from The Kitten Experiment
by Joe Steiff
For the Kitten Experiment, several newborn kittens were placed into separate rooms while their eyes were still closed. In one room, all the walls had been painted with horizontal stripes. In the other, the stripes were vertical. The kittens eventually opened their eyes and lived in their respective rooms for several months. The animals were then placed in rooms with plain walls. The cats that had been raised in the horizontal room jumped up onto chair seats and countertops but kept walking into chair legs. The cats raised in the vertical room could maneuver the densest maze of chair legs but could not be compelled to jump onto any horizontal surface.
We had been unhappy for a long time, but neither one of us wanted to be the bad guy. Our solution was to spend less and less time with each other—afraid that if we were alone together we wouldn't be able to ignore the inevitable. So we practiced a form of approach-avoidance that fluctuated with each eddy of our hearts. I knew that I should end it, but I couldn't.
Just when things seemed their most hopeless, one night in some gesture I can't explain, David asked me to go to the movies. Now I can count on one hand the number of films he saw with me in the seven years we had been together. I didn't exactly complain, because he had awful taste in movies. But tonight, wanting to do something kind, I said yes and even let him choose.
We weren't completely stupid—we invited our friend Wendy to come along so we didn't really have to be alone with each other. Since my pickup wouldn't hold the three of us comfortably, we took David's four-door instead.
After the movie, David tossed me the keys, insisting on sitting in the back. Wendy slid into the passenger seat, and I pulled the car out into the slow-moving train of cars working their way down the parking garage ramps to the first floor.
Within sight of the exit, the car in front of us suddenly screeched to a stop, red brake lights warning us to do the same. The woman driving jumped out, circling her car, crying.
I rolled down my window to ask if there was anything wrong. Her voice echoed along the concrete, “Oh god, I think I've hit a cat.”
Wendy and I looked at each other before getting out of the car. I glanced back at David, still in the back seat, who twisted to see the line of cars stacking up behind us.
I bent down to look under the woman's car, and I could see a small mound lying underneath. Making sure it was clear of all four tires, I had her move her car forward until the cat was uncovered.
The woman got out of the car again, still crying, asking over and over, “Is it dead?” I knelt down to look more closely and shook my head no. But it was clearly dying, each breath slow and ragged, the fur matting with blood.
David leaned out of his car window and shouted impatiently, “What's going on?”
If this were the farm . . .
Wendy knew what I was thinking. The woman saw the look that passed between us and began crying harder, pleading that she knew a vet nearby and couldn't we just help her get the cat into the car? Everything would be okay… I looked back down at the cat as the woman opened her trunk, trying to find a blanket or towel to keep it warm.
I stood there, paralyzed. I knew that sometimes the most humane thing to do for an injured animal was to put it out of its misery. But I'd never had to do it. My grandfather killed a horse once, but he had walked me all the way back to the house first, and he wouldn't let me follow him as he took the shotgun back out into the field, and he never told me where he buried the horse.
I crouched down by the cat, wondering how it would feel: how warm its blood, how wet its fur, how brittle its neck… I wasn't even sure I could touch it, much less kill it.
One of the cars behind us honked its horn. And David was now leaning completely out the window, yelling at the top of his lungs: “Just kill the cat; kill the fucking cat.”
By now the woman had found an old blanket and pushed it into Wendy's hands, and for a moment, I wondered if she might be right. Maybe all we needed to do was pick it up and hold it and keep it warm. Maybe it wasn't too late. Wendy looked back at David, whose voice still echoed through the parking garage, and then at me. She gently touched my hand. “You know what you have to do.”
Josef Steiff is an independent filmmaker, teacher, and writer. Raised in a region where Guns & Ammo outsold Penthouse and where prestige was based on the size of the satellite dish (or trampoline) in your front yard, many of Josef's stories and spoken word performances draw upon growing up gay in Appalachia.
 |
| Photo by Robert Klein-Engler |