My Brother the Cat

Few things will have a greater tendency to interrupt the flow of one’s day than to watch as their favorite pet is flattened by a steamroller. Sure, people might give you a hard time; they might--hypothetically--push your head into a toilet that has not been flushed and hold it there until you scream "David Jennette is God!" But most substances will wash off, while the gruesome images of a cat’s innards spilling out of its mouth and eye sockets somehow never do.

Toby was no ordinary cat. We were born on the same day and raised as twin brothers, although many times when I compared his features to mine I suspected I might have been adopted. We also grew up at completely different rates, and let me tell you, by the time I was almost four feet tall, Toby was very sorry for having given me such a hard time when he was bigger. Apart from that, we loved each other very much. As babies we’d shared a crib, and since money was always tight we had to share a bed growing up as well. When I was almost ten, my mother took me aside one day and told me that Toby would not live nearly as long as I would. It was almost as if she knew he would expire that very week.

Although I would have grown much bigger than him anyway, Toby was the runt of his litter and rather scrawny even as an adult. His rich fur coat was an orange marmalade pattern: a pale orange hue accented by red-orange tiger lines following him all along his back and tail. His round green eyes were flecked with gold, and they seemed to shine even in bright light. He was a quiet cat, and never made much noise even when he was hungry or angry.

Toby and I were like peas in a pod. We were both happy-go-lucky and full of energy. We often tried the same games together, although after giving it a good chance I found that his balls of yarn were not to my liking, and likewise with him and baseball. Despite this, we played together all the time and were each other’s best friend. When my younger brother was born, Toby and I always picked on the new "baby" in the family, with me teasing him and Toby snatching his food. We told each other all our secrets--things we never told anyone else. And we kept those secrets; to this day my mom still thinks her favorite vase was blown over by a gust of wind, and she never found the tuft of orange hair I carefully removed from the crime scene. Toby and I were inseparable--or so I believed in my adorably carefree mind brimming with youthful innocence.

It was a perfect day on the morning of our tenth birthday: sunny, unseasonably warm and not a single dark cloud on the horizon. A very loud construction crew was resurfacing the street that week, and on that day they were very near our house. My mother, being the responsible parent she is, was sure to instruct us not to play near the construction. However, after a quick conference Toby and I agreed gleefully that she had most definitely not told us not to play amid the construction. So we chased each other and played tag and other things, darting between and through the big machines. I ducked around the steamroller and turned around to watch him chase me, but I yelped as I realized that Toby's tail had gotten caught under the huge roller!

The next moments seemed to happen in slow motion. After a brief, frantic and ultimately vain struggle against inevitability, Toby had barely enough time to screech in pure agony before the giant steel drum slowly backed over him before my very eyes. I could do nothing but watch and scream silently as blood sprayed all over the street and the crushing weight of the heavy machine flattened my twin brother like a pancake. The intense pressure squeezed all of his internal organs out of him like a tube of toothpaste. "Well, sooorryyyy!" came the polite apology from the killing machine’s pilot, though I was too busy screaming to suitably acknowledge it at the time.

I just stood there, frozen in terror, as the men shrugged helplessly and went about their business. I had lost my twin brother! More specifically I’d lost his body and most of his internal organs. A big rainstorm rolled through a few moments after and I remained there, eyes wide as dinner plates, while rain ran in rivulets down my face and neck and most of Toby’s most prized possessions including his liver, kidneys and lungs were flushed into the storm drain. His skin remained, but was permanently fused into the fresh, steaming pavement where it remains to this day, a gruesome gravesite and a brutal everyday reminder of my brother’s demise.

It stands to reason that Toby’s squishing was what caused me to be deeply depressed for years afterwards. No one else in my family was killed that afternoon, although I would have put my human brother in Toby’s place in a heartbeat. The therapist I visited for years afterward studied my case exhaustively, and after extensive testing and many days of grueling psychoanalysis, he finally said with the confident air of an expert: "Why do you think you’re depressed?" Some might be skeptical that such an event could possibly have caused such an oppressive malaise in me for three years. Begging those people’s pardons, I would respectfully venture to guess that those people have never watched as the viscera sprayed from every orifice of their twin brother cat. Their protestations are therefore rendered null.

This depression drove me nearly mad with grief to the point where I refused to acknowledge that Toby was dead. But on the day when I finally allowed myself to notice Toby’s grotesque flattened carcass spread across the street for the first time since the accident, I at last came to terms with the loss of my twin brother and set his spirit free in my heart. My childhood innocence was gone, right down the storm drain with a few choice organs that once belonged to my best friend.

AJT
5/18/2001