for the adults who’d perpetrated such cruelty.

It was so unfair, Mia thought. So cruel. The cats were beautiful creatures, condemned because they were homeless. It was not their fault that they lived in the wild. That they had no “homes”—“owners.” They’d rarely left their territory except at night. They harmed no one. Few people even knew they existed. And yet . . .

Mia thought of how, in the derisive world of school, such a loss would be ridiculed. She would be ridiculed. It filled her with horror to think of the coarse boys at school who’d tormented her discovering the vacant lot, the feral cat colony, and making the cats’ lives miserable.

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